Josh Flowers and Justin Seams reflect on their recent flight adventure to Olathe, Kansas, highlighting critical lessons learned from navigating challenging weather conditions. The main takeaway emphasizes that a good outcome does not equate to good decision-making, as they encountered severe turbulence and convective weather that tested their flying skills and judgment. As they delve into their pre-flight planning mistakes and the complexities of flying a small aircraft in a busy airspace, the discussion underscores the importance of humility and thorough preparation in aviation. The pair share their personal experiences, revealing the value of debriefing and learning from every flight, even the ones that don't go as planned. With humor and camaraderie, they reminisce about their time together, reinforcing the bond formed through shared challenges in the cockpit.

Takeaways:

• Effective flight planning is crucial for a safe and smooth flying experience, particularly with unpredictable weather.
• Pilots should communicate their intentions clearly with air traffic control to ensure safe navigation through busy airspaces.
• Flying in a single-engine aircraft at night should be carefully evaluated against the risks involved, including weather conditions.
• Debriefing after flights and learning from mistakes is essential for personal growth and safety in aviation.
• Using reliable weather data, such as SiriusXM, can significantly enhance situational awareness during flights.
• Good outcomes do not always equate to good decision-making; it's vital to analyze and learn from each flight.

Episode 321 of the pilot to Pilot Podcast takes off Now.

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All pilots like to have the big weather picture when they're flying and that's why I use SiriusXM Aviation.

I'm able to check things like fronts, air mitts, signets, turbulence, pireps and more while I'm pre flighting and while I'm en route.

This gives me and my passengers the most comfortable flying experience.

And now with the latest offer from SiriusXM, there's never a better time to upgrade your next flight with the Garmin GDL52 portable receiver to bring SiriusXM in 80 ADSB weather plus traffic into your cockpit.

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Take advantage of this great offer and fly with the weather I count on for every flight.

To learn more, visit sportys.com sxmoffer that's sporty.com sxmoffer I'm Josh Flowers, host of.

The aviation YouTube channel Aviation 101 AV Nation.

Welcome back to the Pilot to Pilot podcast.

My name is Justin Seams and I am your host.

Now you might be wondering why did my phone notify me of a Pilot to Pilot podcast on a Sunday?

Well that is because, and hopefully it is actually a Sunday because I'm not going to re record this if Josh changes his mind.

But that's because Josh has released a video.

He released a 47 minute long video and it's of me and him flying to Olathe, Kansas.

Garmin invited both of us out.

You might remember a couple months ago over the summertime we we did some content around it and Josh and I flew together and he made an epic video.

We find ourselves in some nasty, nasty weather.

If you haven't watched that video yet, I highly recommend that you stop what.

You'Re doing, go click on that video.

And watch it and then come right back.

Because this podcast is just a debrief of bad decisions, of things we could have done better and just a talk about that specific fight.

So go watch that Video.

It should be live on Josh's channel right now.

And when this podcast is released, we're going to sync it up at the same exact time.

So go watch that video, then come back and listen to this podcast and let me know what you think.

I had a lot of fun meeting up with Josh.

That's the first time we ever met.

First time we had on the podcast was in the Garmin studio, so it was nice to have him on again.

I always joke with him about how he ignored me for six years, and I do take it personally.

I'm just kidding.

But we have on the podcast, hopefully many more to come, and we can do some more flying together in a less stressful situation.

So.

So let me know you think of the video and let me know what you think of the podcast.

So without any further ado, here's Josh Flowers and our flight.

Josh, what's going on, man?

Welcome to the Pilot.

The Pilot podcast.

Happy to be on it again, man.

I appreciate the invite.

Look at this.

I mean, you ditched me for five years.

Now I got it two times in, like, six months.

It's amazing, right?

That's right.

That's right.

We're making it happen with the content.

We're making it happen.

Yeah.

Now we're content buddies.

We have to be friends for life.

It's just.

That's how it works.

Yeah, that is how it works.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, man.

Well, we are here today.

We already recorded the main podcast.

Right, The Garmin podcast.

Kind of your podcast that has been out for a while.

It's done great.

There's a lot of good reception to that.

If anyone hasn't listened to that, you should probably listen to that first.

So I'll probably tag it below, or you'll see it on Instagram.

Go listen to that, then come back and listen to this.

Because today's podcast isn't about a story of you.

Isn't about a story of Garmin, necessarily.

It is about our trip to Go Fly to Garmin, which was awesome.

I haven't been in a 172in.

I think we talked about in the video, like, 10 years, maybe more than that.

So the ability to go fly was really intriguing to me, and it was really something I wanted to do.

Especially when I found out you were flying there.

I was like, all right, Kyle, Josh, how do I make this happen?

How do I get in the right seat or the left seat of a 172 and go fly?

Just.

I think it'd be so cool to do.

Oh, yeah.

And we got.

We made it work.

We were able to fly.

I flew.

It was a long day, man.

I flew southwest from Raleigh to Nashville.

Nashville to Austin.

Oh, no, Austin national to Dallas.

Met up with you, and you flew in the night before.

Uh, and you had your own issues coming in where you hit a bird, Right?

Was that on takeoff coming in?

Yeah, I had a.

It was on takeoff out of Stephenville, just out of Dallas.

Yeah.

On take.

It was like 200ft off the ground.

Bird whacked the windshield, which is another video you have as well.

So if you haven't watched that video, you got a lot of video.

You got a lot of first videos you need to watch before you watch this.

That's right.

A lot of prerequisites.

Exactly.

But met up and we kind of debriefed, Right.

We kind of talked about what the weather was looking like, what the situation was like.

