Sucker Holes

I have memory of a terrifying moment during my flight training at NAS Pensacola flying the T-28 Trojan back in the late 1970’s.  I may be embellishing the terror I seem to remember, but not too much.

Flying solo in a big, radial engine aircraft.  I was in command of all that power!  What a thrill!  It must have been toward the end of the T-28 training syllabus because once you soloed that aircraft and did a solo cross-country flight and a solo night flight, back then you were quickly sent either to helicopter training at NAS Whiting Field or to fixed-wing training at NAS Beeville in Texas.

T-28 Trojan.  Courtesy Avgeekery.com

Feeling my oats and a bit over confident, I flew through what we called back then a “sucker hole”…a hole in the layer of clouds. And I ended up “VFR (or visual flight rules) on top”…out of the “goo” (the clouds) and in the sunshine but above the clouds.  And I did this without an earned instrument certification that permitted me to be there above the clouds.  This required me to ultimately descend through the clouds again to return to home base.

Back then, I didn’t know that the “official” name of that “sucker hole” could have been a hole in the clouds punched by an airplane called a “fallstreak hole” or a “hole punch cloud”.

According to Wikipedia, “When an airplane flies through certain types of clouds containing supercooled water droplets, the disruption can cause the water to rapidly freeze into ice crystals, creating a large circular gap in the cloud layer.”

Seeing the recent publication of a NASA photo, copied below, of a what could have been a fallstreak hole over Mount Vesuvius reminded me of the terror I felt when I flew through that sucker hole that quickly closed up. 

Here I was VFR on top, the sucker or fallstreak hole closed up, but no clearance or authority to be where I was and punch back through the clouds to descend and get back to home base.  I was screwed.

The Landsat 8 satellite captured Mount Vesuvius’ caldera perfectly aligned with a cloud gap during its pass in 2022. (Image: NASA)

But when you’re screwed, most of us try to find ways to get “unscrewed”  If I wanted to ultimately earn my “Wings of Gold” I needed to figure out how to get back to and land at home base.  I knew how far I was from home base and how much fuel I had aboard my “Trojan”.  I flew toward home base for a while looking for another sucker hole to descend through with no luck.  Finally, I decided I had to descend and punch through the clouds with or without an instrument ticket and without asking for permission from anybody, thereby possibly creating my own “fallstreak hole”.

All’s well that ends well.  I punched through the clouds and landed at NAS Pensacola without a hitch (except for the terror of being where I shouldn’t have been for a short while).

And I did ultimately earn my “Wings of Gold” despite my over-confidence and stupidity on this particular flight.

Onward and upward!

Sources:  NASA, Avgeekery.com