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Old 17th Jul 2009, 22:53
  #437 (permalink)  
frigatebird
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: South Pacific
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Sure -in the Tropics you don't get moving frontal systems with their nasties, but you get an east-west ITF or convergence zone where the cyclones form. You don't get fog, or only at the lower ports. You do get big afternoon thunderstorms, but you can dodge them providing they are not sitting on the place you want to land. The heavy rain doesn't last long, but if you have come a long way on a 'Pacific Thin Route', you don't want to muck around because the fuel will be getting down. Bad ones can be at night, when you don't want to go to remote places because of unreliable lighting or navaids anyway.
Three things in nature make me feel small.
Stand on the lip of a volcano, say Tanna in Vanuatu, watch the cinders fly and listen to it rumble and hope that that it is all it is going to do, because there is not a damn thing you can do to stop it.
Be on the ground in an earthquake, (with or without subsequent tsunami), preferably outdoors so thing don't fall on you, and know the same feeling.
Bunker down for a few days while the eye of a cyclone goes slowly past, stripping all the leaves from all the trees, blowing away leaf houses -(and the materials to make new ones )- destroying gardens, torrential rain falling in sheets, wind howling and gusting and swinging. And hope the aircraft tied down on the other side of town has survived, because you know you will be needed for relief clean up work later. And if you are trying to do a service to a port that is coming under the influence of a cyclone, knowing when to call it off as the crosswind on the runway gets too high, and even with the wipers belting, the lead-in lights, or runway lights, are hard to make out.
Sure its easy in the central Pacific, we don't have the snow.
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