Quote:
Originally Posted by Noah930
You would have enjoyed (don't know if that's the term) the flight I had to ORD. It was uneventful until the landing. It's often bumpy dropping through cloud cover, right? Particularly if there are thunderstorms. So as we descended through the cloud layer over Chicago it was bumpy. OK, no big deal. But it was also equally bumpy all the way down. Maybe even worse. I could see the rain out the window. As we approached the runway I could see the pilot crabbing, and then heading straight, and then crabbing again. Wingtips were rolling back and forth. I was reminded of one of those videos of F-14s landing on a carrier deck in inclement weather. And we were still bopping up and down by what felt like a good 10-15 feet at any second.
But we got lower and lower. We passed over the runway and the pilot even flared the plane about 10-15 feet off the ground...and then throttled back up.
We very slowly climbed back into the clouds (almost like the plane was struggling?) before the pilot announced we were heading to Indianapolis. ORD was now closed and the weather would be there for about half an hour at the least. 60 mph winds, big time windshear, etc. We didn't have enough fuel to circle for that long, so we were off to Indy to fuel up and return. And when we got to Indy, we sat on the tarmac for about 30 minutes waiting for them to open up a gate for us, because apparently American only has 2 gates there and they were both occupied by planes parked for the night (well find the freakin' keys, then!).
We got into ORD 3 hours late. And when I got to curbside at 2:30 in the freakin' morning, there was a line of about 40 people....for 3 cabs.
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Yes, flying through clouds can be bumpy, thunderstorms would pretty much guarantee that.
As the pilot is trying to land, he is probably getting a lot of "wind checks" - tower is giving wind speeds and directions. If the pilot can't get it on the ground the first try and the conditions get worse, you get diverted.
Airports are ringed with devices that detect windshear, but can't get it down to the millisecond. Things happen.
Those jets don't have keys! Shhh!