I was called out yesterday to do some more relay work for an offshore helicopter company and with an approaching cold front due in that night around 9ish i was a little concerned but not really. mistake #1. around 5:30 i was released to fly back home, i had been stationed over the white lake VOR just southwest of laffayette louisiana and am based at la porte (east side of houston on the west bank of the bay). when i was about 40-50 miles east of beaumont the ceiling started coming down and the sun was setting so the visibility was deteriorating albeit still VFR. for those of you without an instrument rating, take what i'm fixing to say to heart. get one. i had my girlfriend with me and had been talking to her. well when i looked out the windscreen, what did i see?? nothing. i had flown into the clouds. no problem. immediately i called beaumont approach and told them my situation and got on a plan. my nav/coms were not very spiffy so i requested radar vectors through his airspace then on to la porte which he had no problem with. upon leaving his airspace to the west i cancelled the flight plan b/c i was VFR again. no problem i thought. we've got 25-30 miles to go and everything will be cool. uhh, nope. we get to the west side of the bay and i see a familiar ship yard on the left but no bridge on the right. the bridge i was looking for has high intensity lights on the top but to no avail. just inland there is a wall of clouds and rain from the surface up. i skirt around and decend to 500 over the water flying the shoreline to see if i could get in on a VOR approach but decided that since my com 2 was not up to par elected to go to another airport, baytown. with baytown in sight i get set up for landing. then on downwind, 1000agl the front hit and wham! once again i'm in the soup, low and slow. in your vfr training you practice hood work for a reason but in reality, an instrument rating will fair you much better in this situation. so anyway, i go throttle full and execute a climbing left turn to 180 degrees of course, (which actually happened to be heading 180). we broke out and when we did i turned and looked for the airport. it was totally obscured. the execution of the manuever took less time to do than to sit here and type this out. it was a fast moving front. now enter girlfriend and the infamous words "i'm going to be sick" she grabbed a bag from a burger joint we'd hit earlier and let it loose. Murphey's Law states here that there will be a hole in the bag so the floorboard of the warrior was painted some. we ended up flying back across the bay to an airport that i knew would be well clear of the front, landed and called my boss to come get us. about 10 minutes later the front hit the airport with wind so strong the rain was going sideways and shaking the building that we were in. weather, especially fronts are nothing to toy around with. if your not trained or not up to your own personal standards the results can be disasterous. i had called wxbrief to give them a pirep of what i'd just seen and been through and the briefer informed me that at Geo. Bush (IAH) they had had gusts of 45kts upon the passage of the front. it was an interesting night. oh, and one more thing. fly the airplane! don't turn a non emergency into an emergency. stay calm and fly the plane. there will be plenty of time later to be nervous. tune out what you have to and focus on the situation at hand.
