Remembering Archie Trammel, the Man Who Taught Me How to Use Weather Radar

It’s springtime, and that means squall lines, thunderstorms, and tornadoes. And now that I live in Colorado, late-season snowstorms. But now, as my friend Bryan Windham and I were discussing recently, I don’t have to fight them anymore. I can watch them on the weather channel, then turn off the television and go to sleep. It wasn’t always that way.

Many times over the course of my flying career, I had to deal with heavy rain, moderate to severe turbulence, and on a couple occasions, hail. In my early years, before I flew anything with onboard weather radar, I had to out of necessity rely on myself to visually find gaps between storms or upon Air Traffic Controllers to provide radar vectors which most of the time kept me and my passengers safe.

Murphy’s Law always prevails, though, and often times I would be too low for radar coverage, or the controllers would be “too busy handling IFR traffic” to accommodate my requests. At one point, the FBO/Air Taxi service I flew for did spend some money on a storm scope which gave you an idea of where the most lightning strikes were occurring, and I thought that was great. Those were my young and dumb days, when I was still a bold pilot.

I only lived long enough to become an old pilot by retiring my bold pilot persona. By then I was flying corporate airplanes which did have weather radar, and after that, I was not so impressed by the storm scope.

I was fortunate enough to attend a one-day seminar in St. Louis on the subject of weather radar, conducted by Mr. Archie Trammel. Not many people I meet once and remember their names for 45 years, but Mr. Trammel knew his stuff, and I will never forget the life-saving knowledge he passed on to me.

 Mr. Trammel taught us to tilt the radar up and down, noting the number of degrees from the bottom to the top of the thunderstorm, and the distance away to determine the height of a storm.

In particular, Mr. Trammel addressed the subject of attenuation. Attenuation happens when the storm is so heavy the radar cannot penetrate to the other side. Think of it as if you were pointing the radar at a building. The return would show only the front of the building. Just a thin, solid line. Nothing more. When flying in areas of thunderstorms, there are times when you will see what appears to be a very thin, narrow line of weather. All the storms to its left and right appear bigger. To the untrained eye, it looks like the place to go.

He taught us to tilt the radar down to see if we could paint ground clutter on the other side of the storm. If you could make out ground clutter, you were painting through the storm. If not, that’s one to avoid at all costs.

It is surprising to me that many pilots do not know about attenuation. One good example is the deadly crash of a Southern Airways Flight 242, in April of 1977

I had many times over the years that I avoided big trouble by knowing that. Once with my boss when I was flying corporate. He was a bomber pilot in World War II, so he knew more than the average passenger, but he hadn’t been trained with weather radar per se. We were flying from Effingham, Illinois to Pueblo, Colorado and there was a line of weather. There was a thin band such as I previously described, coincidentally right on a direct line with where we ideally would like to be going. He didn’t understand why I was deviating, so I had to show him how we could paint the ground clutter on the other side of all the weather except where that thin band was. He accepted my explanation and after that never questioned me again when I deviated around weather.

Another time, when I was flying out of Sterling-Rock Falls, Illinois, our director of operations had opted not to purchase fuel in O’Hare and of course there was a line of weather between us and Sterling. Quite naturally, there was what appeared to be a thin band of weather on our flight path. And of course, him being nowhere nearly as smart as he thought he was, that’s where he pointed the airplane.

I said “No”. Then I showed him why. We still got the snot kicked out of us because we didn’t have enough fuel to go around all the weather, but we were able to pick our way between the worst of the storms. He later asked me to train the other pilots in our company on how to use weather radar.

There were dozens of other times I used the information I learned that day for decades to come. I will always remember Archie Trammel and be grateful to him for being such a great teacher.