Well said seahawks - it's a bit different when you are out there instead of sitting in an armchair in a warm home, supposing you know what is going on. Been there, done that. Nothing like a warm cuppa and a bacon sarny whilst clearing snow - the refreshments used to come to you rather than going back to base.
Can someone in the know explain why the very expensive concrete strip in Cheshire has not been used today, at a time when I thought having a second snow free runway would pay dividends. In my simple logic why not keep sweeping all day alternating the runways ?
They are only allowed to use certain runways at certain times with certain departure patterns
MUFC - The latter comment is rubbish. 23L/05R can be used in extremis when it is supposed to be closed (subject to an inspection first) when emergencies happen, as in fact it did last week when the BE Dash 8 did a pax evacuation on 05L
At present 23L-05R is not scheduled to be used on Sunday am as the traffic doesn't warrant it. Therefore the priority would have been to keep the one runway open with the resources they had on overnight. After the Saturday pm snowfall, the temperatures dropped rapidly to reach a low of -7 at 0300. But working all night, the airfield was open first thing this morning. Perhaps the intention was to get onto 05R/ 23L then?
However, ManofMan is quite correct. There were then a succession of showers dumping a few cm at a time with clear patches of 20 minutes or so in between. As seahawks says a blacktop surface can go white again in 7-8 minutes, so just as you have cleared it you are back to square one and have to close again as soon as the contamination gets too great. There is about 10 cm of snow lying so hardly a flury (sic) Mouser.
Here are the METARS
EGCC 201750Z 21010KT 9999 FEW011 SCT027 01/00 Q0994=
EGCC 201720Z 23014KT 9999 BKN012 01/00 Q0994=
EGCC 201650Z 23014KT 220V280 9999 -SHSN BKN011 01/01 Q0994=
EGCC 201620Z 22012KT 9999 SHSN BKN008 01/01 Q0993 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201550Z 24010KT 4500 SHSN BKN009 01/01 Q0993 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201520Z 22011KT 4500 -SHSN BKN010 01/01 Q0993 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201450Z 23008KT 4500 -SHSN FEW007 BKN017 01/01 Q0993 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201420Z 23008KT 5000 TSSN FEW002 BKN011 00/00 Q0993 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201350Z 24014KT 3000 TSSN FEW003 BKN011 00/00 Q0994 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201320Z 21011KT 4000 -SHSN FEW003 SCT021 01/00 Q0993=
EGCC 201250Z 21010KT 0900 R23R/0750 SHSN FEW003 BKN006 00/00 Q0994=
EGCC 201220Z 23014KT 1100 R23R/1100 SHSN SCT008 BKN011 00/00 Q0994=
EGCC 201150Z 22013KT 190V260 3900 -SHSN FEW006 SCT011 00/00 Q0995 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201120Z 19006KT 0800 R23R/P1500 SHSN FEW002 BKN012 M00/M00 Q0995 SNOCLO=
EGCC 201050Z 21008KT 0800 R23R/0750 SHSN FEW002 BKN013 M01/M01 Q0996=
EGCC 200950Z 17005KT 9999 4600E VCSH FEW018 SCT030 M03/M03 Q0997 RESN=
EGCC 200920Z 16006KT 9999 4000NW -SHSN FEW030 M03/M04 Q0997=
EGCC 200850Z 17006KT 9000 FEW011 SCT018 M03/M04 Q0997=
EGCC 200820Z 16006KT 9999 FEW011 SCT033 M04/M05 Q0998=
EGCC 200750Z 15004KT 9999 FEW011 SCT018 M04/M05 Q0998 SNOCLO=
EGCC 200720Z 15005KT 2000 -SN FEW005 BKN021 M04/M05 Q0998=
EGCC 200650Z 20005KT 170V230 9000 -SN FEW005 SCT036 M05/M07 Q0999=
Could someone in the know tell me what the current rules are re runways and snow clearing in the UK or point me in the right direction? Several UK carriers were saying their ops manuals would let them depart with some contamination on the runway so why not at MAN? Never heard what the answer was.
As Sir George has pointed out, there seemed to be disconnets in information flow - do the Airport have some sort of emergency centre for use by personnel from all the relevant agencies to coordinate actions in this type of situation? I'm sure they must have, so how about some Collaborative Decision Making? ZRH has a tremendous centre which is used on a normal basis to coordinate operations and which is a boon when exceptional situations develop and I believe MUC does something similar to minimise delays and make best use of capacity and slots.
As seahawks noted once the runway is sorted there are then taxiways and stands to clear and that's where I believe it all started going wrong. Outbounds were stuck on cleared stands as the airfield was SNOCLO and not enough vacant safe stands led to the delays mentioned earlier as the snow teams had to keep going back to the runway. Maybe there were not enough resources available, but you have to balance the pieces of snow kit available with the number of times the kit is going to be used. Any business decison contains risk and maybe the chance of this sort of thing happening once a year was a risk the Airport chose to take?
The Virgin 747 was waiting for nearly 4 hours for a stand whilst the KLM waited until 1300 for some steps and buses by which time his bogs were full. I heard a story that the Cpt threatened to pop the chutes if the buses didnt arrive shortly.
but again tries to hide this with a arrivals/departures web page that is under maitenece on a Sunday morning.
Not sure it was under maintenance as it is still on the emergency page at this time of night. Maybe it crashed due to the volume of traffic on the website, especially with SKY saying all flights were cancelled. However, exceptional situations are the time you need accurate info most!
But true to form, Mr Mouser suspects a conspiricy..... Why on earth would the airport try to hide it? I'm sure there were enough p*ssed off pax on their mobiles as it was happening.
Anyway, as Norman Lamont said, "it has been a very difficult day" and at least the operation did keep going just about. Hopefully the post mortem will reveal plenty of areas for improvement by all agencies rather than a finger pointing exercise. But I wonder......Oops, sorry mickeyman must be positive -it WILL be a constructive exercise in making sure that lessons are learned and it won't happen again.
This old git's off to bed now
Suzeman