The family and I took a trip up to Omaha on Thanksgiving Day in the Diamond DA40XL. Weather was forecasted to be good, however, there was some warmer air aloft and I had some concerns of visibility due to the recent snow fall to our north (colder ground temperatures). The issue was that the Blair airport had no published instrument approaches. We decided to proceed with the flight as visibility was good (10+ miles), there were no icing concerns, and if we could not get VFR into Blaire, we’d go to Omaha International as our alternate. We’d also watch the XM Weather close on the flight up to see if the weather closed in on us en-route.

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