The 5nm rule is generally a fairly well defined safety margin. But as most would know, weather doesn't necessarily play by the rule book. I personally had a colleague in the late 80's who was headsetting an aircraft. Lightning hit the tail and discharged through his headset, he never worked again, and he permanently lost all his sense of smell, taste and body temperature, by which I mean his body does not feel the elements of hot nor cold. He gets sunburnt in summer but doesn't sweat or feel the heat, he gets sick in winter and always wears a jumper to protect his chest yet he doesn't actually feel the cold. He is a permanent emotional wreck almost 3 decades later. His ears permanently ring, he has weird ass alergic reactions to seafood (only started after he was struck, and some specialists think it has something to do with metals in the fish). When I visited him in hospital after the accidnet, and for weeks later, he looked like a fish as every bare part of his body that had either rain drops or sweat drops on it when he got struck caused a burn where the droplet of water became charged/heated, hence the scale like appearance.
Later I studied meteorology and also learned that when we make the call to evacuate the ramp it is because the storm cell is within 5nm, the cell. However an electrical storms preceding anvil can be 20 miles ahead of the cell, and the anvil can actually produce a lightning strike also. Radar screens that we monitor on the BOM are roughly 10 minutes out of sync, in other words what we are viewing is around 10 mins old. If a storm is fast moving like you often get in Brisbane and it is moving at 60km p/h then you may be in more danger than you realize.
I once argued with SYD Ops Center who make the call when to evacuate the ramp. Their radar screen was showing a storm 9nm away from BNE airport yet I personally watched a bolt strike a hangar. I pulled the guys of the ramp and had to offer up a 'please explain' the next day as to why I 'unnecessarily shut the ramp without SYD Ops permission' adding around 15 mins worth of supposedly unnecessary delays in BNE. I told management to get fu#ked and yet I still managed to keep my job. An unlikely scenario in today's narcissistic environment. Screw OTP, lives come first.
People like GT are absolutely unintelligent, uninformed wastes of space. He is not Mr aviation, knows little about 'real' aviation and should should be sent out on ramp during an electrical storm with Joyce to marshall in aircraft using copper wands !
Airports are notorious for lightning strikes - Flat ground, tall lights, towers, buildings and aircraft tails, lots of metallic surfaces (saw a bolt hit a baggage barrow that was parked INSIDE the baggage room at BNE while all the rampies were huddling under cover supposedly safe, the bolt then deflected into an electrical conduit running along the bag room ceiling frying the baggage belts, lights, pretty much everything, resulting in 1 week without power, everything handled manually and a damage bill of over 100k).
The point of my mumblings? There is a damn good reason why the Tarmac is evacuated during a storm. If it is a slow moving cell/line of cells then the delay is even longer. Combine that with the other well articulated delay explanations here explaining the other compounding factors which caused an even more protracted delay and you get to see some pretty accurate facts. Naturally the media, narcisstic managers and ignorant arrogant self centered passengers will not either understand this nor care for the true facts. To them I raise a firmly elevated middle finger salute.
