joe_pilot
There be whales here!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2004
- Posts
- 592
Ok, I won't even touch the centerline issue 'cause I know I've definitely had a few that weren't pretty. But as far as the vis. issue goes, I have a couple of thoughts in the guy's defense. First of all, we are seeing slant range in the video, while rvr is horizontal. I don't think that fully explains it, though. Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words. The video on the site is 320 x 240 and I'll bet there was some detail loss due to interpolation errors in the codec, not to mention that at low light levels CCD's don't exactly perform at optimum. Low-res video just doesn't show nearly what we actually see. Consider this: in football games broadcast in standard NTSC you are lucky to be able to read a player's name on their jersey, while with Hi-Def HDTV broadcasts you can tell who's jersey the fan sitting in the stands is wearing. I've had great views of say the Golden GateBridge from 3 to 5 thousand ft, snapped a picture with my 4.3 mp camera that look NOTHING like what I saw. I wouldn't use the RAW video he shot to try and measure RVR, let alone the streamed version.
Now let's look at the data. The video was obviously shot in the daytime. Sunrise at KACK that day (31Jul04) was at 0934Z and sunset at 2357Z. Let's look at the metars during that time. From 1132Z(0953 loc) until sunset the reported weather was legal! (assuming pt135 ops) Only the 0953Z, 1053Z and 1253Z observations reported wx below the published mins. The reports showing the wx below mins were all before 0930 local time and from the video it appears it is at least noon or later.
Some of you would have been crying for your mothers if you had been with me this fine morning at RDU - SPECI KRDU 091641Z COR 07003KT 1/4SM +SN FZFG VV004 M01/M01 A3018 RMK AO2 P0002. Freight Dogs fly ALL THE TIME in wx like this. Remember this video?
For those of you who have hand flown a GA aircraft down to minimums and are trying to pick this guy apart for anything OTHER than being left of centerline please stop.
For those of you who have never hand flown a GA aircraft down to REAL minimums and are picking this guy apart, well...just shut up.
-JP
Now let's look at the data. The video was obviously shot in the daytime. Sunrise at KACK that day (31Jul04) was at 0934Z and sunset at 2357Z. Let's look at the metars during that time. From 1132Z(0953 loc) until sunset the reported weather was legal! (assuming pt135 ops) Only the 0953Z, 1053Z and 1253Z observations reported wx below the published mins. The reports showing the wx below mins were all before 0930 local time and from the video it appears it is at least noon or later.
Some of you would have been crying for your mothers if you had been with me this fine morning at RDU - SPECI KRDU 091641Z COR 07003KT 1/4SM +SN FZFG VV004 M01/M01 A3018 RMK AO2 P0002. Freight Dogs fly ALL THE TIME in wx like this. Remember this video?
For those of you who have hand flown a GA aircraft down to minimums and are trying to pick this guy apart for anything OTHER than being left of centerline please stop.
For those of you who have never hand flown a GA aircraft down to REAL minimums and are picking this guy apart, well...just shut up.
-JP