Poster: A snowHead
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I believe the airport, plane and pilot all need to be cleared for landing in fog
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^ This. Pilots have to be trained and in current practice at landing in fog. The aircraft has to have full autoland capability - different aircraft have different limits. Different airports have different weather minima too, depending on the extent of their facilities (eg their Instrument Landing System and their lighting.) It's all very complicated, but the bigger airports tend to spend more on their facilities, and therefore extreme weather conditions are less likely to close the airport. Even at Heathrow, fog slows things down a lot, with knock on effects often occurring later in the day even after the fog has lifted. While the visibility is poor, an airport will enforce Low Visibility Procedures (LVPs) and this means any taxying aircraft must stay much further away from the runway until it is time to line up and take off, in order to protect the effectiveness of equipment on the ground. (Many of these pieces of equipment work by transmitting signals that are received by the aircraft, and they can be disrupted if, for example, a ground truck drives in front of it.) Also aircraft taxy much slower when the pilots can only see a few yards ahead! Once you are away from the ground, things revert to normal speed, but fog really slows everything on the ground down.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Heathrow does get snarled up in fog - I am told it is the ground systems that stop everything (as mentioned above - distances on taxiways - not the actual taking off and landing - got caught twice on my swiss trip earlier this year with 2+ hour delays both ways.
Also object lesson check the flights before you check-in - there was space on an earlier flight but could not get on to it as already had booked my kit on to the flight I was scheduled to depart on and they could not retrieve it!
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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RibenaRockstar, Nielson run a pretty big operation out of Salzburg (or at least used to a couple of years back), so you're right, they probably had some reps hanging around waiting for other flights. That doesn't stop them all running off to hide from the angry passengers who aren't anything to do with them though!
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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sugarmoma666,
Sounds sensible
Innsbruck arrival last year was awesome, beautiful clear skies and as you say, could almost see people on the slopes
Hopefully the same in 2 weeks time
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Couple of weeks back, flew into Heathrow in heavy fog, totally on instruments apparently, visibility was down at 100m
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Heathrow isn't surrounded by high mountains! If I remember the localizer (horizontal part of the ILS) can't even be aligned with the runway because of the terrain so you have to do a 5 degree turn on getting visual to the runway. So you need to get below the cloud/fog before you can land.
At least you were able to get off the plane at Salzburg, once after being diverted from Chambery (suffers similarly from weather) to Lyon we were kept on the plane for 8 hours....
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