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Home  Products Pilot Reports Chris Neaves - Citation Ultra
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Chris Neaves - Citation Ultra |
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Kansas City storms in May with XM
Flying a Citation Ultra is fun, especially when you are at FL430 looking down on the storms over the center of the USA. Of course being in the Citation down low going thru the storms is not that much fun!
The biggest downfall of the citation is the radar, its great for 25nm ranges, but anything over that its pretty useless. At even 250kts 25nm gives you less than 5 minutes of forward looking time, and it has a nasty habit of loosing all its energy on the first thing it sees, so as soon as you pass a storm it shows whats hiding behind(normally a solid wall of yellow and red!).
So an investment was made in a second hand airgator system , based on a PDA to see if it would help, and take some of the anticipation out of flying around this type of weather.
Our first trip with the unit was to Kansas City, on the weekend a tornado wiped out a whole town in Kansas, upon departure it looked grim, on nexrad there was just 2 holes, this was confirmed on flightaware.com with the traffic flow in out of, which was thru these 2 holes, one to the north and the other to the south. The south route took us out of the weather within 100nm, but it wasnt a straight run, but a s turn to get thru. We took off with the intention of the south run, the onboard radar showed a grim picture, and of course it wasnt showing the full story, as by the time the people were onboard and the clearance got MKC was surrounded by a wall of storm cells with lightning to the south, with just the slim ray of clear looking sky to the southeast.
Our Airgator powered PDA system was up and running, showing that there was still a gap to the south, the updates were running 5 minutes apart which was great(it since hasnt always updated this fast!). The xm radio saved us , it allowed us to weave our way thru the holes using the combination of onboard weather radar to show what was in front, our eyes looking out when we could , and the xm system to show what was around the corner.
I will admit though there was times the onboard radar painted green, the xm showed sky clear and the view was scary...with billowing towering cumulus clouds in front, the type you fly thru with your selt belt as tight as you can put it. They were clouds of less than a mile width so it was a brief interlude of turbulence, only to be spat out into blue sky in a value of storms again.
It was quiet amazing to have the ability to see what was in front, make a plan of attack, and get thru it all count down the miles to go until clear air, and wham you pop out into the blue sky, looking back at a wall of weather...asking did we really just fly thru that !
I love this system, and ama amazed to sit and use it, we just flew to Denver and it was pretty amazing to be overhead Chicago looking at a live radar shot of the storms approaching Denver, another 2 hrs flight time away.
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Got it, subscribed to XM and played with it on the ground. I had to test fly a Bonanza after an autopilot repair and there was a line of CB’s approaching. I flew straight for them. The stormscope 1000 in this plane was "spoking" so it wouldn’t indicate with any precision the actual location of the line. Awesome! I could actually find "holes" through the line without having to patrol for them. The rain boundaries depicted on the map coincided so close to the actual rain that it amazed me. I expected the delay from NEXRAD to be appreciable, but in reality you hardly notice it. I can already tell that this will dramatically increase the utility of my plane and all the other ones I fly. We leave tomorrow for a long weekend in Houston. I feel so much more relaxed knowing that I’ll have the big picture when I have to face the inevitable summer time line.
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