*Rewatch* *09L Arrivals* - some from this session: 20:00 Qantas 🦘 QF1 A388 from Singapore - named David Warren 1:36:29 Virgin Atlantic VS166 B789 from Montego Bay - named Amazing Grace 1:39:22 Qatar Cargo QR8225 B77L from Doha 2:36:22 British Airways BA1477 A319 from Glasgow - BEA Retro Livery 5:55:55 Qatar Cargo QR8253 B77L from Doha 5:59:52 British Airways BA693 A319 from Vienna [G-EUPW] 6:55:57 British Airways BA435 A319 from Amsterdam - BEA Retro Livery 7:12:46 Singapore Airlines SQ308 A388 from Singapore 7:14:41 British Airways BA274 A35K from Las Vegas 7:43:19 Korean Airlines KE907 B77W from Seoul 7:53:34 British Airways BA641 A20N from Athens - BA Better World Livery *the Slayer* 7:56:12 British Airways BA268 A388 from Los Angeles 7:57:56 All Nippon Airways NH211 B77W from Tokyo - Pokémon Livery 8:07:05 Malaysia Airlines MH4 A359 from Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia Negaraku Livery Cheers to the FF365 crew, mods and chatters
This video's title mentions 'Strong Winds', so I thought I'd vent a bit of hot air myself tonight. Er, about wind, I mean. In case any of our Merkin cousins were disappointed not to see Heathrow's hangars and Terminal buildings blown away by the kind of Category 5 tornadoes and hurricanes that put Kansas and Florida on the map. Well, Britain doesn't get that kind of 'wind event'. It does get around 30 'mini' tornadoes every year, but they're minuscule. Interesting to catalogue, but otherwise insignificant. Britain's tiny, soggy island status doesn't support the kind of stable conditions needed to grow monster tornadoes. We get plenty of wind, though, and while tornadoes do terrible damage, it's in a fairly narrow path. General winds affect larger areas; a hurricane or severe storm can span hundreds of miles. So, anyway, it's all about wind at LHR at the moment. As the Dazz Band said, 🎵 "Let it all blow". Yeah, baby. I like to hear it on the microphone. It's like birdwatching on the marshes, with just the rustling rushes for a soundtrack. With no human providing a commentary on FF365, the wind is this Channel's voice, and I love it. It gives a nice impression of conditions, even if the microphone is 4 storeys above the runway. I wonder if the peeps who doubt that a 'mere' 10 knots of wind represents any kind of a challenge to planes and pilots have ever measured wind speeds for themselves. A 10 knot wind is quite strong, actually. It's close to 14 mph. Still not impressed by 2-digit wind speeds? Hmm, well, he's a tricky chap, Johnny Wind. Oh, yes. Deceptive. Sneaky. Nostalgia break: One of my earliest obsessions was making and flying kites. Great hobby. My dad got me hooked when I was tiny (about 6) and I've made and flown them ever since. It's a misconception that all kites need a strong wind to fly; the merest puff is enough in most cases (3 to 5 mph), and anything strong enough to ruffle your hair or flap your trouser legs will make a kite difficult to control. Much more will override its stabilising features entirely and blow it to the ground. Rip, splat, crunch, waaaaah, boo-hoo, never mind, Elli, you can help me repair it... (Flashback trauma!😳) Strong winds ruin kite flying. But what IS a strong wind? I never knew when I was young. Oh, I remember sticking my head out of the car window [no seatbelt laws back then], waving my arms about and trying to breathe at 30 or 40 mph, but it all felt the same - just a roar of noise, watering eyes, and an angry bumblebee up one nostril. Standing out in a field, we didn't have any way of measuring windspeed back then (analogue meteorological equipment was expensive and not the kind of thing amateurs could get hold of); my dad would only say that it was easy to overestimate it. That didn't help. It just made me more curious. He'd ridden motorbikes, though, and knew what a mistake it was to lift your head above the windscreen at 60+mph if you didn't have goggles on or a visor on your helmet. Coming up to date, digital anemometers are cheap, accurate and easy to obtain. I bought two (online, from you-know-where in the East) about 15 years ago, when I started using kites for aerial photography. (I was also into flying RC model aircraft which are no less affected by wind than their full-sized counterparts.) The anemometers were different designs from different companies and cost less than £10.00 [ten quid] each; I wanted two so that I'd have two separate measurements and be able to check one meter against the other for accuracy and error. As it happened they agreed with each other to within one decimal place, so I felt reasonably confident that I was getting accurate and (more importantly) consistent readings. The biggest shock (and disappointment!) was to see exactly what a real 10 mph wind ACTUALLY felt like. Ten miles per hour, you