a tarheel adventure

[arisrabkin]

I've been in Raleigh, NC, for the last few days, visiting the Cloudera office here. I am currently waiting at RDU airport; my flight was weather delayed and thought I would spend a few minutes and tell all y'all folks out there what I've been up to

Comments

[madrobin]

I'll leave the political commentary re: the south for later and just focus on the easy one: weather and airplanes.

First, it depends on the type of weather. Convective activity (thunderstorms) can cause at least two different problems: lightening and microbursts. Those potential dangers can lead to ground stops.

And while instrument landings are old tech, instrument flight rules require certain minimum aircraft separation, typically greater than that required under visual flight rules. For airports where the parallel runaways are close together, like both Logan and SFO, operating with instrument approaches can effectively limit the airport to single-runway operation. For an example, see: http://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/profiles/media/BOS-Airport-Capacity-Profile-2014.pdf

And even during an instrument landing, the pilot is required to be able to see the runway before touching down - there's a specified height above the ground where, if you can't see the runaway, you're supposed to abort the landing. I've been on at least one commercial flight where that happened.

[arisrabkin]

Thank you for that explanation. But it still leaves me wondering why we have these minimum separation and visual-contact-with-runway rules. Don't we have really good radars and altimeters these days?