Gee, North Dakota must be a really tough place to learn to fly with those 50 or 60 knot winds all the time-----------------Is that story really true?-------NO----------That's not even poetic license, that story is simply not true!!!!
WE GROUND FIRE AIRCRAFT (fixed wing, flown by high time professionals) IF THE SURFACE WINDS EXCEED 35 KNOTS OR WINDS AT 3,000 EXCEED 50 KNOTS---just how high do these UND trainers fly?
Before you jump all over my ass like you so love to do, you just check your facts. We fly all the time with surface winds of 20 to 30 knots. Our cut off is 30 knots at the surface. If we didn't fly with that amount wind, we would never get off the ground.
Now meteorology 101 should come into play here, but oh yea I forgot, you never open books, all of your knowledge comes for years of experience.
Met 101 tells us that wind is slowest at the ground due to skin friction drag, and this skin friction drag comes into effect in the boundary layer of the atmosphere (the first 2,000' agl). Also we all should know that wind increases with altitude, and you see the greatest increase in wind speed in the fist few thousand feet after that boundary layer.
So you then apply this knowledge to practical use, you take off with a ground wind speed of 30 knots, which I've done here. You climb up to cruising altitude for me that day was 5,500' on the way to fargo. I had a tail wind going down, and was with a TAS of 115 my ground speed was reading 175. Now I assume you can do simple math that gives me a relative wind of 60 knots roughly. I made it to fargo in about 15 min, normally about a 30 min trek in a warrior. On the way home, several hours later, as my instructor and I figured we'd never make it back with that kinda head wind, our TAS was 105, with a GS of 70ish. We watched cars pass us on the interstate all the way back to Grand Forks.
If you think I'm using poetic license or swamp gas smoke and mirrors to tell my story here, ask Gulfstream. He went to UND and still lives in this area. He will readily confirm what I say here.
**Edit, Gulf beat me to it.