Clack100
 

Son,

Most of us thought you had a genuine question. As rediculous as your question is, most of us are providing common sense answers (you should know most of this allready). Your FCOM is setting you up to fail, a little airmanship may save your life or career one day.

If you can't figure it out on your own and dismiss good advice as non relevant, what are you here for?

You can rest assured I am not your son - I'd be too old for that ;)

My hope was to simply gain an idea of how operators word their FCOM's so I can incorporate examples of industry practices in a submission to management - our wording is vague and we seem to have a reasonable number of TS encounters, especially lightning strikes. "Avoid by 10-20nm" is better than simply "avoid".

My thanks to those who assisted!

Hi Clack100

Some other carriers have avoid by 10 miles below 10,000 and by 20 miles above 20,000. Still others have for every 10 knots of wind you must clear the tops by 1000'

A good piece of information by airbus can be found here.

http://www.airbus.com/fileadmin/medi...V_WX-SEQ07.pdf

My experience is to know the environment and weather attributes for the region I operate in. Even then to be cautious. Lots of advice out there but the best is

There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime. (Sign over squadron operations desk at Davis-Monthan AFB)

Thanks for the link BoyFly.

Love the quote BTW!!

Clack, FCOM update - a worthy and necessary effort for all operators. I hope that you would agree that BoyFly’s “avoid by 10 miles below 10,000 and by 20 miles above 20,000” is an improvement on your "avoid by 10-20nm". I would add ‘a minimum of 10 / 20 nm …’ for further error mitigation;
- simplicity, but not at the expense of ambiguity.

‘There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime’, I add ... nor wartime. From my experience of an ‘intentional’ flight through a Cb, my co-captain related the risk (fear) to that of being shot at in a helicopter at low level in Nam – and he had been shot at – so he had two experiences to my one.
My conclusion was that it was an experience never, ever, to be repeated.

Let's also not forget that it does not need to be a 'thunderstorm' to warrant avoidance?

Quote from Denti:
Our company manual requires at least 10 NM from any echo associated with thunderstorm activity (even green) at FL200, at least 15 NM at FL250 and at least 20 NM at FL300 or higher.

Guess your company doesn't operate schedules that involve crossing the ITCZ? And doesn't plan on crews crossing any cold fonts in, for example, the US?

Strikes me (pun not intended) as being the kind of advice that covers the management at the board of inquiry. On the other hand, in case you ever have to comply with it by doing a "one-eighty", it might be prudent to have a camera with you. (My comments are not aimed at you personally, by the way: I'm well out of the game now.)