Originally Posted by
LTNman
From memory, in those days RVR's were calculated by an airport firemen sitting in a little raised hut that sat on legs who would count runway edge lighting.
It must have been a cold lonely night sitting in that little hut while surrounded by a thick fog.
Correct. The firemen seemed to hate it as much as we did and it wasn't unusual to have to constantly ask them 'how many lights' because we thought we could discern a change in visibility but nothing had been heard from them. Quite frequently it was due to the failure of the very unreliable handset radios. The number of lights counted was checked against the official RVR table and noted on a proforma. Allegedly, someone checked the data against the Daily movement register and weather obs log to see if minima had been busted. Quite how well that worked I can only guess!