ksarrowpilot
Filing Flight Plan
I'm working on my IFR rating and have a question. How does one determine which clouds are OK to fly into? The weather yesterday in KC had many layers of clouds from 2500 agl up to FL400. See the attached photo. No clouds were showing up on radar as no moisture and no lightning was present. So if you're on a long cross country in a small single engine plane with a 10k altitude limit, and you run into a giant band of these huge clouds that stretches for miles, are you OK to go through them? How do you determine how dangerous a cloud is? I asked our company ATP and after a long pause he said "I can't answer that - you have to use your own judgment". He says you judge intensity by how hi the tops are, and how much moisture they are producing, lighting, etc but what other sources of information do you have for big white clouds that will likely soon get nasty? Do you just eye-ball the situation and make a judgment call to continue, re-route or land? Any advice would be great. Thanks