say with a sneer? "Only TEN? That's NOTHING!!" But a 10 mph wind is far stronger than most people imagine. Before I got the meters, my guesstimates were way off. What I'd excitedly thought was "At least 30 mph!" turned out to be nearer 15 mph. A steady 20 mph wind, not just a momentary gust, is enough to make walking difficult. Beyond that, things get silly. Unless you're a particularly well-built person, a (steady) 40 mph wind will knock you off your feet; 50+ will blow your garden fence over, and 60+mph will bring down trees and parts of your house. So... most people overestimate wind speeds. It's easily done if you have no reference points. A wind that rocks you back on your heels or that sends your windsurfer ripping across the lake like a speedboat won't be the 50 mph beast that you imagined; it'll be 20, maybe 23 mph. Meh. The chances are that a lot of plane spotters have never felt a 40 mph wind, but after watching cyclones on the TV news that's probably their idea of what it ought to take to make landing a plane tricky. They're thinking in terms of 80+mph, but that's not fair, guys. 15 mph with occasional 30 mph gusts (in random wind-shear directions!) are a big enough challenge for pilots. 80+mph winds are cyclone, typhoon, hurricane-strength, and they're lethal. No messing about. 100 mph? 150 mph? They'll kill you. Thor's the boss, and he'll flatten your entire city. (Yes, I know a tornado can have faster winds - 200+mph - but they're circulating in a narrow funnel usually less than a mile across; a hurricane can be hundreds of miles wide.) So, when people talk about 'strong' winds at an airport, they probably mean 25 mph with occasional gusts of 50 mph and not anything much more - not least because all air traffic would be grounded and we'd have nothing to watch. Those speeds are assumed to be blowing straight down the runway, of course. If there's a crosswind component, you can halve those figures and things will still be tricky. The boring truth is, most day-to-day winds are around the 3 to 7 mph mark. Whee. What about last weekend, then? The modest 12 knot (14 mph) crosswinds that marked the passing of the last remnants of the tail end of 'Storm Darragh' at Heathrow were normal for the time of year. No biggie. Hey, it's England; it's winter; it's wet, it's windy. Move on. Although I feel I must protest at the Met Office's pathetic new directive which makes it necessary to give names to ordinary weather phenomena. Naming storms? Oh, come off it! Hurricanes deserve names. Ordinary winter storms don't. Grow up, UK Met Office peeps and stop pretending you're Merkin meteorologists! Sheesh. It's as bad as when they started giving 'wind chill factor' warnings on our weather forecasts to try to make things sound more dramatic. Rubbish! Stop it! It's as cold as it's always been, so dress up and shut up and forget about all this trendy wind-chill malarkey. Stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on! This is the UK, not Antarctica, Siberia or Canada! Out weather's extremely changeable, but rarely extreme. Thus: March gales, April showers, May flowers, Flaming June, Bloomin' lousy July, Awful August... And rain, drought, blizzards, mild spells, floods and storms for the other 5 months. It's colder if you're up in Scotland, wetter if you're in Ireland. That's it. The end. But it's little wonder that the invading Romans got fed up and went home 2,000 years ago. Back to Italy, where the sun doth shine. All right, weather rant over. I urge all aviation spotters and fans to get themselves an anemometer. The commonest model is black, the size of a Mars bar, and has a fan blade about 1" in diameter set into its top half. It takes one CR2032 battery and comes with a moulded bright yellow protective cover. I think they're still about £10. My other model is orange and marked 'Benetech GM8908'. It's very satisfying being able to say what the windspeed is without guessing. No more relying on broad-regional suggestions from the Met Office; you can get accurate local ground-level data NOW, in your own back garden. Or down on the beach, surf dudes. Or at the airport, my plane-spotting chums. My meters have a 'max recorded' feature, so I can fit them to a kite, fly it to a given height, and measure the wind at different altitudes. That's really interesting. The highest STEADY windspeed I've recorded at ground level is 58 mph. That was really scary. [I live in West Yorkshire in the north of England. That's pretty scary, too (joke).] Getting an idea of what the wind really feels like is a good step towards understanding why landing a plane in turbulent conditions can be difficult. Crosswinds and wind-shear don't have to be strong - 15 knots, for instance - they just have to be there to cause go-arounds and 'positive' landings.