And it was really funny in my mind, when I.

When I first saw the weather, my instant reaction, because I was paying attention to it online, I was like, it's no problem.

Let's just fly west of it.

Because in my mind, I'm flying a latitude right at that time, that's what I was flying.

I was flying a jet.

And we're talking about.

It's like, yeah, but, like, it could still build.

I'm like, I know, but we're going to go, like, really fast and we're going to go past it.

And you're like, no, we're in a 172.

We're going to go really slow and we're going to get stuck.

And I was like, oh.

Like, eventually it finally dawned on me.

I was like, oh, wow, we're not going fast anymore.

I'm in a small airplane, and it's much different.

I think my mindset was still tailored toward, like, jet life, jet travel, and decisions you make with weather, which can be a little bit different.

Obviously, you always err on the side of safety, but in a jet, climb above it, go to the west, go to the east of it, you usually tack on an extra, like, 10 minutes max.

It's no big deal.

Just go around the weather and you go in and land.

But in a 172, it's more.

And you can say more to this as well.

It's more of, we need to wait.

We need to sit here and wait, let it pass, go tomorrow.

A lot different options when it comes to find general aviation.

Totally.

Yeah.

And.

And you also have to consider, like, the amount of time that you're going to eat up trying to go around weather like that.

How much fuel you're going to burn, how much cost is it going to add to the overall trip?

It really changes the game when you have a weather system like that.

And of course, I like, showed a bunch of screenshots and screen recordings of Garmin pilot with the radar, you know, with our route in there and exactly what this system looked like.

And it was, I mean, throwing tornadoes all across Oklahoma, which was dead center of our route from Dallas up to Kansas City.

And if we would have gone to the west, we probably would have been in nice weather the whole time, but we would have easily added an hour and a half, maybe two hours to the overall trip, maybe even more, including fuel, because we definitely would have had to stop for fuel at that point from Dallas to Kansas City.

We were already like kind of right at that point where we're going to be hitting our hour reserve right about when we're landing, which is about what I like to land with, is an hour hour of fuel remaining.

Um, but it really changes how you make decisions when you're going a hundred knots or with my luck, usually it's more like 85, 80 knots.

And, you know, looking at the weather coming out of Dallas, we had two options, and we talked about all this in the fbo and I mentioned this in the video.

We could either go.

Of course, the third option is always to just wait till the next day or really wait the weather out entirely.

But if we were going to depart at any point that afternoon, the two options were we go way out of our way to the west, we'll be forced to for sure make another fuel stop, and it's going to probably make us drift into the night.

We might even have to be taking off from that fuel stop in the dark, which I really don't like in a single engine if I can avoid it.

The other option was to go to the east, and there were some big gaps in between these cells, but we would have quite literally been flying ourselves into a corner.

We would have been flying across the front of that system.

And maybe when you're going 400 knots, that's relatively doable.

You're going to be able to get out of there really quickly.

You can get in and get out real quick.

And a Skyhawk going 100 knots, very different story.

You have to really think about the weather differently when, when your, your speed ratio compared to the storm is much closer.

Yeah, and we'll kind of go back and forth between like, timeline of everything.

So we'll try to remind you of where we are in the process of the flight or the video.

But skipping forward a little bit.

I remember even walking out like some of the warning signs of like, wow, it's actually kind of dark over there.

You know, it's like, right.

It doesn't look great over there.

It's like maybe the radar itself didn't look awful when we're getting ready to take off of that tail end.

But you show a.

We kind of pan up to the, the Garmin avionics and it's kind of a B roll.

But you show the line and how solidly red that line became.

And I in, I'm fully confident that that happened as soon as we were flying through it.

It's like all of it just kind of built up at that moment and it just kept building and building and building.

And there were definitely some mistakes that we made and decisions that we could have made differently.

And I think some of the thought processes of our mind.

You mentioned it in the video where it's like you're.

One of your biggest rules of not flying a single engine at night unless you have to could have put you in a position to push the weather a little bit and.

Or make a decision between both of those.

And you had to choose which rule you wanted to either bend a little bit per se, or to kind of mess with and put you in a tight spot in your decision making or in our decision making.

Yeah, exactly.

And of course, you know, like, when you say bend rules, we're talking about our personal rules here, like our personal minimums, you know.

So like, for me, single engine at night is something I really try to avoid whenever I can.

And I think my.

I sort of fixated on, on that whole, like, well, our risk factor really goes up.

Our.

The.

The amount of risk we're accepting really goes up.

If we're taking a single engine into the night on a long cross country, unfamiliar areas, we're not really following an interstate at that point.

You know, we don't.

If we lose our engine, our one and only power plant, we don't have options.

And I've just read too many NTSB reports about situations like that.

So I really try to avoid that.

But that fixation of that risk profile sort of pushed me.

I was about to say forced, but that's not true because it was a willful decision on my part.

By mitigating one risk, I put myself into the face of another risk and in this case I think a more unpredictable risk.

And that is the Convective weather.

So for the sake of avoiding night flight and then having the remaining daylight hours to complete the trip, I mentally accepted the risk of getting too close to convective weather and go ahead, you know, go ahead and depart.

And there was another factor about a flow change there that kind of, kind of made the situation worse for us.

I'm not going to say, you know, made the situation bad, but it definitely complicated it even further.

Um, and we can go into that in a little bit.

It was kind of a complicated sequence of picking up the clearance, and then we called clearance back and they had a flow change happening and gave us an option, and we ultimately took the option.

But, yeah, yeah, you definitely don't want mitigating one risk to put you in the face of an even worse risk.

