Saturday May 29 2010. Mission: Charleston SC for Memorial Day Weekend  May 29, 2010 we planned a trip from St Pete Florida to Charleston SC for a 4 day 3 night Memorial day weekend.  The weather forecast was scattered showers on Saturday and clear sky for the trip home on Tuesday.  The Q200 was filled to the top (24 gal) and 5 qt of oil.  The concerns for the Saturday morning takeoff was fog.  The SE US typically has fog issues to about 10 AM and the afternoon almost always brings huge thunderstorms which you don’t want to try flying through.  We got to the airport and loaded the bags.  I fired up the SPOT and set it to beacon our position every 10 min.  Several friends will follow us up there on the internet.  Takeoff was planned for around 9AM but we got off at 8:50.  After we got out of KPIE airspace we dialed up the FSS and opened our flight plan.  The St Pete area was fairly scuddy looking with poor visibility on the climb out but once we got to about 4000 feet we were starting to see the blue sky.  We had to step climb to stay under the Tampa Class B, first 1200’ then 3000’ then 6000’ then we got to our 7500’ cruising altitude.  Our route was to Gainesville FL, Jacksonville, Brunswick GA, past Savannah, and into Charleston.  The waypoints for the GPS were planned to keep us out of the restricted space just past Gainesville.  JAX has a lot of military airspace and jets so I had approach tuned in to the radio.  I hear the controller calling in traffic at 7700 feet NE bound to another airplane.  Hey, that’s me.  I called him back and told him that the traffic was me and that I’m inbound to Charleston.  He gave me VFR flight following from then on so I started being more careful about staying at 7500’ where I belong (when flying about and not talking to a controller I never stay at the precise even altitudes).  To that point we’d not even seen any other airplanes nor did the ZAON pick up anything.  It was pretty quiet in the air.  Our header tank fuel sender started acting weird but came back to life after the header fuel tank was pumped full.  When the header tank is full it overflows into the main tank and I can see that flow through the clear tube.  At that point I know there is roughly an hour of fuel in the header tank.  This becomes more important on the flight home… The ground temp was around 85F, at 7500’ the outside air was 60F, and the inside airplane temp was 72F, pretty comfortable with white puffies to our left, blue sky above, and the Atlantic Ocean to our right. As we flew north of JAX and a bit offshore there was a big cloud buildup over the land.  It started raining on us pretty good and a rainbow formed off our left side.  My carb air temp was 38F so I wasn’t concerned with carb ice.  Got a couple of rainbow pictures tho. The Savannah controllers kept me clear of military traffic and handed me to the Charleston approach.  Charleston was using RWY 15.  This is a joint military/civilian airport and RWY 15 has an arresting cable at about 1000’ from the approach end.  I understand this is a big steel cable 4” off the runway.  This would destroy a little plane like the Q.  I don’t even like bumping over those white runway center markers and try to land off the center line to avoid them.  30 miles South of Charleston I was now over land with lots of clouds and looking for a nice hole to drop down.  About 20 out we made it down to 3000’ and were pretty much at the cloud bottoms.  CHS approach had me turn away from the airport (west) over a forest with nothing to land on… didn’t like that much either.  CHS Apch wanted to get me lined up on the airliner standard 10 mile straight in approach.  Sure not how I like doing it.  They handed us off to the tower and were cleared to land.  The time to CHS was 2:20, 333.7Nmi, that’s 143Nmph or 164MPH on the way up.  A passenger airliner was waiting for us on the right.  I landed real long as the Odyssey FBO was on the other end of the airport.  Not a bad landing and we pulled off onto taxiway A.  The FBO building was in sight and we taxied to the ramp.  The lineman was signaling us but I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me.  He was signaling for me to turn left but that made no sense as the ramp was to the right so I just stayed to the left and circled toward him.  He seemed to be happy with that.  Weird, he has me shut down on the ramp near the big hangar door.  No tiedowns anywhere in sight.  Oh well, I got custom wheel chocks and if it gets real windy maybe they’ll pull the plane into the big hangar.  I think they are too accustomed to the big buck private jets here.  We pull the bags out and head to the FBO, it’s beautiful.  All glass and marble with lots of leather sofa’s, big time!  In the pilots lounge I close my flight plan.  