Originally Posted by Alycidon
While it may be true that you and your company don't do much winter stuff, remember that some UK and Irish companies operate scheduled services to all sorts of cold and snowy places and have a great deal of experience with contaminated runways and winter ops.
Yeah, completely agree. I think my comment was a bit too 'UK General'.
Originally Posted by kick the tires
Riding in a car on a runway and saying, yeh thats ok, is not an exact science!
Couldn't agree more, hence my asking for a BA reading when given info from this source and perhaps the captain in question was using this info to compliment other info he had?
I must admit I cannot quite see the value in it though, because if the airport are saying BA is POOR, hence nobody going anywhere and you go out in the car and make your own judgement that it's not that bad, I can't see how you could justify going anyhow. The lawyers would have a field day in the event of an incident. I personally think I would only use a personal observation to get Airfield Ops to carry out a further test if I felt it had improved since their last report (presumably of conditions which meant T/Os were not occuring), or more likely to downgrade an airfield report where I felt the conditions appeared to be worse than ATC were passing.
Anyhow, does anyone have the SA Wx at the time in question, especially ATC passed BA reports?
PP