So having that foresight, which I think I sort of dropped the ball on, on the decision making is important.

That's a good lesson in my logbook on that.

Yeah.

I mean, everything about flying is learning from whether you want to call it mistakes or just stuff that made you feel uncomfortable.

And I remember, yeah, I remember taxiing and I remember doing a run up and they're like, hey, if you can get out in five minutes, you can take off of the shorter taxi in the Runway.

And in my mind, I was like, oh, my gosh, it's amazing because the weather's going to be here in like 10 minutes.

So if we can avoid the taxi, if we can avoid them changing the runways around where we'd have to wait behind southwest or wait behind a flow or do anything like that, it's like, all right, we just need to get in the air and go west or south.

And, you know, we were just, we.

We were really banking on the idea that we would have more control of where we could go.

And for me, I think that goes back to not being as familiar and flying in that airspace in a 1 72.

And I'm more.

I'm used to being in the plane that they're vectoring the one 72 away from, not necessarily the plane that needs to get out of bad weather and can't go in certain areas.

Uh, in my mind, I'm like, we can go anywhere.

Right?

Like, we're fast, we're high, we kind of have priority.

I know that's not necessarily, like, how it should work.

You know, when you look at who has priority.

Slower.

Right.

But.

And right.

The slower airplanes aren't.

They're not going to put a 172 or 4,000ft in Dallas Fort Worth in the flow of approaches or arrivals or anything like that.

And even the video, he's like they, they had, they had a 737 or some airplane go closer than they wanted to us and we're in solid IMC getting rocked around.

So we had no idea that was even going on.

And trying our best to maintain altitude.

You trying your best to maintain.

The good news is I felt like we weren't climbing, we were going down.

So we definitely weren't climbing into the traffic.

But yeah, it was a whole thing.

Yeah, that was, it was definitely, it was an experience.

So the flow change really.

And I totally agree with what you said.

Like in my mind when they said well if you can get out in the next five minutes, if you're ready to taxi and you're going to be ready at the end of the Runway, you can get out on 13 left.

And that's, that's a way shorter taxi from that fbo.

So I was thinking, well the sooner we can get in the air the faster we can get this process moving and start getting out of this, out of this airspace and out of the way of this system.

Yeah.

But what I wasn't processing, what I didn't have the foresight to really like on the fly plan out was the fact that if we would have.

Originally the original plan was to take off on 3:1.

It was going to be 3:1 right.

That was already going to put us on a northwesterly heading which is the direction we needed to go to get behind the system.

When they changed it up and said well if you'd like you can take 13 left.

And we accepted it.

I did not think about the fact that now they're going to have to vector us first.

First they gave us a heading left 070.

Originally it was right 330 off Runway 31.

When they switched it around to 1 3, we accepted a heading of 070.

So now we're going northeast.

Terrible direction for the direction of this weather.

And of course like the controllers are making it work.

They're doing their job and we're doing our job at least I tried to do my job in the co pilot seat and we turned left 070.

Then they brought us to the north.

I think it was due north for a few minutes and then we were kind of getting close to the Addison airport at that point and the front was still, or the squall line was still about 15 miles ahead of us I believe.

But there were little embedded cells that were starting to pop up in that area.

And historically, over the last several weeks preceding this flight, Dallas had just been getting absolutely rocked by almost daily thunderstorms.

In fact, in the hotel that I was staying in, while I was there, before you got there, there were utility crews like electrical workers just filling all the rooms.

And the parking lot was full of their big boom trucks because of all these severe thunderstorms.

They had been repairing all these electrical lines and stuff.

So this was an ongoing thing at this point in the.

In the summer in Dallas.

So when we turned to the north, those little pop up thunderstorms ahead of the squall started to really mess with us.

And I started to see them populating on radar.

And we're starting to get into imc and that's when we kind of started to hound ATC about a westbound turn as soon as you can.

And then it ended up being.

As we got closer to dfw, they could continue us on that westbound heading if we could go down.

Just anything we could do to stay out of these clouds to smooth out the ride for us so that you could maintain control of the airplane in imc.

It was getting really uncomfortable.

And we were not the only aircraft experiencing that in the airspace.

Yeah, I haven't heard anyone in my.

I'm trying to think, in all the years I've flown, I've never heard anyone say extreme turbulence.

And I don't think personally we were in extreme turbulence.

I don't like calling severe or moderate.

You know, I.

It's hard to know where that line is.

Right.

Were we in severe?

I don't know.

Was it constant, heavy, as close to severe, moderate as you could get?

Maybe, you know, it's like, it's really a toss up of what we were in.

And I.

It was just, I think it was just solid moderate that was very uncomfortable.

With really good downdrafts.

And yeah, it was just very uncomfortable and then here.

But it kind of was like, it wasn't comforting to hear another plane in a similar situation.

But I was like, all right, at least we're not the only ones that are getting beat around.

Yeah.

But going back to before we took off, I.

I don't know why in my mind for the day, I was kind of like, I let my.

I want to say I let my guard down, but I was so far removed from the GA side of flying that I didn't necessarily bring my experience to help.

That makes Sense, like, if I was flying the latitude or if I was flying any other plane that I was, like, normally in charge of or flying for professionally, I would have had a plan for what we're going to do.

I would have called clearance.

Like, hey, I, uh, this is our route.

The weather's really bad here.

When we take off, we need to go south.

Like, we need to set this up.

When can we take off to do this?

Fit us into a flow to go all the way south outside of your approach, out or outside of the Bravo, and just go all the way south and go as far west as possible.

Um, setting that up ahead of time.

