Gotta love West Tennessee weather

[Banshee7]

Was 65 degrees yesterday (Friday).  We now have over 6 inches of accumulation of snow.  High tomorrow 35.  I'm guessing the rain and sleet cooled the ground off enough for it to stick (although it has been snowing for around 6 hours now.  This was unexpected.  Nothing was put on any of the roads, no one went out and bought extra groceries...it just hit...and still hittin now.  Can you say "four-wheeler-hauled sled time"?

[ridley1]

Extra groceries? For 6 inches?

Hell, 6 inches of snow here...and all we do is double our commute time.

And buy extra beer.

[eagl]

I get a day off of work with just 1/8 inch of ice especially if it accumulated with winds greater than about 15 knots...  There is apparently no approved de-icing procedure for the new T-6's we're flying so when freezing precip gets blown under our shelters onto the planes, we just about have to wait for the ice to melt off by itself.  And that's just a bit of freezing precip...  When it snows, we don't have real ramp/runway ice/snow clearing vehicles and our new aircraft shelters cast enough of a shadow that the planes get blocked in by ice and snow that takes days to melt.  We lost 2/3 of our flying schedule for 2 days back in January because we couldn't clear the ice from in front of 2 rows of planes due to the shadow cast by the shelters.

Seems silly, but we're the only US pilot training base that has temp swings from 10 to 100 deg F.  We probably ought to ask the Canadians what they do about it, but my guess is that they park the planes in real hangars and have real snow/ice clearing equipment.  We only lose a few flying days each winter due to snow/ice so it's not worth it to build real hangars instead of just sun shelters, and any snow clearing vehicles would get used maybe twice a year.

My personal solution is to put a couple of old T-37 engines in a swivel mount on a trailer, and send the exhaust through a wide angle diffuser.  To clear the planes of ice, you swivel the engines horizontally and blow the exhaust onto the planes.  To clear the ramp, you swivel them vertically to blow the exhaust on the ground, a bit like the big trucks they use to dry off NASCAR tracks after rainshowers.  We must have a bunch of surplus T-37 engines on base that will just get put in the trash in the next 8 months, and I bet our machine shop could whack together a suitable mounting cage in a day or two.

[Banshee7]

12" of snow now boys    And yet it's STILL coming

[JunkyII]

12" of snow now boys    And yet it's STILL coming

Come to Korea, you will have a different opinion of the weather in your town

[Captain Virgil Hilts]

And in middle Tennessee, we'll get some more rain. It's 40 degrees here right now, and I think we might be 3 hours east of Dyersburg. Now, last Sunday, we went 2 hours east of here, to Jamestown TN, to hunt hogs, and there was 4" of snow on the ground, and it kept snowing until 11AM, and at home it was 35 degrees when we left at 5AM, and when we got home at 3PM it was close to 50.

And now, an hour later, it has dropped 10 degrees, and there's an inch of snow on the deck. Go figure. Well, I guess it's a good thing I got some new front tires for the 4x4 today. I should have put them on this afternoon.