Doug Liman Blog — Christmas Florida Pilgrimage Through Tornados and Hail, Part 1 » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog — Christmas Florida Pilgrimage Through Tornados and Hail, Part 1

Share on Facebook posted 01-05-10 by Doug Liman

With Fair Game overlapping my Moon project, Argonauts, this fall; I was really in need of some down time. Flying myself to Florida, to see my mother who is a painter and runs a gallery in Palm Beach in the winter, is a pilgrimage I make every Christmas but this year I seriously almost didn’t make it. Below are my journal entries that I didn’t get a chance to post during the break and there are photos at the bottom of the page.

December 25, 8 a.m.

I just got one of the worst weather briefings I have ever gotten: icing in the northeast and a line of thunderstorms down south directly in my path, with one-inch hail, tornadoes and tops (the ceiling for the clouds) to 50,000 feet. Air Doug is a prop plane. A very fast prop plane, but a prop plane nonetheless, which means no going above the weather, no making it non-stop to Florida without stopping to gas her up again. The plane flies about 225 mph, which is less than half the speed of a commercial jet.

I’m gonna take off, see how far I can get vis-à-vis the weather and land and re-evaluate from there.

December 25, 1 p.m.

Spend three terrifying hours in the air, heading south and staring at the NEXRAD weather radar image that is beamed by satellite to my plane. The radar image shows this monstrous storm bearing down on South Carolina, and I spend the whole flight deciding how close to get to that storm before landing. I am in one of those situations I so try to avoid: confronting a situation for the first time, without the benefit of an instructor aboard. The storm has these tentacles that radiate outward, each a different shade of green on the radar — the darker the green, the fiercer the storm. How dark do I dare go?

I land in extremely bumpy weather (but a perfect landing) in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and step out of the plane into a torrential downpour and huge winds. The ramp guy says to me: “You must really need to get somewhere.” And as I am the only plane at the airport, I take it as a pretty good indicator that maybe I pushed it a little too far and flew a little too close to the heart of the storm. Nothing to do but wait here on the ground, with my dog Jackson, for the storm to pass overhead.

December 25, 8 p.m.

About to land in Palm Beach. The departure from Myrtle Beach was extremely dramatic. A window opened up on the radar image where I could take off, fly south over the gulf 20 miles, then turn to the west and get around the rest of the storm. After three hours on the ground in Myrtle Beach, I was ready to go. I raced out to the plane with Jackson, taxied out in torrential rain, waited at the end of the runway for the radar image to show all clear, and then took off. Fifteen harrowing minutes later I was clear of the storm, which was now northeast of me and moving away. It has been clear flying the rest of the trip.