So they knew what our plan was.

Because when we got up there, the plan was to turn west when we took off, and it was a very slow turn to the west.

If you remember, they kept pushing us farther to the northwest and farther to northwest.

And we're like, we need west.

And like, we can't go any farther west because we didn't prepare or prepare them for what we wanted.

And we were in a bind where they couldn't really do much with us.

With us, because it's just 7:30, seven after 737, after 787, after triple seven, like one after the other.

There's really no breaks going into DFW at any time of the day.

So we were just kind of up for it.

Another option, I think in my head could have been flying over DFW itself, telling them that we just need to stay.

We want to stay over the airport.

That way we get out of all their traffic and we can just continue to fly west that way.

But those are kind of the two things that really kind of stuck out to me is just bring your experience, whether I'm not.

I'm experienced in different ways, your experience different ways, and collaborate and kind of just use the best of both worlds.

Just don't drop your guard if it's not something you're a hundred percent comfortable with or not comfortable with, but you're not a hundred percent in that zone or in that type of aviating.

If that makes sense.

Totally.

No, and that's a really, really good point.

Bring your experience to whatever aircraft, to whatever crew you're flying with, because it's valuable no matter what.

Um, and it.

It can be kind of a delicate balance.

Like, you know, some people, including myself, it can be uncomfortable to assert your experience or assert your opinion in a situation where you kind of see this potentially going sideways.

And you have the experience to enable your foresight to see how this could go wrong, whereas the other person may not.

Like, for example, you have way more experience flying out of larger airspaces, Bravo airspaces that have a lot of traffic inside of a regimented flow that can't be changed, that can't be manipulated easily because of one or two aircraft trying to cut through.

So, you know, like you said, that would have been super beneficial and that would have sort of reframed my perspective on how to go about this.

And another thing too, that I preach all the time and that I kind of realized while editing this video is the controllers are human too.

You know, just talk to them like a human, just like you said, call ahead on clearance and be like, hey, here's what's, here's what we're looking at.

Here's where we need to go.

Here's what we filed.

As soon as we get off the ground, whatever you guys can do for us to get us south and then get us west, that would be great.

And if we would have done that like you said, I bet, I bet they would have had totally different vectors ready for us and there would have been very, very little conflict there.

And we would have taken off at a time where they could accommodate what we need and what we wanted, essentially.

Right, so exactly.

Mistakes were definitely made.

I don't think either one of us thought it was going to be that bad, even with what the weather showed on radar.

And that kind of goes to what we talked about, about how we should have realized, like, hey, it looks a little darker than we thought it would.

Or like that looks not as nice.

I don't even like feel like sub self or subconsciously we like looked at each other.

I don't know if that's true.

Maybe making it up.

We're just like who we find.

Yeah.

But yeah, it was, it was definitely a ride.

And when you're talking about controllers, I remember the watching the one.

I watched the video and he sent it to me.

He was talking about how there's moderate rain for the foreseeable future, like 30 miles on our path.

And to him, he's used to dealing with airlines that have radar.

Even asked if we had radar.

Like, well, we got SiriusXM.

He's used to having planes that have big radars on and can navigate around and tell him exactly what deviations that they need to get around the bad stuff.

They have, they have good radar too, but it's not as good as having the idea of exactly where that cell is.

So he.

We were all kind of at a deficit there and we were probably the only 172 flying at that time.

He's probably like, man, what an idiot.

What are these people doing?

I know, I know.

I think the other one that reported extreme turbulence is like a Cherokee or something.

That's good.

Yeah, I know that like.

Like you said, you know, it's not.

Not necessarily comforting, but almost like, reassuring that, okay, we're not the only ones that are in kind of a crappy situation right now, you know?

But definitely, I think planning mistakes were for sure made, and ATC was doing everything they could to just get us out of the way of everybody else and get us out of the way of the weather.

And took a lot of communicating back and forth, and ultimately we made it out of it just fine.

The turbulence has really calmed down, and we can see that we are trending away from the bad weather.

So that's good.

And then that's.

From that point on, I think for the rest of the flight, I was silently debriefing this whole thing to myself, writing the voiceovers for the video in my head, like, okay, I really need to debrief this.

Preparing yourself for this edit.

I was probably put it off for, like, another year.

Be like, I can't look at this yet.

I don't want to miss.

I can't look at it.

I've looked at enough of my mistakes.

I'm kind of numb to it now.

I think I just look at what happened and debrief it.

And it's also really cool, too, because editing these videos, it's not just a, you know, okay, yeah, I had a bad flight, or I made a bad decision that got me in a sticky situation.

You know, okay, yeah, I know what I did wrong.

Learn from it.

Move on.

I have to go through this footage and thoroughly debrief this and explain it in the video to the audience members who knew nothing about this flight and knew nothing about my thought processes.

They were not there.

So I basically have to explain every detail of this situation and how my decision making contributed to making it bad so that they can hopefully learn from it, too.

And that has worked wonders over the years for me to reinforce these experiences.

And I will remember them in very vivid detail because I had to edit a 47 minute video about it.

You know what it reminded me of is have you seen those Instagram Reels or TikToks where they go.

Yep, that's me.

Let me explain how I got here.

Like, that's like.

Right, that's essentially what I feel like this video is.

Yeah.

I bet you're wondering how I got in this situation.

That's right.

When we were in the air and got in the clouds and it started getting rough, what was we, like, what were your thought process with options?

Like, were you thinking, all right, should we go land somewhere, should we declare an emergency?

Like, what was everything that you were thinking of, what we should do with all the tools we have afforded to us to get out of that situation?