*Rewatch*
*09L Arrivals* - some from this session:
20:00 Qantas 🦘 QF1 A388 from Singapore - named David Warren
1:36:29 Virgin Atlantic VS166 B789 from Montego Bay - named Amazing Grace
1:39:22 Qatar Cargo QR8225 B77L from Doha
2:36:22 British Airways BA1477 A319 from Glasgow - BEA Retro Livery
5:55:55 Qatar Cargo QR8253 B77L from Doha
5:59:52 British Airways BA693 A319 from Vienna [G-EUPW]
6:55:57 British Airways BA435 A319 from Amsterdam - BEA Retro Livery
7:12:46 Singapore Airlines SQ308 A388 from Singapore
7:14:41 British Airways BA274 A35K from Las Vegas
7:43:19 Korean Airlines KE907 B77W from Seoul
7:53:34 British Airways BA641 A20N from Athens - BA Better World Livery *the Slayer*
7:56:12 British Airways BA268 A388 from Los Angeles
7:57:56 All Nippon Airways NH211 B77W from Tokyo - Pokémon Livery
8:07:05 Malaysia Airlines MH4 A359 from Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia Negaraku Livery
Cheers to the FF365 crew, mods and chatters
I like that thumbnail of the Thai Airways Boeing 777 landing
This video's title mentions 'Strong Winds', so I thought I'd vent a bit of hot air myself tonight. Er, about wind, I mean. In case any of our Merkin cousins were disappointed not to see Heathrow's hangars and Terminal buildings blown away by the kind of Category 5 tornadoes and hurricanes that put Kansas and Florida on the map.
Well, Britain doesn't get that kind of 'wind event'. It does get around 30 'mini' tornadoes every year, but they're minuscule. Interesting to catalogue, but otherwise insignificant. Britain's tiny, soggy island status doesn't support the kind of stable conditions needed to grow monster tornadoes.
We get plenty of wind, though, and while tornadoes do terrible damage, it's in a fairly narrow path. General winds affect larger areas; a hurricane or severe storm can span hundreds of miles.
So, anyway, it's all about wind at LHR at the moment. As the Dazz Band said, 🎵 "Let it all blow". Yeah, baby. I like to hear it on the microphone. It's like birdwatching on the marshes, with just the rustling rushes for a soundtrack.
With no human providing a commentary on FF365, the wind is this Channel's voice, and I love it. It gives a nice impression of conditions, even if the microphone is 4 storeys above the runway.
I wonder if the peeps who doubt that a 'mere' 10 knots of wind represents any kind of a challenge to planes and pilots have ever measured wind speeds for themselves.
A 10 knot wind is quite strong, actually. It's close to 14 mph.
Still not impressed by 2-digit wind speeds? Hmm, well, he's a tricky chap, Johnny Wind. Oh, yes. Deceptive. Sneaky.
Nostalgia break: One of my earliest obsessions was making and flying kites. Great hobby. My dad got me hooked when I was tiny (about 6) and I've made and flown them ever since. It's a misconception that all kites need a strong wind to fly; the merest puff is enough in most cases (3 to 5 mph), and anything strong enough to ruffle your hair or flap your trouser legs will make a kite difficult to control. Much more will override its stabilising features entirely and blow it to the ground. Rip, splat, crunch, waaaaah, boo-hoo, never mind, Elli, you can help me repair it... (Flashback trauma!😳)
Strong winds ruin kite flying. But what IS a strong wind?
I never knew when I was young. Oh, I remember sticking my head out of the car window [no seatbelt laws back then], waving my arms about and trying to breathe at 30 or 40 mph, but it all felt the same - just a roar of noise, watering eyes, and an angry bumblebee up one nostril.
Standing out in a field, we didn't have any way of measuring windspeed back then (analogue meteorological equipment was expensive and not the kind of thing amateurs could get hold of); my dad would only say that it was easy to overestimate it. That didn't help. It just made me more curious.
He'd ridden motorbikes, though, and knew what a mistake it was to lift your head above the windscreen at 60+mph if you didn't have goggles on or a visor on your helmet.
Coming up to date, digital anemometers are cheap, accurate and easy to obtain. I bought two (online, from you-know-where in the East) about 15 years ago, when I started using kites for aerial photography. (I was also into flying RC model aircraft which are no less affected by wind than their full-sized counterparts.)
The anemometers were different designs from different companies and cost less than £10.00 [ten quid] each; I wanted two so that I'd have two separate measurements and be able to check one meter against the other for accuracy and error.
As it happened they agreed with each other to within one decimal place, so I felt reasonably confident that I was getting accurate and (more importantly) consistent readings.
