Grey in Gayndah

After much preparation by Andrew Mladen, the weather Gods had other ideas for our Gayndah Fly-in during August this year. The weather forecast wasn’t looking good a few days out and hadn’t improved by Friday. Many pilots called it Friday and decided Saturday would be a day for staying on the ground. A few Instrument rated pilots held onto hope that Saturday would still allow a chance to get into the air.

Saturday morning conditions on the eastern side of the range certainly weren’t playing nice and our coastal based friends had to make the call to stay firmly planted on terra firma. On top of the range and further to the west of Toowoomba the cloud was breaking up, although the weather forecast was not looking to improve much for the rest of the day. Tom and Evelyn, based at Cecil Plains could track to Gayndah okay VFR in his Tri Pacer. Al and Des in the Cessna 190 and Rob, Fred and Blair in a 182 submitted our IFR plans and departed Toowoomba into fairly good conditions with the cloud having broken up quite nicely. We climbed out of Toowoomba clear of cloud to 6000 feet.

There we were on top of scattered cloud. The forecast initially showed this to be the case for our arrival at Gayndah. However, the cloud thickened to solid overcast for our arrival. We called Brisbane Centre for a clearance for the Gayndah RNAV – E. We popped out of the cloud at 2100 feet and landed on runway 24. The cloud was lifting fairly quick and Tom and Evelyn arrived shortly after with no problems VFR. Al and Des where the final crew to arrive for the day.

We elected to walk into town – about 1.5 km. We checked out the main street, surprisingly quite a few shops that where of interest to 5-year-old Blair. He thoroughly checked out these stores and the merchandise of special interest before we adjourned to the Grand Hotel for lunch. We were  warmly welcomed there and after filling out the required paperwork and assurances we hadn’t been any where near Victoria in recent weeks, sat down to a fantastic lunch.

The pilot’s attention was on the weather back home. It hadn’t gotten any better and had in fact got a whole lot worse. YTWB was down to a base of 200 ft AGL and vis of about 800 metres. Our Alternate of YBWW was a lot better so with plans of landing there we cancelled our visit to the Gayndah museum to head for Brisbane West Wellcamp before the weather got any worse. Tom departed for Cecil keeping to the west of the Bunya Mountains and able to keep clear of the weather. With only a couple of showers to divert around, able to arrive home without issue.

The Toowoomba based 190 and 182 filed their IFR plans and departed Gayndah climbing through the cloud base to come out on top at 7000 feet. With the AWIS on we listened intently to the changing conditions at Toowoomba. ‘Base 100 Vis 800’, then base ‘300 Vis 1000'...that’s sounding better, and then conditions start getting worse again. We decided there would be little chance of getting into Toowoomba so started planning for an approach into Wellcamp. With only half a dozen aircraft in the air across southern Queensland at this time who would have thought that they would all be arriving for Wellcamp at the same time?

Rob decided with all the traffic for Wellcamp at the same place at the same time it would be a good opportunity to fly the 29 RNAV and missed approach for Toowoomba for practice and let the traffic sort itself out at Wellcamp before heading there. As luck would have it, right at our missed approach point we popped out of the cloud and landed on runway 29 without any problems. Al and Des in the 190 followed straight after. Not all that unusual for Toowoomba the cloud lifted further to actually allow for a couple of VFR Helicopters to get in before deteriorating fairly rapidly again forcing a few other aircraft to do a missed approach and head for the better weather just a short distance to the west at Wellcamp.

Despite the weather dropping our numbers from about 35 back to 7 it was still a great day out with the perfect opportunity to keep our instrument skills current. With the great interest from the local International Fellowship of Flying Rotarians, Darling Downs Aeroclub members along with our friends based at Gatton, Warwick and Caboolture we will reschedule this trip for another date in the near future.

Rob Hannemann

DDAC Club President