Yeah, definitely.

The 180, 80 degree turn was sort of already in the back of my mind when it started to get really rough in im.

The option was in my mind to start either a left or right turn to get out of it and like basically come back around and enter the pattern for Runway one three at Love, if they would let us, or three one.

So that was sort of option one.

Option two was to, if they were not going to let us go to the west as soon as we could or get us down, basically, if we would have kept asking for either lower or take us west or take us east, then declaring an emergency was going to be the next option.

Outside of 180 degree turn, basically take us anywhere but north was kind of.

Anywhere but where we went.

Anywhere but where we went.

Take us any direction other than that.

And I think this is a really great lesson too.

Just stepping back a little bit to what you said about warning the controllers about what we're going to want and sort of briefing them so that they can have the tools at their disposal to give us the vectors that we need.

You know, the controllers are, and I mentioned this in the video too, they're going to keep piping people through on the, on the arrivals or on the departures until somebody complain.

In fact, I think this is, this was you that said it.

In the airplane, they're going to keep everybody on track until somebody complains.

And at that point, I think we were the pioneers.

We were the ones to complain, aside from that other guy too that reported the extreme turbulence.

So definitely the outs that were in my mind were any vector other than north.

Even if we could just go east and let's just bail out and go land at McKinney or maybe head out toward Terrell and just get on the.

Ground, go back To San Marcos and just go to bed.

Right.

Go home.

Go home.

Headquarters.

Yeah, yeah.

In my mind.

Mind it.

I don't necessarily.

I was always under the impression when I was flying freight, single pilot, freight, ifr, whenever I got myself in a situation, I always thought that a 180 was.

Was not the best move because you're just going to go right back through the bad weather so that you just went through.

So my mind, I was like, all right, we need to go south.

Like, we need to just go dead south.

Go as far south as we can until it's VFR again and then cut west or land.

I was worried about coming and landing somewhere because obviously there's some strong winds and convective turbulence and just convection in the area.

I was worried about downdrafts.

I was worried about just winds being crazy in general.

So I was like, we.

In my mind is like, I don't think necessarily landing in the Dallas area is a good idea.

Let's keep demanding west and south and south and south and south and get out of here.

Thankfully, they were really.

They were willing to let us go.

When we started descending down, I think we're already at 5,000, I believe.

I think they did take us up to five.

I know we were at four.

At one point.

I'd have to pause it and look at the G3X where we were.

But then we came down to three.

And we were like, in and out, right?

We got like in and out of clouds, so we knew the bottom.

We were at three.

That's when we were in and out of the clouds.

So we were at 4,000.

And that's when the controller said, yeah, I can see you're getting rocked around pretty hard.

And he kind of like paused inside.

And what do you want to do?

Right.

Yeah.

All right, what are we going to do here?

And when he said that in editing, I looked at the G3X and I think we were assigned 4,000.

And we were.

We were like coming down to 3,700.

And you were, like, pitched for a climb.

Yeah, you know, full, like, full power, trying to maintain 4,000.

And it was just rocking us around.

And he could see that.

So that's when he was like, okay, I'm going to let me help you guys out.

Okay.

And it really smoothed it out at that point.

As soon as we got to the clouds, I was just like, it's going to be okay.

It's going to be.

I know it's crazy when you're in IMC like that, in a situation like that, how much just getting a brief glimpse of the ground can like really calm you down.

Yeah, it's, it's really crazy.

And you know, I'm sure it's, it's a different sensation when you're in a jet and you're going super fast and you know, you know, it's just a very different feeling.

But when you're hand flying a little airplane, getting bounced around and you're concerned about the weather that you're in, man, when you get that like real quick ground contact out the window and it's like you, you realize that you're super close to the bases of the clouds.

It's a, it's kind of a good reassuring feeling out of the woods yet, but it's reassuring feeling that you're close.

Yeah, it was definitely reassuring just knowing that there was an out that we had that wasn't declaring an emergency or doing anything that would just be a little bit more difficult.

Like the easiest way was to get under and just keep going around and go around the storms and totally thank, I'm so thankful that you had SiriusXM.

I think before you took off we were talking about, you're like, hey, like I just got the cards updated.

I just had all the SiriusXM put in and I was like, thank the Lord.

Because SiriusXM was amazing.

Like having all the weather information that we had and being able to even go back and look at the nasty line that we went through and see like our breadcrumbs.

Just having it right there.

Knowing the track of the storms, where it was getting worse, where it was building and just continually knowing where our out was was phenomenal.

So thank you, Sirius xm.

Totally.

I love you with all my heart.

You're the best.

I need an airplane.

Sirius XM is fantastic.

And yeah, having that, that reliable data coming from satellites, not ADS B and then that high resolution next.

Rad.

Yeah, is.

It's so nice.

It's so fast and it's, it's really, I mean not to be dramatic, but a lifesaver, you know, like, it's, it's super.

It'll really save your butt in those situations, giving you that reliable data.

Yeah.

Super grateful we had that.

Yeah.

It helped us really kind of get a plan in a bad situation to go around or not to go around, but to go around the weather.

Right.

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And now back to today's episode.

But yeah, I mean it was, it was interesting for sure.

What would you do?

What would you have done different now that you have debriefed the video?

All the memories are there.

You've had a couple months, we've had a couple months to kind of think about it.

Would you have gone the next morning?

Would we have just waited for the weather to push out, not have gone to Chick Fil A and wasted an hour or sit on for three hours?

What, what should we have done?

So I think waiting wasn't a bad thing at all.

