Gotta love the last pickup and delivery mission we had.
The mission was to pickup 2 new UH-60Ms at the factory in West Palm Beach, FL, fly one to Lakehurst, NJ and the other to Huntsville, AL. Then, pickup a new HH-60M at Lakehurst and fly it to Jacksonville, FL. We took off from WPB as a flight of 2. The wx got so bad we had to break up and pickup IFR clearances into Cecil Field. We continued on as a single ship IFR in VMC to North Myrtle Beach with a 40 kt tail wind. 30 Miles out we go into the goo and shoot the ILS to a 400' ceiling and 1.5 in rain & mist. We plan to stay overnight at CRE, let the snow storm in the NE pass through, then make our way north as the snow is cleared. Unfortunately, the storm stalls, hits the next day, and pounds VA to NY with snow. Lakehurst is closed for the rest of the week due to limited snow removal capabilities, so we head back to Cecil, do 9-11 retorques, and plan to go up a week later.
A week later we fly to North Myrtle Beach and shoot the ILS to 700' OVC, an ILS to 200' OVC in MD, and a TACAN to 650 OVC in NJ. The next day, after completing the turnover paperwork, we need to get out of NJ in 600' OVC before the next storm hits later that day. On preflight I notice weights in only one quadrant of the tail rotor and think that is odd. I pull up IVHMS after the startup and see the tail vibes are at .4 IPS (.2 IPS is max allowable). We shutdown, call FSS to change our takeoff time, and make the corrections to the tail. An hour later, we get a SVFR clearance to fly around the pattern, dash out at Vh, see if anything shakes loose, then return to pickup our IFR clearance. We finally leave Lakehurst in IMC with a clearance to 5000'. F-16s at 6000' report light rime icing, so we turn on the windshield deice, main/tail rotor deice, and engine anti-ice (pitot heat was already on). Glad we checked all of that during the start-up. Now we will have to consider the added fuel consumption. We breakout at Salisbury somewhere around 700'. So much for the forecast 1000' SCT. Kinston's ASOS is reporting clear skies and 10 miles. We arrive to a SCT layer at 1000' with mist and less than 3 miles visibility. Of course we can see even less down through the SCT layer, so it is vectors to the ILS for us. We see the field on downwind leg and proceed with a visual approach. The rest of the flight to VQQ was VFR, with no incidents, except for snow flurries in SC and the 40 kts cross wind and moderate turbulence.
Total flight time was 21.2 hours, 8.7 IMC.
I'm ready to wait until spring before doing one of those again.