✈️ Weathering the Storms: Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Snow, and Ice at Columbus AFB

Most people picture pilot training with blue skies, gleaming aircraft, and perfect conditions.
At Columbus Air Force Base, we trained under an entirely different sky — one that could turn on us without warning.

During my 21 months there, Mississippi served up some of the worst weather in base history: tornadoes, thunderstorm outbreaks, snowstorms, ice storms, and seemingly endless weeks of dense fog. And through it all, we still had to learn to fly.


Welcome to Clear Skies and Wild Rides, alright — heavy emphasis on the “wild rides.”

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Tornadoes and Takeoffs

One night in particular, I was grabbing pizza in town, when all of the sudden the sky opened up, and the tornado sirens started blaring as I walked out the door. Immediately the owner started grabbing guests and ushering them to the shelter area and we all hunkered down. While the wind screamed outside, we cracked jokes about chair-flying and how we would still be expected at 0400 formal brief, even if the storm proved fatal — pilots can be a little dark like that.

Morning came, the storm passed, and sure enough: the schedule rolled on.
Formal Brief? Still at 0400
Canceled sorties? Not unless a tornado was on the airfield
Checkrides? Still better be prepared

Flying in Mississippi meant checking weather constantly — watching for pop-up cells, judging if those towering cumulus clouds were just friendly puffballs or the first signs of trouble. It meant relying on your millennial spidey senses to feel it in your bones if a storm was coming. Every pre-flight briefing ended with a serious, no-nonsense discussion of alternates, fuel minimums, and escape options if the weather turned bad mid-flight.

The Air Force wasn’t just teaching us how to fly — it was teaching us how to make critical decisions under pressure.

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Ice on the Wings

Then winter hit.

Mississippi isn’t exactly known for snow, but that year? We caught snow multiple times.

Runways glazed over with ice. Aircraft froze solid on the ramps. Frost crept across canopies like spiderwebs. We went from worrying about thunderstorms to sitting idle as the jets thawed.

When conditions improved enough to fly, maintenance had a monstrous task of de-icing over a hundred aircraft. A single missed patch of frost on a wing could mean a very bad day.
Flight line crews worked miracles getting planes ready, sometimes for just tiny windows of opportunity between storms.

Flying after a storm was a special kind of nerve-wracking. You didn’t just think about aerodynamics anymore — you thought about invisible threats:

• Icing in the clouds
• Surface Icing

Every takeoff, every landing demanded total focus. Every decision was deliberate.
And every clean sortie under those conditions felt like a huge win.

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Fog: The Relentless Opponent

And then… there was the fog.

Not the light, storybook mist you see in movies. I’m talking thick, wall-to-wall, soup-thick fog that could roll in during a sortie and erase the entire world outside the canopy.

Instrument flying (IFR) suddenly wasn’t just a block on the syllabus — it became the only way to get out and train. No outside references. No visual horizon.

Just trusting the gauges, trusting the training, and believing that if you flew the procedures exactly, you would break out of the cloud deck right over the runway.

It was humbling.

It made you respect the precision of flying on instruments.
It made you trust your aircraft — and yourself — more than ever before.

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Lessons That Stick

Looking back, those weather days — the tornado drills, the icy mornings, the no-visibility recoveries — were where real learning happened.
Anyone can fly when it’s 75 degrees and clear.
But pilots are forged when the skies are angry.

Mississippi weather didn’t just make training harder — it made us better:

• It forced adaptability
• It sharpened decision-making
• It built resilience in a way no classroom ever could

By the time we finished training at Columbus, we weren’t just pilots.
We were pilots who could adapt, overcome, and keep flying even when everything — literally everything — was stacked against us.

That’s part of what Clear Skies and Wild Rides really means: it’s not just about the sunny days and smooth sorties.

It’s about facing the storms head-on — and flying anyway.

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Next Up:

➡️ “Mastering the Madness: Combining Aerobatics, Instruments, and VFR Low-Levels” — where every flight became a full-speed puzzle of new skills, stacked one after the other.