So like I said, the two main options that were kind of in my head was, well, we can either leave now and just go all the way out to, you know, way, way west, western Oklahoma, almost to the panhandle of Oklahoma and get around that system.

We'll have to stop and refuel and then cut up to the northeast to Kansas, and we probably would have been pushing into the evening.

It would have been a long day of flying and it would have cost more money.

We would burn more fuel.

But we, but it would have been just fine.

And honestly, if we would have left shortly after you landed on your flight, you know, we would have had time to grab lunch and stuff, but then pretty much just get in the plane and go.

We probably still would have gotten to Olathe before dark.

Honestly, if I could do it all over again, I think the decision, if I could have a do over, the decision I would make is to wait out the system, let it entirely pass over us, and we would have probably been able to depart with the weather to our southeast at about 6:45pm and that's already kind of what I was thinking in the fbo.

But again, I was letting that prospect, the possibility of flying into the night stop me.

But that would have been statistically a whole lot less risky than going head to head with Unpredictable convective weather, a squall line that's also throwing unpredictable little cells out in front of it as soon as it hits the dfw.

Bravo.

So if I could do it all over again, I would have waited until, you know, 6:37pm we would have had about probably two and a half hours of cruising before sunset, and then after sunset we would have had maybe an hour.

Yeah.

Landed with the Runway lights on.

But wasn't flying at night kind of fresh in your mind too?

Wasn't there a video just released or an experience you just had in California?

I believe so.

I feel like if that that happened so much more recent, that that was even more like, all right, I didn't like that.

I'm not going to do that again.

Yeah, a couple of experiences where we kind of dipped into the dark and of course, like where we were flying in California, right there, SoCal on the west coast.

Lots of mountains, very little options to put a single engine down.

If you lose the engine, of course, there's highways all over the place, but especially once you get up toward the Central coast, it's just rolling hills and, you know, the, the PCH is not a good option.

So.

And then of course there are no beaches or anything to, to really speak of at that part of the coast.

So it certainly was fresh on my mind.

And I had been preaching that to myself and in the videos about, hey, if you're flying a single engine at night, I'm not saying don't do it, but really think twice about what you're risking and is it worth it or should you wait until the next day?

And there were a couple situations that, you know, pushed us into the dark, leaving our interim stop a lot later than we intended and all that kind of stuff.

So it certainly was fresh on my mind and I think that certainly contributed to me sort of being like, ah, night, night bad, you know.

Yeah.

But it would have been safer.

Yeah.

If we would have just waited and contend with the night flying.

Did Chelsea watch the video or have you shown any footage to her?

What did she think about everything or even just like live, like after we landed and you talked to her, was she like, you're an idiot, like, why did you do that?

Or was it what.

I guess, you know, what did she think about everything?

She's, she's very thoughtful about the way she delivers her feedback.

Of course we, you know, we have our own opinions about and we bounce off of each other all the time because we've.

Her and I flew out fly as A crew constantly.

Um, so we always bounce our, our ideas off of how to do things and our decision making.

What would I do?

What would she do?

And then we make a decision from there.

Um, I did explain to her after our flight.

I was like, that was definitely some of the worst turbulence I have felt in a light airplane.

And I, I already knew that there were significant flight.

Flight planning mistakes on my part.

So I, I was, you know, we talked on the phone about it and I was like, yeah, I, if I could do it over, I would have done things very differently.

And I mean, she has a great attitude about it.

She's like, well, that's.

You live to fly another day.

And that's the beauty of also recording the flights too.

Um, and we're, we're both very grateful that we have all this footage of our flying adventures and continue to record more and edit more so that we can debrief this stuff and also reminisce on the cool flying memories too.

But she was a, she's not shy about, you know, beating me up a little bit about my, my dumb decisions.

But, but it's also.

We have a great working relationship in terms of being able to recognize when there are things to learn from those situations and whatnot.

So definitely when we're looking back on this flight, obviously it's going to be remembered for the turbulence, the weather decisions that we could have made better.

But what, what would you look back on the flight of, like, is there anything positive you look back on the flight other than the fact that you learned.

Learned a lot or.

Because I look back, I remember when we passed, like, we had good conversations, we had some lighthearted laughs.

It was still very memorable on that end, but it's definitely gonna be overshadowed by the actual event of flying itself through the weather.

Yeah, I, I mean, the big positive, though, I take from it, like you said, to not choose is a lesson was learned.

You know, that's, that's the biggest takeaway I can take from it.

The rest of the flight was super uneventful.

It was calm, it was clear, we had a tailwind.

Um, and then we, we did that RNAV coupled approach down to the Runway and played with the autopilot and all that kind of stuff.

I think, you know, the real positive part that comes out of it is sort of the experience that followed the flight.

You know, once we got to Olathe and we hung out at Garmin and got to pal around with everybody and see the, see the amazing facility there.

So that was kind of like the meat and potatoes of the positive part of the trip for me.

Um, but in terms of the flight, the way I compartmentalize this stuff over time, after I edit videos and compile them, I sort of like choose one takeaway.

It's just I do the same thing when I read a book.

There's always like one sentence or like one takeaway that I have from that experience.

And that's just forever going to be the flight.

Planning errors, what's going to be leading up to it.

What I think is going to be funny is this flight will probably be your meter for bad turbulence.

You're going to be flowing no matter who you're flying with.

Like, all right, was it as bad as I fly with Justin?

No.

Okay.

Right.

So it's always gonna be right up there at the top.

We're always going to be bonded with the trauma.

I'll call it trauma bonding over the flight.

It's a trauma bond.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

We'll be 80 years old to look at each other bike.

Remember that?

I remember that.

