Last week we did an early morning flight from Geneva to Zürich. It was CAVOK in Geneva, but somewhat foggy in Zürich. Fortunately our passengers were a bit late, otherwise we might not have been able to get into LSZH.
This was the general weather situation:
On approach to runway 14 with a heavy type 5 miles ahead. In the middle of the picture, his wakes can be seen, clearing a path through the fog:
When we arrived over the lights, the “tunnel” he made for us was half closed already. A minute later and it might have been a go-around:
Quite nice and good visualization of the wakes
Wonderful photos, thanks!
Although one is concentrating hard at the time, there is something utterly magical about approaches through the fog.
That is an excellent photo sequence.
Brilliant 
I never thought a plane could clear a hole in fog like that. But presumably the fog wasn’t down to the surface, was it? It was perhaps something like OVC001 and a layer 300ft thick?
The topmost pic is just awesome…
If this was the USA, we would now have a debate as to whether this meets FAR 91.12345.345 para 3(a) (c) as regards the definition of the “runway environment” 
There’s a story in “Fate is the hunter” with cargo planes stacked over a fog layer coming back from China over “The Hump” during WWII. Their method was to do low approaches one after the other until they’d cleared it.
Apparently nobody here remembers the days around 1970 when Paris Orly had a “Turboclair” system to dispers fog over the runway. By means of hot air from jet engines under the runway the air was heated by approx. 2° C and a rather good visibility tunnel was created over the runway permitting handflown landings …
I landed there 2 or 3 times under “Turboclair” conditions – a little thermal turbulence included but nothing to worry about … maybe it was too costly regarding fuel and maintenance. I also remember that Almaty airport (Kasakhstan) had two lorries with jet engines mounted that were used for runway de-icing and fog dispersal.
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0711605
I recall seeing these jet engines on their swivel mounts at CDG ages ago. Never seen them in action, though.
nobbi wrote:
I also remember that Almaty airport (Kasakhstan) had two lorries with jet engines mounted that were used for runway de-icing and fog dispersal.
My homebase (EDDS) still uses these for de-icing the aprons!
Peter wrote:
I never thought a plane could clear a hole in fog like that. But presumably the fog wasn’t down to the surface, was it? It was perhaps something like OVC001 and a layer 300ft thick?
Yes, something like that.
