The story continues.. :-)
We realised pretty soon that the closer we got to our destination the worse the cloud and visibility were becoming. There were active Cb's all around us but the local cloud was heavy and broken and still flyable as you could dodge the the large, dense clouds where the risk of a lightning strike was greatest.
But that was far from true up ahead where it was obvious we were going to run into a wall of heavy stuff pretty soon.
Now ordinarily this would have been a reason for an immediate divert to a clear airfield, especially with the lightning risk as well, because running into a large, active Cb can be extremely dangerous. Your aircraft can be tossed around like a feather and it is possible for updraghts to carry a light aircraft like ours thousands of feet up into very unstable atmosphere. However, we elected to continue and only divert if a safe landing at our planned destination turned out to be impossible.
Conditions turned out to be as bad as we had feared, if not worse. And then, suffering cats, we could not believe it when Approach cleared us for a VISUAL on runway 29. Either they knew something we didn't, and the field was clearer than we thought, or, more likely, they were keeping us away from the heavies approaching on the ILS on runway 33.
Alternatively, of course, they could have their heads in a place where the sun don't shine, but in any case, we kept our cool and requested the ILS approach to runway 33. D'you know what, those b******s in ATC would still only clear us for ILS to 33, circle to land on 29 so we decided to live with that knowing we had the choice anyway to stick up 2 fingers and still land on 33 - captain's decision, safety, donchaknow ;-) .
By now vis was atrocious. VFR minumums didn't come into this at all as we were well below them. Bear in mind this was late afternoon and still full daylight so the pics give you some idea of just how bad things were. The light, or lack of it, was weird. Then holy cow, when we were about to advise ATC that we intended to land on 33, we just caught our first glimpse of the 33 approach lights.
We looked at each other and grinned. So what the heck, we'd give circle to land 29 a try as in reality it only meant deviating a bit to the right. And anyway, 29 was plenty long enough for us with our STOL capability, even if we were still at a couple of hundred feet over the threshold. But it didn't come to that.
After all the excitement, the landing turned out to be a pretty tame affair. Hellow Warsaw, EPWA. A very nice little airport - pity we couldn't see much of it through the afternoon gloom.
We taxied round to GA parking switched off and breathed sighs of relief. It's good fun flying in real IFR conditions but it can be draining.
Never realised that flying in Europe at this time year could be so ..... err .... invigourating :-)
