KTUS

18. March 2008 by pilot.

This past weekend I found another perfectly good excuse to spend a Saturday flying across Arizona. Ivan, a friend from the old continent, sent me an email during the week, he was in Arizona for company training but stuck without a car in Tucson for the weekend. Could we meet? And when a friend calls, how can you not listen?

The trip by car would have been a couple of hours (each way) of absolute boredom driving across the desert for hundreds of miles assuming perfect traffic conditions (an improbable assumption on this stretch of highway). By airplane, it would have been less than 50 minutes. There were no doubts in my mind on which way to go except for the weather. A cold front was supposed to cross the state right that day. Precipitation was not part of the picture, this is Arizona after all, but a fair amount of wind (variable direction and gusting to 25knots) was showing in the Terminal Area Forecasts (TAFs) on Friday night. Saturday morning, an update showed that the front was late and would have crossed Arizona only in the afternoon and off I went to beat the wind and reach Tucson by air.

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