To clarify: ops meant t/o and landing.
What you are talking about is ground ops which are stopped because of lightning risk to baggage loaders. Not relevant to the point I was making, which is:
The US has better awareness of microburst dangers than we do in Europe.
Snoopy wrote:
To clarify: ops meant t/o and landing.
Snoopy used the term groundstop. That is the equivalent of a Eurocontrol slot in Europe ie they keep aircraft on the ground and don’t allow aircraft to depart the relevant airport or take off towards it.
We also had a +FC this automn in LFMN. Very nice to watch but actually LFMN did close for some time.
I can’t imagine the WS around…
Snoopy wrote:
The US has better awareness of microburst dangers than we do in Europe.
That’a probably because like tornadoes, microburst is a real phenomenon there. Not much of this in Europe, we have a different weather system.
I don’t know if Europe airports use doppler radar to forecast microbursts.
This is the llast one I can remember – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLM_CityHopper_Flight_431
That’a probably because like tornadoes, microburst is a real phenomenon there. Not much of this in Europe, we have a different weather system.
That’s what’s in the heads here but it is changing and getting more severe.
“The US has better awareness of microburst dangers than we do in Europe.”
Last Thursday I was inbound VFR from Exuma (MYEF) to Ft Lauderdale (KFXE) when a nasty series of weather patches hit the east coast of Florida, all the way from Palm Beach to Miami, it was impressive to see the level of awareness and flexibility from ATC and various pilots regarding that localized weather, ATC had weather radar and most pilots use in-flight weather radar or data links, flying VFR there was challenging (I was not the only one) but carrying 2h expensive fuel reserve did pay well after all, also very convinient to have other traffic and in-flight weather overlayed on tablet
Only caveat 10min wait untill it clears was actually 60min as destination airport changed it’s state from VFR/IFR/Closed/IFR/VFR two times, I tried two unsuccessul VFR approaches before going for emergency IFR and fitting with the traffic flow, on my slot I had a bumpy long downwind but I got sunshine and rainbow on my final to tarmac 
I now understand why distance from clouds in class D makes lot of sense: very useful when you are given details for a B737 traffic running from convective weather and you are asked to make your own separation from him
Thanks for the writeup! Where did you charter (if) the plane? Thanks.
VFR bimbling Bahamas/Florida, I was supposed to fly from Exuma to Tampa with a quick stop at Fort Lauderdale Exec (had to clear US customs on east coast and hand back some survival gear we loaned there) but we end up spending the night in La Quinta hotel watching lightnings
