Flight Training - July 2014 - 29

2,500 feet along the route and thunderstorms 60
miles south of the course Phillip would be taking.
Compared to some of the flights he had made, a
2,500- foot ceiling and a route north of the thunderstorms sounded like smooth sailing. He set off for
Colorado Springs anticipating a pleasant flight to the
eastern edge of the Rockies.
Most of the flight was in instrument meteorological conditions. As he neared Colorado Springs, ATC
offered to clear him direct to his destination, and Phillip gladly accepted. He remembers that "the clouds
quickly went from light grey to a menacing shade of
pitch black, but the ride was still eerily smooth so I
continued on my heading." A few minutes later, he
heard a loud bang, similar to the noise of a gunshot,
followed by a sharp yawing motion to the right.
What in the world was that? he wondered, just
before it happened again, this time on the left side of
the airplane. He quickly referenced his charts to make
sure he was above the minimum en route altitude,
thinking that maybe he had hit some sort of obstacle.
At 11,000 feet, he was almost 2,000 feet above the
MEA for his route. The banging sounds became much
more frequent, "almost like popcorn," and Phillip realized he was in the middle of a hailstorm.
MAINE
At this point, the noise was so deafening, he
couldn't even hear ATC well enough to ask for a
vector out of the storm. The next thing he knew, a
VERMONT
fist-sized piece of hail came through the front windscreen, delivering a knockout punch to the side of
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Phillip's head. He was hit so hard that he temporarily
MASSACHUSETTS
lost his vision. Cape Cod
CONNECTICUT

Phillip remembers, "I didn't think I was going to
die. I was certain I was going to die." Just as he was
sending up his final prayers, his vision returned, and
Phillip found himself in a graveyard spiral, well below
the MEA, with no front or side windscreens and the
wings punctured with holes from the hail. Somehow,
he was lucid enough to squawk 7700 and recover
from the spiral just as he broke out of the clouds
above a large meadow nestled in the valley of two
higher peaks. He landed and brought the airplane to
a stop about 20 yards from a fence that separated the
field from another pasture.
He climbed out of the mangled Cherokee and came
face to face with the farmer's 5-year-old daughter.
Hands on her hips, she chided him, "You better be
glad you didn't hit any of my horses!"
To which Phillip responded with a grateful laugh,
"Sweetie, you don't know how glad I am."
After the farmer's family doctored Phillip's head
in their kitchen and drove him to the emergency
room, Phillip put in a call to ATC and the FAA to let
them know he was safe on the ground and needed to
report the accident. The controllers apologized profusely, explaining that the hail that had ripped apart
the Cherokee Six appeared as only a light return
on their radar. That is still a weakness in our radar
system to this day; dry hail rising and descending
in a thunderstorm can sometimes appear as light
precipitation or does not show up at all. It turns
out that the weather system Phillip encountered
that day spawned more than 20 tornadoes in its trip
across the country.

RHODE ISLAND

NEW JERSEY

DELAWARE
MARYLAND

Cape Hatteras

A t l a n t i c
O c e a n
JULY 2014 FLIGHT TRAINING

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Flight Training - July 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - July 2014