Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Got The Date Wrong Re Leuthold's Flight

Mike's rough flight Minneapolis was on Friday afternoon and I had posted wrong radar images - I've corrected in earlier post and show image at approximately 00 UTC on the 26th of June. The radar shows four or five large supercells surrounding the Minneapolis airport. I just can't imagine that a pilot would be trying to make a landing in the midst of such severe thunderstorms! If the pilot were trying to make his decisions based on an aircraft 5-cm wavelength radar, then there could have been serious interpretation problems, since storms like these badly attenuate a 5-cm radar. There are a number of documented incidents that involved bad interpretation of on-board radar data. However, I would have thought that AIRINC would now provide live WSR-88D data to aircraft cockpits. Thus, this situation is a bit strange - regardless, it is the pilot who has final say re what's he/shes' going to try to do in such a situation, assuming the airport had not been closed for operations.

No comments:

Post a Comment