PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - When the SOPs don’t work WRT min drag/WAT/ram recovery factor.
Old 19th Aug 2015, 06:47
  #10 (permalink)  
blind pew
 
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: by the seaside
Age: 74
Posts: 581
Received 23 Likes on 16 Posts
The weather

Could be great, often cr@p and sometimes bloody dangerous.

We had the Foehn wind - incredible visibility, awful turbulence and a doubling of suicide attempts.

Summer some great photo opportunities - of magnificent lightning displays from alpine line squalls which could and did stretch from Zurich to our second hub of Geneva...cabin crew ordered NO INFLIGHT SERVICE - which they didn't like...our seat harnesses locked and NO COFFEE - the sacrifices we made for the company.
My first few goes and waiting for a hole to appear on the radar to take off through as well as being blitzed scared me but after a while you get used to it. The bonus was not getting multiple lightning strikes.

Kloten Airport- the cabin crew were not allowed to announce Kloten on Dutch and Belgian flights as it's a naughty word - I, of course, didn't know that as I is an ignorant Brit - is in a bowl so we suffered from the effects of Katabatic flow running off the hills which gave us unpredictable (as far as the Swiss met office was concerned) fog.
The worse bit is the pool of cold air could persist for weeks - grey and very cold.

The sudden Cat 3 conditions as the sun rose which caused enough thermal mixing to change the forecast heavy dew into fog - there's an old joke there somewhere.

When a front passed we occasionally got ice rain - supercooled water drops that instantly coated everything and the only way to get rid of it was a chisel or masses of hot water. one couldn't even walk let alone drive on it so it closed our operations down although my old mates could fly in as they had different min Braking actions.

It was this pooling effect with the weather passing over that nearly nailed us.
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