Confused…
1. Why do they call these relatively benign conditions “CAT2”?
2. I was led to believe that CAT2 approval was practically impossible to archieve in a small GA aircraft. No?
Looks CAT I to me. Didn’t have the sound on though…
There was an ATIS recording saying “poor visibility, procedure category II in operation”, but also that touchdown zone visibility was 1100 m, RVR 1300 m and cloudbase 250 ft.
It’s possible that visibility was fluctuating or that it had been improving from cat II conditions but that low visibility procedures were still being applied.
That’s what CAT II looks like:
OK, I checked that ATIS recording. Low Visibility Procedures were in progress but the conditions and the approach by this pilot were CAT I.
Clearly CAT I. His autopilot wasn’t doing a great job of localiser tracking. Real CAT II is much nastier.
If you read the EU OPS LVO requirements, you’ll realise the single pilot CAT II/III chances are negligible to zero.
That’s CAT 1. Maybe the weather conditions had changed in the meantime. Or the met-office gave a 100ft ceiling and some pilot requested a CAT II approach and the airport kept the Low Vis Procedures in force. Which is not really necessary if the reported visibility is more than 1100m because flight testing showed that you will have the runway in sight at 200ft = CAT 1 minimum. Years ago that was a problem in Frankfurt because running CAT II ops meant single runway operation for landing and building up massive arrival delays due to the required increased longitudinal spacing. So the pilots of the main customer airline were asked not to request CAT II ops with reported 100ft ceiling but +1100m visibility.
All true, but the ATIS is still a bit of a mystery. Can’t really be a case of a recent weather change, because the met report (“RVR 1100m…., overcast 250 ft”) and the indication “CAT2 operations” are both on the same recording.
The airport gets manually switched to CAT II and back to CAT I. The effect is that the holding positions change to provide greater clearance to the ILS for less danger of influencing the signal. The weather was probably CAT II before and they haven’t switched back. I have landed during CAT II operations once but the weather was good CAT I.
