Originally Posted by
vlsrotate
Now the scary bit... You're flying ETOPS over the Ocean on a particularly cloudy and moonless night and your one weather radar fails. By the weather report at dispatch, it's supposed to be a right mess with build ups all over the place that you now cannot see. Nearest airport is hundreds of miles away. What would you do?
Speaking as self loading freight, I wouldn't mind if the pilot popped out of the cockpit, told the passengers that it was going to be rough and possibly perilous, and conducted a poll on whether they would prefer a pleasure flight round the local scenery instead. To be honest I think I'd opt for the sight seeing! If that means a diversion to somewhere sunny and tropical so much the better!
Is it possible to get basic weather data via ground support?
From a purely technical point of view it would be possible to feed a whole lot of real time meteorological data to an aircraft. It would be gathered from satellites, ground stations, etc. Most of the earth's surface is continually monitored these days especially the oceans. I guess running a weather radar on the plane is a lot cheaper and simpler, but with some development effort a data feed could be made into a viable backup.