Orestes wrote
The alleged NTSB e-mail mentions a sudden "drop" in air temperature - meaning it suddenly got colder? That seems counterintuitive - I had thought the more likely danger was the sudden increase in air temperature associated with these weather systems. I'm confused....
Conventional wisdom has it that you can't pick up heavy icing in the upper flight levels. Practical experience would suggest you can. If the NW incident reported by the NTSB is factually accurate they lost static as well, which I find hard to fathom. Does that mean they lost rudder limiting as well as the indicated speeds rolled back?
I had this recently from a mate of mine flying BBJs but with a lot of tropical heavy experience. He wrote;
Came back from SIN the other day and had ISA +28 at FL 360 going through some weather system. It must have been the beginning of a cyclone.We were 2000ft below Max Alt before we entered.Once in cloud Max alt came down to FL 360.Never seen a temp like that before.
High temps. Low temps. Ice where it shouldn't be. Rain at FL390! Someone remarked at the start of the first thread about Al Gore claiming responsibility under the guise of climate change. I grinned, but maybe there's something to it. We know a lot more now about windshear and microbursts and we're learning more about SCD. Maybe, like these phenomena, icing, rain and rapidly varying temps in the upper Flight Levels have always been there and we just didn't (collectively) know it.
Rgds.
24V