Milk runs and hard work

At 200 feet everything is white. The clouds, whose bases I am still in and out of. The ground, covered in snow. The runway, covered in blowing snow. The approach lights. There is virtually no contrast. Everything I need to land is white. Only the shade of white varies and not by much.

The ASOS had been reporting 200-foot ceilings and 2-mile visibility. More than enough under normal circumstances as the reported visibility only needs to be half a mile for me to legally begin the approach.

Legal and safe are frequently two different things, easy a third and all three are not always in line.

I had forgotten how difficult it is to fly a low approach in the daytime in the middle of winter with a thin ceiling. It has been a long time since I've done this and it quickly comes back: 2-miles of visibility is barely adequate when the world is all the same color.

So I have legal and safe covered. Easy, not so much.

The sun illuminates the thin clouds, only 1,000 feet thick or so today, turning them into a giant diffuse light source. Thicker clouds are nice and dark down low, providing much needed contrast against the snowy surface, but today everything is the same color.

I file this away in my mental folder labeled “things nobody taught you but that still might get you killed.”

At 300 feet above the snow on the ILS into Aberdeen I looked outside and saw nothing. At 200 feet I looked again, still nothing.

What started as a milk run, with clear blue skies and warm temperatures is about to wind up with a missed approach. I haven't gone missed in a very long time.

Decision time. I'm starting to push the throttles up when I catch a glimpse of the approach lights so I ease them back instead, the runway comes into view and I plunk down. All of this happens within the span of a few seconds. The other 90 minutes of the flight were so routine as to be totally boring.

The next few weeks are a mishmash of cargo life, long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of utter beauty and occasional actual hard work.

There was the approach late one night, again into Aberdeen. No radar vectors for me so it was back to old school, instrument training stuff as I tracked the localizer outbound and flew a procedure turn for the first time in six months. It's amazing how rusty one gets when fed a steady diet of visual approaches and radar vectors to final.

On that same approach I marveled at the surreal beauty as I skimmed just across the cloud tops watching shapes rush through the glow of my landing lights and I stayed high just to prolong what I was seeing.

It was an almost indescribable moment, when I felt I was the most privileged person on earth. No desk-bound job with a view that never changes. Just me, alone, at night, getting ready to descend through the clouds to the welcoming lights of a small Midwestern runway.

It would scare most people to death, a pilot friend said when I told him about that night. Getting back behind a desk, now that's scary.

An hour earlier I was freezing, walking around my airplane in Fargo as the snow was driven sideways by the wind using my FAA-required 2 D-Cell flashlight to smash ice off of the parts the fancy de-icing boots don't cover. It was miserable.

Then there was Venus, chasing a sliver of moon to set in the West. The first night I saw it I thought it was the landing light of an airplane headed my way and flicked on my own lights, even though they cost 7 knots when extended into the slipstream.

I was getting ready to query the center controller when I realized I was worried about colliding with a planet that wasn't my own. On a clear night I was sure it was a landing light, it was that brilliant.

For the rest of the week Venus was there and I never tired of staring at her.

More trips, more of the same but always something different as well.

A brake failure taxiing out one night so I turned around and gingerly taxied back to get a different airplane.

More time spent knocking ice of the airplane, this time in Sioux Falls but almost as cold and miserable as it had been in Fargo.

A few more approaches, although none as challenging as the one into Aberdeen that white-on-white day.

Cursing a heater that left me covered in sweat with it's blast furnace mentality. Cursing another heater that left me half-frozen with it's weakness.

Huddling inside my airplane, waiting for the lights of the hotel van to appear through the cold and blowing snow and hoping they did so before all the heat had escaped from the cabin. There is no place more lonely than a deserted airport in the middle of South Dakota on a brutal winter night.

I took this job for the experience. Walked away from corporate life and large, steady paychecks so I could sit on a ramp in the middle of the night and ponder restarting the engines to keep from freezing to death.

I miss the paychecks of my past career, I knew I would, but little else.