The biggest shock (and disappointment!) was to see exactly what a real 10 mph wind ACTUALLY felt like.
Ten miles per hour, you say with a sneer? "Only TEN? That's NOTHING!!"
But a 10 mph wind is far stronger than most people imagine. Before I got the meters, my guesstimates were way off. What I'd excitedly thought was "At least 30 mph!" turned out to be nearer 15 mph.
A steady 20 mph wind, not just a momentary gust, is enough to make walking difficult. Beyond that, things get silly.
Unless you're a particularly well-built person, a (steady) 40 mph wind will knock you off your feet; 50+ will blow your garden fence over, and 60+mph will bring down trees and parts of your house.
So... most people overestimate wind speeds. It's easily done if you have no reference points. A wind that rocks you back on your heels or that sends your windsurfer ripping across the lake like a speedboat won't be the 50 mph beast that you imagined; it'll be 20, maybe 23 mph.
Meh.
The chances are that a lot of plane spotters have never felt a 40 mph wind, but after watching cyclones on the TV news that's probably their idea of what it ought to take to make landing a plane tricky. They're thinking in terms of 80+mph, but that's not fair, guys. 15 mph with occasional 30 mph gusts (in random wind-shear directions!) are a big enough challenge for pilots.
80+mph winds are cyclone, typhoon, hurricane-strength, and they're lethal. No messing about. 100 mph? 150 mph? They'll kill you. Thor's the boss, and he'll flatten your entire city.
(Yes, I know a tornado can have faster winds - 200+mph - but they're circulating in a narrow funnel usually less than a mile across; a hurricane can be hundreds of miles wide.)
So, when people talk about 'strong' winds at an airport, they probably mean 25 mph with occasional gusts of 50 mph and not anything much more - not least because all air traffic would be grounded and we'd have nothing to watch.
Those speeds are assumed to be blowing straight down the runway, of course. If there's a crosswind component, you can halve those figures and things will still be tricky.
The boring truth is, most day-to-day winds are around the 3 to 7 mph mark. Whee.
What about last weekend, then? The modest 12 knot (14 mph) crosswinds that marked the passing of the last remnants of the tail end of 'Storm Darragh' at Heathrow were normal for the time of year. No biggie. Hey, it's England; it's winter; it's wet, it's windy. Move on.
Although I feel I must protest at the Met Office's pathetic new directive which makes it necessary to give names to ordinary weather phenomena. Naming storms? Oh, come off it!
Hurricanes deserve names. Ordinary winter storms don't. Grow up, UK Met Office peeps and stop pretending you're Merkin meteorologists! Sheesh.
It's as bad as when they started giving 'wind chill factor' warnings on our weather forecasts to try to make things sound more dramatic. Rubbish! Stop it! It's as cold as it's always been, so dress up and shut up and forget about all this trendy wind-chill malarkey. Stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on! This is the UK, not Antarctica, Siberia or Canada!
Out weather's extremely changeable, but rarely extreme.
Thus: March gales, April showers, May flowers, Flaming June, Bloomin' lousy July, Awful August... And rain, drought, blizzards, mild spells, floods and storms for the other 5 months. It's colder if you're up in Scotland, wetter if you're in Ireland. That's it. The end.
But it's little wonder that the invading Romans got fed up and went home 2,000 years ago. Back to Italy, where the sun doth shine.
All right, weather rant over.
I urge all aviation spotters and fans to get themselves an anemometer. The commonest model is black, the size of a Mars bar, and has a fan blade about 1" in diameter set into its top half. It takes one CR2032 battery and comes with a moulded bright yellow protective cover. I think they're still about £10. My other model is orange and marked 'Benetech GM8908'.
It's very satisfying being able to say what the windspeed is without guessing. No more relying on broad-regional suggestions from the Met Office; you can get accurate local ground-level data NOW, in your own back garden. Or down on the beach, surf dudes. Or at the airport, my plane-spotting chums.
My meters have a 'max recorded' feature, so I can fit them to a kite, fly it to a given height, and measure the wind at different altitudes. That's really interesting.
The highest STEADY windspeed I've recorded at ground level is 58 mph. That was really scary. [I live in West Yorkshire in the north of England. That's pretty scary, too (joke).]
Getting an idea of what the wind really feels like is a good step towards understanding why landing a plane in turbulent conditions can be difficult. Crosswinds and wind-shear don't have to be strong - 15 knots, for instance - they just have to be there to cause go-arounds and 'positive' landings.