Originally Posted by
JimEli
“99.999% of the time there is a way through”
“no way to gauge the conditions without going up and taking a look”
With that mindset, there’s no such thing as a weather decision.
I think you may have misinterpreted me, and I could have been clearer. I'm not suggesting pushing on regardless, I'm saying weather decisions are not always easy and Kauai has more than its fair share of marginal conditions and subsequent difficult calls. The 99.999% statement was a little bit of a mistake, I wasn't trying to say there is a way through in every situation but that there is almost always a route from the Waimea Canyon to the Na Pali coast. Sometimes it involves a detour but it's pretty unusual for there to be no way through. With that said, I have turned back there.
When I said there's no way to gauge the conditions without taking a look, I was again referring to the area between Waimea Canyon and the Na Pali. Unfortunately, that is the case. There's no radar, no meaningful observations, not even a webcam. The satellite image doesn't indicate whether the clouds are 2000' over the rim of the canyon or 200' below it. Even when you're in the Canyon you can't see what's going on beyond the rim, so you might cross the rim in sky clear conditions only to be confronted with cloud obscuring the normal route to the coast. Potentially you may be able to fly around the cloud, no problem, but you've got to go further to see. Now your weather decision has to be made very quickly, with passengers in the back, whilst flying, and potentially with other aircraft coming up behind you. Can it be done? Sure, but I wouldn't say it's always easy.
With that said, of all the tours I could have flown on Kauai, I cancelled probably in the region of 10-20% for weather reasons. I stayed on the ground for entire weeks when the weather was just a little too marginal. I have no desire to take dumb risks, especially for a tour. I was one of the more cautious pilots at one of the more cautious companies, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't make mistakes (although I did try to learn from them) - the weather here is unlike anywhere else I've flown. Some of those weather decisions were easy to make. Others were hard. They don't get easier when you're paid by the flight, not by the day, and you're working in an industry where progression is based on number of hours flown, not number of good decisions taken. I've heard people say "you're paid to make good decisions" but in the tour industry it's literally the opposite.