Monday, November 22, 2010

Sit tight and wait…

One can definitely tell that autumn has come and winter is not very far away…

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On my last flight to Bucharest the weather really gave us a hard time, we had known since departure that they were forecasting some fog for the morning, basically about the time of our arrival. So we were pretty well prepared for a low visibility approach and a possible diversion to our alternate airport.

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The bad thing was that instead of increasing the weather conditions especially the visibility were getting worse by every report we got. So when approach gave the final vectors and RVRs (technically measured visibility on the runway) we knew that we were not able to continue for a landing. So we abandoned the approach and as agreed earlier told ATC that we are diverting. So this had us heading about an hour across Romania to alternate of Timisoara. Not a big deal and we were even treated with a nice scenic tour of Transylvania and the Carpathians. But the problem was that we had started flying out of Cologne many ours ago and we would not be able to wait very long in Timisoara for the weather to clear or we would be out of crew duty time…

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After landing we did a quick check and came up with a maximum wait of approx. 3 hours. After refueling we checked the latest report from Bucharest again and discovered that it was even worse now, so it was a good choice not to sit in a holding pattern overhead Bucharest and wait. Because now we would have to wait as well, but we could go for some fresh coffee and a toilet here in Timisoara while waiting ;)

As report after report comes in the situation is not changing at all the visibility still hovering around 200m, we need at least 300 to come in for an approach…

So after waiting for close to 3 h we don`t have high hopes for the last report out of Bucharest before we have to call it a day and head for a hotel . But surprisingly the weather decided to give us a chance suddenly the fog seems to be way less dense with about 800-1000m visibility we`re good to go and head out literary speaking on the last minute.

In Bucharest they still have low ceiling and the fog is going back and forth over the field, but reports are now good enough to continue the approach. Descending into the dense layer atmosphere on the flight deck becomes very quiet and concentrated as we descend further and further along the glide path and finally get ground contact at around a 150` an uneventful landing follows and we just have to find our way to the parking spot and then we`re off to the Hotel.

It has been a long day (or night)!

And the fog didn`t go away for the next 1 1/2 days so when we got back to to the airport it was still looking like this:

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