HEAVY WEATHER
The DC9 was a great airplane to fly. I loved the way it handled. It was very forgiving, and I was totally comfortable with it. The only real scare I had in a DC9 came, as you might expect, in a thunderstorm.
We were going from Wilmington to Rockford, Illinois, with a brief stop in South Bend, Indiana. For some unknown reason, the company had not given us any extra fuel out of Wilmington, which meant that we had to take on fuel prior to departing South Bend. A rapidly moving squall line was coming into the Rockford area, and the fuel truck was nowhere to be seen. I was tempted to go with the fuel on board. It was enough to be legal, and leaving right away would increase our chances of beating the weather into Rockford.
However, if we did not get there before the weather we would also be faced with a low fuel status. Not a good combination. I chose to wait. The fuel truck eventually came, and we were on our way.
As we lined up for the runway in Rockford, the weather was just a couple miles to the west. A minute or two sooner and we would have avoided it altogether. The turbulence was really bad. We executed a missed approach, and then noticed on our radar that there was a hole in the line. On the back side it looked good. We decided to go for the hole, get behind the weather and hold for ten minutes and it would be through the area. We could then come in and land.
It was a great plan. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work. We went through the hole, got on the back side, and then everything closed in around us. This was severe, nearly extreme turbulence. The worst I’d been in since Crossett, Arkansas in the Baron so many years before. I was as scared as I’d been in a long time. One updraft caused me to involuntarily push forward on the yoke to try to maintain some sort of altitude control. I pushed harder than I meant to, and we experienced negative G forces. The Electric and Electronics compartment door, located on the floor right behind the captain’s seat, came open. Half my flight case and my flashlight fell into the compartment beneath the flight deck.
We managed to get out of the weather and make a beeline for Chicago. We landed in O’Hare, retrieved my flashlight and maps from the E and E compartment, and watched the squall line sail by lickety-split. Soon after that, we were back in the air and on our way to Rockford is smooth air.