A Visit To Vulcan
Back in late June, the Calgary Flying Club had planned a convoy to Wetaskiwin to coordinate with the COPA Convention. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. It looked okay for the trip there, but not so good for a return several hours later. That is, unless we wanted to stay overnight. Perhaps two nights. Thunderstorms were building and things weren’t expected to clear up until the next day… perhaps. I had brought Mike and Gary along for the flight, so we still wanted to go for a trip somewhere. Along with the rest of the pilots involved in the convoy, we decided on Vulcan (CFX6) as our backup destination, though I decided we’d leave first and try to fly over Drumheller (CEG4) and then head to Vulcan. On a side note, Vulcan is typical of small town Alberta; small, rural and quaint. But they’ve transformed themselves a bit to take advantage of the ever growing Trek fans… as seen on the town’s website.
As planned we took off first, headed south to skirt the majority of Calgary’s zone but only made it as far as the east side of Calgary’s city limits before we were forced to head south towards Vulcan due to low cloud cover at less than 900 feet AGL. To the south however, things looked much better with broken cloud at 1500-2000 feet AGL. With better weather ahead, the flight to Vulcan was uneventful.
We landed at Vulcan ahead of the rest of the group, so we waited in the ‘terminal building’, which, although small, had a washroom, was full of old copies of Flying magazine and protected us from Vulcan’s giant mosquitoes. The remaining planes arrived about twenty minutes later after their touch and go fly bys and we all walked across the fairway of the neighbouring golf course to the club house for some late lunch.
After lunch, the weather around Vulcan was starting to look like it could turn bad, which was confirmed by a weather briefing. Calgary was experiencing thunderstorms and the storm front was coming off the mountains and heading our way. The FSS briefer said to expect the thunderstorms to pass Vulcan within 15 minutes. So we waited. And waited. After an hour had passed with no considerable change in the weather at Vulcan, I volunteered to start hoping back towards Springbank given that I still have 4 hours of fuel on board.
High River is only 15-20 minutes from Vulcan and Okotoks is about the same from High River. Our plan was to head towards High River and then Okotoks, turning back at any point that things got worse. And the plan turned out okay; other than two small pockets of rain we encountered no significant weather and by the time we landed at Okotoks and called the others to report on our progress the sun was shining through scattered clouds. From there it was another short hop home to Springbank.
Was it safe to return like we did? You’ll have to trust me that it was, given my flight time, flight experience and ‘lived safely through my twenties’ judgement. Of course, it’s hard to judge this kind of thing anyway without actually being there. Would I have recommended such a flight to a new pilot? Probably not, but in the end, every pilot in command has to weigh the evidence and make the go/no-go decision for themselves. In any case, this flight only solidified my desire to get an IFR rating that much more. The weather at Vulcan was more than good enough to depart and had Springbank been socked in on my arrival, Calgary International would have been a good alternate.
Thu, 07 Jul 2005 23:20 Posted in Flying