Then we get a line guy to drive us to the main terminal where the cheap rental cars are kept.  He drives us over in the new Range Rover crew car!   Where is the old beat up 1970 Pontiac Station wagon that I’ve typically seen for crew cars?  We pickup our Chevy Cobalt and head into town. Charleston is a real neat city with lots of old houses on the water front.  Lots of art galleries and a Spoleto festival going on.  The Charleston Museum was very nice as was the Patriots Point aircraft carrier, sub, and destroyer.   We toured around for 3 days, each of which were getting more cloudy.  Looking out over Charleston Harbor. Patriots Point had an aircraft carrier, and sub.  Nice place to visit on Memorial day Mike hunting for stray aircraft... The final day we awoke to an IFR sky in rain.  The airport was reporting 1.5 mi visibility, the clouds were around 1000’ up tho.  The weather radar showed that if we got out of Charleston the Atlantic coast was clear sailing.  As you can see the SE is getting hammered We watched some blue holes in the clouds blow by so we knew it wasn’t horrible weather.  We got to the airport and returned the rental car.  The sky was looking pretty good.  As we picked up the bags to load into the plane the sky broke loose and poured on us.  So we sat for 30 min.  It was obvious that squalls were blowing through with short gaps of clear.  I decided to push the plane into the big hangar to load the bags, good thing as another squall went through as I preflighted.  The thought was that if I started up in the rain by the time I got to the runway it would be clear.  This Class C airport had a clearance delivery frequency so I dialed that up prior to start up.  I was wondering if they’d say no VFR but they asked if I was IFR capable and all the other stuff like where I’m going, what altitude…  Then they cleared me to RWY 21.  Pretty nice as our on course heading was 224 so pretty much straight out.  We’re taxing in the rain, its dark and ugly with no blue sky in sight.  A business jet takes off so I’d like to let the wing tip vortice die down but there is a C5a down there that looks like he’s getting ready to go and I don’t want to be behind that belmoth and to top it off the Cessna behind me calls ready.  So I call CHS tower and tell em I’m ready.  We are cleared for takeoff and away we go.  Fairly heavy rain and no real difference from a dry takeoff.  The Q200 performs well in rain.  We flew for about 10 miles being stuck below 1000’.  Departure clears me to climb whenever I can.  There is a nice hole over there so up we go, zoom we are at the tops of the cloud deck.  That 3000FPM initial rate of climb and the 1000 steady rate of climb gets you up in a hurry.  We pick our way around the clouds as we climb to 6500’.  Nice blue sky and white puffies below and next to us.  The weather data showed it is clear over the water with buildups over the land and that’s what we are seeing.  We are on our way but showing about a 10K headwind, bummer but at least we escaped Charleston.   We are getting passed from center to center and I’m kind of curious if they can track us all the way to Clearwater.  No MP3’s tho because we are listening to the controllers.  JAX tracks us past Gainsville and hands us to Tampa for the last leg.  They have me fly way off to the Gulf coast, kinda wish I hadn’t bothered with them as they ran me lower altitudes and farther out than I would normally go.  Next time I dump em.  As we pull into final for RWY9 at KPIE the weather is ok with a few clouds around.  We land on the rough runway and taxi to the hangar.  As we pull the plane into the hanger it starts sprinkling on us, then pours.  I guess the rain was welcoming us home but we escaped getting wet by only seconds!  10:20 off and we’re back home by 12:50, a 1:30 flight time for 133.5K or 153.5MPH, not the best speed due to the headwinds but way better than driving. For curiosity let’s look at the cost of the trip.  Over the round trip I started with 24 gal of fuel, landed with 10 gal of fuel and bought 10 gal at $5 per gallon (for some reason their price was listed at $5.70 per gal, maybe I got the weekend discount?).  So 14 gal at $3 + 10 Gal at $5 = $92 in gas, $9.50 per night tie down but with gas purchase one night is free so $19 in tiedown.  It was a 767 smi round trip so I got 32 sMPG.  Going commercial would be best case $367 each or $734 for the two of us plus airport parking of $48 for a total of $782.  Also no airline goes direct from Tampa to CHS so it takes the airlines 3.5 Hr to get you there.  You got to be there an hour early so 4.5 hours to get to CHS.  The Q200 cost was $111 for two and it was 2 hours faster than commercial, so I kicked the commercial airlines butt big time!