Forecasting in our youth
Quote from PKPF68-77:
Pretty awesome forecasting if you know what the skills were like over 30 years ago.
[Unquote]
How true. In his day, the mid and upper-air forecasting (on which all this hinges?) was fairly hit and miss. Was once crossing Holland en-route to to Germany in a Dakota (1968), and none of our planned drifts or ETAs were making much sense at FL070. The forecat W/V in the area was about 260/30. So we used the optical drift sight to confirm the actual drift (starb'd); and stopwatch for ground-speed (TAS was 140). On that basis, we estimated the actual wind was about 310/45.
As for the (westerly) sub-tropical jet, SNAKING over North Africa in winter, the direction in the 1970s was fequently 30 or 40 degrees out. This made an enormous difference to your drift and/or GS when it was blowing at 150 kts... And the strength was equally unreliable in those days.
This may have been contributory to the shooting down of a Libyan B727 by the Israelis in about 1978. The A/C was going from Tripoli to Cairo, and completely overshot its destination, finding itself over Israeli-occupied Sinai, where the Israelis assumed it was hostile.
By the 1990s, the computer-forecast en-route winds had become uncannily accurate...
Last edited by Chris Scott; 14th Mar 2008 at 12:58.
Reason: For PKPF68-77 and others: YES! We must REMEMBER ALWAYS to create our posts in a word-processor...