Remember that.

Yeah, that was rough.

Eating cheese curds at Oshkosh.

That's right.

Still doing a podcast.

Anyways, I remnant.

Yeah, I go on, I go on.

But overall, yeah, no, it was an awesome flight.

We did have great conversations on it.

So the big positive was it was a super nice flight.

After we got out of the Bravo.

For most of the flight, it was just a crazy 25 minutes.

20 minutes?

Yeah, it was the first 25 minutes of a three and a half hour flight that were.

Hell, yeah.

And then the rest.

The rest is pretty great.

Yeah.

I just.

I did a podcast with Jason Miller.

We're doing a series called how to Be a Pilot.

So we started with Student Pilot, Private Pilot.

We just did the instrument rated one and I talked about the idea or shooting where I talked about our approach that we shot in into Olathe.

And I reminded him and I reminded myself about.

I think I even said in the video is like, this takes forever in a 1:72.

I was like, oh my gosh.

Like, we haven't.

We're still 20 miles away.

Like, it was just like that opened.

My mind so much up because it's.

It's not that I forgot about.

I mean, I clearly did forgot about it.

Forget about it.

But when you start going and flying faster airplanes, you just think it's always going to be fast.

Right.

Like when.

When you haven't flown a slow airplane in a while, you're just so used to what your recent experience is that I was just dumbfounded at how much extra fuel, how much longer it took.

And I just.

It's like we still haven't even turned base yet and it's been like 20 minutes on this approach.

That was crazy to me.

Uh, so rest assured, you're still burning more fuel in the, in the jet.

Oh, for sure, A hundred percent.

But yeah, I mean, it's like you have, you have time to think.

That's why the 172 has been such a popular trainer.

And honestly, for getting over the years, getting so comfortable with IFR.

And I love flying IFR.

And a big benefit of flying a slower airplane is it, especially when you're learning for the rating, it gives you time just like you saw.

Like you, you have so much time in between the intermediate fixes and before you get to the final approach fix.

Like we, we wait until we're a dot below the glide path before we start actually slowing down and getting configured.

Because you have that much time, you're not going fast.

That's very different.

Very different.

I'm looking for.

Even after that flight, I still want to get into GA flying.

I'm starting to save more money to buy an airplane one day.

I'm gonna hopefully.

There you go.

Run a bonanza soon, so maybe see more aviation content.

And like I said, I'll, I'll take you up and I'll.

I'll do some payback.

Like, Justin, you're not flying into that storm, are you?

Like, I don't know.

Maybe.

Maybe Josh.

Maybe I am.

Let's see what we.

I jump out in a parachute.

See you.

That's right.

But yeah, lots, lots learned.

I think it's going to be a great tool for everyone.

Another kind of way to think about it is you might watch and be like, wow, what idiots they got themselves in the situation.

But we're, and there will be comments.

Saying that, but we're two experienced pilots.

You could find yourself in a similar situation.

Whether dumb luck, bad planning, bad decision making, you could find yourself in that situation.

So take the lessons from the video to heart and really kind of understand and focus on the fact that you need to do as much pre planning as possible to try to avoid that and not put yourself in that situation.

I think I even said in the video, it's like we used our superior flying skills in a situation that we shouldn't have even been in.

It's like you don't want to have your.

You don't want to use your flying skills.

You don't want it to use your superior knowledge of airspace or how to get out.

You want a boring flight as easy as can be.

So do way more preparation on the ground and kind of think about every single out you have before you even take off.

It's the famous saying that you'd rather be in the ground than being in the air wishing you were on the ground, which I feel like we thought we felt that when we're in the air, so definitely felt that.

Yeah.

So in IMC there, definitely remember that and kind of take that to heart, you know, it could happen to anyone.

It happened to you, could happen to us.

So.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

And that's, that's where the whole hazardous attitude conundrum comes in.

Like we all, we all have them every now and then you just have to have the wherewithal and the, the self honesty and the humility to recognize when you have that mentality of invulnerability.

That's.

I would not make the decision to put myself in that situation.

I probably would have thought the same thing until I found myself in that situation.

And then it takes that sort of honest thinking and the real really deep and well exercised humility to debrief your own experiences and be honest about it.

Don't blame external factors, don't blame this or that.

You can use factors to explain why you've got to that point.

But accepting responsibility is a big piece of being a good and responsible aviator, not just a pilot.

I'm talking about a true aviator.

Be able to debrief your mistakes and be honest with yourself.

When you screw up, it only makes you safer, makes you a better pilot.

And then you can live to tell those, the stories of those experiences about, you know, back in the day, I got myself into that bad situation and here's what I learned and, and those are good experiences to hang on to.

And I did think it was interesting or how I think when we were going through it, I remember in my brain I actually, I wasn't thinking you were okay with it, obviously, because no one was okay with it.

But you work on more on the quiet side when we're actually flying through it.

And then when we got out, I feel like it was like 20 minutes, like on the road.

You're like, all right, stop what we're talking about.

I just want you to know that I was not okay with that.

And I was like, yeah, I hope you weren't okay with that.

But, yeah, right.

Well, that.

That was like a.

That was a big highlight of the teaser and the intro of the video because I feel like that was a big pivotal point on that flight where I was like, okay, I know that I wasn't saying much when we were in imc, and, you know, I.

That's why I kept talking about it, and I was like, dang.

Like, I.

That we shouldn't have been in that situation, blah, blah, blah.

And that's why I said, look, I hope you know that I was not cool with that because, I mean, I've flown with some pilots that they will.

And this is another big point I wanted to make in the video.

