Violent delights have violent ends

When you see clouds such as these you have to wonder how bad the winds aloft are going to be. These clouds are at about 10,000 feet and already the winds where 65 knots and climbing. The clouds look neat with the wind swept appearance.

Now when you level off and see this as your ground speed it makes for a long trip ! We are en-route from Boston at 12,000 and ground 164 knots. We went up to 14,000 first to test the waters and the winds picked up 20 kts in those 2000 feet so we decided to come back down. We are about 80 miles west of Manchester VOR (Mass.) Since the wind was uniform in direction and only varied in speed there was very little turbulence once above 8,000 feet. On departure out of Boston they gave us a radar vector direct to Downtown and we passed over at 1500 feet or so. It was amazing and I need to grab the co-pilot's pictures and post them. He snapped a few really good ones of looking straight downtown Beantown !

80 knots directly on the schnoz. The winds are directly off the front and its slow going. 2 hrs 30 mins if we stay here. Closer to 3 hrs if we go to 18,000. Another advantage of a turbo prop. We can fly low out of the wind where a jet would run out of gas in an hour at this altitude :) Also since they have a higher true airspeed this would would only be a 15 percent reduction in cruise speed opposed to our 31 percent kick in the teeth.