Flight around Cyclones/Hurricones
You should try to avoid these beasts at all costs because global warming is making them meaner and stronger year after year; however, if it so happens that you have to get around one of these, let me tell you what I have experienced. There should not be such a thing as an airline dispatcher sending you purposely into a cyclone or typhoon, BUT if the airport conditions are "operational" regarding visibility and crosswinds, you may get sent into harm's way never the less. As captains, we are risk managers and are constantly assesing how much to take and manage it wisely so to make the final decision of when it is not safe to continue. Well, when you fly into airports affected by these monster weather machines that risk is changing so fast and so often that what seemed safe a few seconds ago, suddenly becomes deathly the next instant you are reassesing your situation [A true russian roulette] . Your airspeed will be all over the place on your speed tape (On EFIS equipped aircraft) and your best energy indication will be your groundspeed readout coupled with your attitude and power settings. The autopilot and autothrust will not be able to compensate quickly enough so be ready to fly the approach manually as early as possible. When you fly around one of these things, you usually will have the outer edges pretty well defined and beside the increase in tailwind around the SE and NE quadrant you will not find too much to complaint about. The edge (Which by the way, is not defined at all) between the Northeastern and Nortwestern quadrant are were you will start getting whacked around violently and most of this Northwestern quadrant will have some pretty severe turbulence, so bad in fact, that you will not feel safe enough to extend your flaps for an approach. In our case, we diverted to our alternate airport and waited a couple of hours till the cyclone moved north a bit. On my second attempt I landed in what could still be called the south eastern quadrant and had the most extreme rainfall I had ever experienced, just like flying into a fireman's hose but the turbulence had decreased to a more moderate level. The wind on a 20 NM final went from a 65 knot tailwind to a 15 knot left crosswind at 50 feet over the treshold. The precip was so intense the localizer signal grounded out (The aircraft was a B-737NG, a phenomenon(EFIS LOC display loss) that also occured to me in a B-737-300 in a blizzard some years ago) on short final, fortunately we had the approach lights insight and could continue visually to complete the power on landing. You may be asking yourself why continue the approach under those conditions? Well there is not an easy reason but you have to look at the whole situation, the areas we had alraedy flown through, the few aircraft that also had landed ahead of us and just the prospect of the go around was even worse given the conditions over the missed approach path.
So there you have it, experience from making a questionable decison in the first place. What seems operational on the dispatcher's desk may seem totally different from that left forward seat. My advice again AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!