I've flown with some pilots that just because they got out of the other side of a bad situation and everything was fine.

The airplane was fine, pilot and passengers were fine.

Everything was fine.

They think that because of that, there was nothing to learn from it.

Yeah.

Good outcome does not mean good decisions were made.

Nope.

And so I wanted to make it clear that, like, look, I was not cool with that.

That's not something that I like.

That.

That was an outlying circumstance.

That was an outlier piece of data.

And my entire logbook of flying, that was definitely a hairy situation.

And I recognize that.

And I wanted to make that clear because I didn't want you sitting over there thinking, like, this dude is, like, cool with flying into this kind of stuff.

Like, no, not at all.

I did not like that situation.

I was like, did he do this for the content?

Like, wow, I'm just kidding.

Right?

Right.

Is this what he does for content?

No.

Yeah, that's.

And that is something that I vow.

I vowed to myself a long time ago to never, ever let the channel become.

I will never, ever seek crappy situations or unsafe situations for the sake of rich content.

Yeah.

Never.

I will never do that.

I will hang up my headset and quit flying if.

If I ever feel like I need to get to that point to keep it going.

I think there are fantastic teachable moments in everyday flights, simple flights, even the boring flights.

There are very teachable moments.

And that's what I try to highlight on the channel.

So the.

And I.

The caption from this video was.

The biggest point from this video was the whole.

Just because you had a good outcome and you landed safely right at sunset, beautiful ending to the flight does not mean all the decisions you made were good.

And that's where that true pure humility comes in, to be able to debrief those.

Totally agree.

I'm still waiting for the caption when you actually publish the video to be, I made an airline pilot cry or airline pilot flew me into this.

I'm just like, airline pilot almost killed me.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I think it's.

It's a good, like, it's good to talk about this.

It's good to have the debrief.

The video is great.

I think I said before, I think it's the longest YouTube video I've ever watched, and obviously I'm in it, so it's easy for me to watch it.

It's like, hey, it's cool.

I'm on YouTube.

Well, and, you know, I used to try to keep them down to sub 20 minutes.

And, you know that there's benefit in that, too.

There are plenty of videos that I make that are shorter than that, but this one, I just felt.

And I started doing this pretty recently, trying out the format of just keeping all the, like, nitty gritty, technical stuff in there, and that's what I did in this video.

I kept all of the ATC communications, I kept all the explanations, and I kept a lot of the personal stories in there that you were telling after we were out of the bad weather and everything.

And that's what ultimately ended up making the video 47 minutes.

But I am just not willing to sacrifice, you know, the stuff that I think is really beneficial to the story and to the lesson for the sake of a time code on YouTube.

So.

Which is good.

47 minutes.

I'm glad you sat down to watch it.

I did.

I sat down fully intending to not watch the whole thing, and I did because it was really good.

There you go.

There you go.

But, yeah, I mean, is there anything else you want to touch on for that?

I feel like we kind of debriefed it pretty well.

Yeah, no, I think.

I think that's pretty much it.

Like, you know, like I said, humility and debriefing your own mistakes, I think is just.

That's been a very common mission in my.

In my flying, especially after I became an instructor.

It's.

It's a very important part of everyone's personal flying.

Absolutely.

And when I fly with different pilots, you know, I usually try to pay attention to how.

How humble they are, how.

How much humility they exercise in their own debriefs and in their own flying.

And.

And I think largely there.

There can be a big, stark contrast.

A stark contrast out there in general aviation.

And I think that's what I try to get across with my content.

I've made it my mission to showcase safe practices while sharing the beauty the world has to offer.

That's my mission statement.

That's what the YouTube channel is all about.

So you said world, right?

So you're going to take that 172 all over the world now you're going to do the world flight?

Maybe not the 172, but something else.

Yeah.

Cool, dude.

Well, hey, even looking back on it, I'm glad we got to finally meet up.

I'm glad we got to go on a flight together.

Like we said, we're trauma bonded for life.

We always have it.

That's right.

Um, but we'll do it again sometime, man.

Maybe we'll just have like a chill flight in North Carolina.

We'll go to go see.

I can't remember the airports.

Go first in flight and we'll go over there and hang out and do something fun.

But I appreciate it.

Yeah, man, I appreciate you taking more time to come on the podcast.

Two times in six months.

Like, we got Josh, guys.

We got Josh.

Aviation 101.

Probably won't be able to get him on for another six years, but he's here.

We did it.

All right, man.

You have my cell phone number now, so.

That's true.

Wait, that is true.

I'm just going to call you all the time.

Hey, buddy, that's.

That's cool.

That's cool.

Yeah, anytime.

Yeah, man.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and I appreciate what you do for the aviation community and the YouTube videos you put out.

It's.

It's inspiring to see.

When I get an airplane, I'm going to try to make videos just like you.

You know, I'm going to be Aviation 101 Junior.

Perfect.

Yeah, that works.

That works well, Likewise.

I appreciate the content that you put out here, too, and, you know, interviewing people with awesome stories and also talking about stuff like this and talking to people like Jason Miller.

I love his content and it's really great what you're doing to bring it to your audience in a really digestible format and.

And you run a great podcast.

You've been running it for a long time and you're doing good stuff.

I appreciate it, man.

But yeah, that's enough of us talking about each other, so.

That's right.

I appreciate coming on and look forward to the video coming out and then hopefully everyone watches that video and then comes here and listen to the podcast because I think the two resources will go really well together.

Absolutely.

Yep.

All right, man.

We'll have a good one.

You too.

Appreciate it.

We'll See you AV Nation.

That's a wrap on today's episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it.

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