Loving the bad weather in the UK right now!

[F737MAX 5,501]

@V1ROTA7E Not as nice as your pics, but here's a few for you.
 

Where's the airfield?

Runway sighted at minimums:

[Aamir 2,905]

I've had 3 IRL flights cancelled in the last 24 hours, the original, the re-book, and the re-book of the re-book - all out of Gatwick.

Then I saw the title of this thread and wanted to cry 😛

Here's hoping flight no. 4 works out tomorrow... 2 days after I set off from home!

[V1ROTA7E 718]

37 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

Runway sighted at minimums

This is what I live for! Nice shots!

 

26 minutes ago, Aamir said:

I've had 3 IRL flights cancelled in the last 24 hours

Well, lesson learned....if you had flown to your destination on flight sim, you'd have been there already 😄

[DD_Arthur 1,037]

7 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

There is only one true north. And that’s anything north of Watford 😉

Fixed that for you😎.

 

[Jazz 1,045]

3 hours ago, Afterburner said:

And because bad weather can be fun and challenging, me and some others are calling for the implementation of historic weather in MSFS. Imagine you are at the workplace when you see this thread or when there are some special weather conditions, but once you are back home, they are gone. Wouldn't it be nice if you had historic weather available that allowed you to recreate conditions from a specific day?  That way, you can repeat flights under these conditions. Something to think about for the folks who say "MSFS doesn't need historic weather".

Yes, it's nice. A feature I would welcome....but I would use it once......... rarely again.

[pstrub 997]

5 hours ago, Jazz said:

Yes, it's nice. A feature I would welcome....but I would use it once......... rarely again.

And I would use it most of the time because I fly in daytime conditions most of the time (even though I enjoy flying at night from time to time), but usually I find the time for flying when it's dark outside, so I turn the MSFS time a couple of hours back for a daytime flight.

I prefer using live weather because it's more interesting, but sometimes it's very obvious that the live weather doesn't match the simulated time. For instance when ground fog begins to fall in the early afternoon... 

I see a BIG case for 24h historical weather, on the longer timescale it's mostly of interest for exceptional weather conditions.

[Rocky_53 1,566]

16 hours ago, V1ROTA7E said:

Oh wow, I had no idea. I thought the flights were delayed/cancelled due to the low visibility. I've been following some flights on Flight Aware, but they just say they're delayed due to weather. I am in the Beta, so there's the "fix" for the snow on the apron. Up north at EGPH, there was snow everywhere.

I flew out of Edinburgh the other day and there was snow at the airport.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,903]

16 hours ago, Jazz said:

It's a modern British tradition to make a song and dance about 2 millimeters of snow and behave as though it's dangerous and unworkable when the rest of the world manages to keep things running with meters of the stuff on the ground. Here it's used as an excuse to get out of school and work.

Frankly, I have always found it pathetic.

You cannot compare snowfall in Britain to the continent. There is a huge influence on our weather from the Atlantic and in recent days the daytime max has generally been above freezing. That causes melt and when the sun sets the temp drops and partially melted snow refreezes. That was the case on Saturday here in Cheshire.

On the continent daytime temps stay below freezing and snow can be removed by blowers. That is not possible with our wet snow.

[Kaboki 437]

56 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

You cannot compare snowfall in Britain to the continent. There is a huge influence on our weather from the Atlantic and in recent days the daytime max has generally been above freezing. That causes melt and when the sun sets the temp drops and partially melted snow refreezes. That was the case on Saturday here in Cheshire.

On the continent daytime temps stay below freezing and snow can be removed by blowers. That is not possible with our wet snow.

We have these conditions in Norway sometimes too, they manage to fix it somehow. There can be rain in winter that melts the snow, but the ground is so cold under that it freezes the water and it becomes pure ice. And also what you describe happens here too, pluss degree during day that melt snow and it freezes in the evening. We never ever had to close an airport.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,903]

3 minutes ago, Kaboki said:

We have these conditions in Norway sometimes too, they manage to fix it somehow. There can be rain in winter that melts the snow, but the ground is so cold under that it freezes the water and it becomes pure ice. And also what you describe happens here too, pluss degree during day that melt snow and it freezes in the evening. We never ever had to close an airport.

That’s down to the Gulf Stream. All airports need to close whilst snow is cleared from taxiways and runways. Manchester closed for a few hours on Saturday but was operational in the afternoon. Same for Gatwick on Sunday.

[Farlis 2,277]

If you are on the hunt for low visibility I find the best way to do it is use https://metar-taf.com/

 

You just have to zoom in enough and look for the purple L's to find airfields where the METAR is currently reporting IFR near and below the minima for CAT I.

[F737MAX 5,501]

22 minutes ago, Farlis said:

If you are on the hunt for low visibility I find the best way to do it is use https://metar-taf.com/

An alternative site is https://www.badbadweather.com/visibility
Lets you know which airfields have strong winds, strong gusts, low visibility, rain, low temperatures, high temperatures, thunderstorms and snow.

I prefer the visual element of the metar-taf.com/ site you linked though.

[Chock 17,769]

As others pointed out, the issue in the UK when it snows is the fact that settled snow frequently turns to deep watery slush fairly quickly in daylight with the temps being above freezing, but before this has chance to dry out or evaporate, when the temperature drops at night all of that slushy partially melted snow freezes into a very thick layer of ice. This makes roads, runways and taxiways hazardous and difficult to clear too.

At EGCC earlier this week, it started snowing at around 4.30am and kept going for a few hours. Most of this stuff did not stick but operations were stopped for a couple of hours starting sometime around 9am, this was whilst the airport's snowploughs and blowers did their best to push snow into some out of the way piles and a few inbound European and several outbound flights were cancelled during that time, but the airport was operational again just before 12 noon. Having said that, there was some difficulty in stand availability as aeroplanes sat there awaiting departure or towing off to a remote stand to free up a space allow inbound flights onto a clear stand equiped with an airbridge. For example, I had a Brussels flight which was initially meant to come onto Stand 109, so I started sending GSE there, then it got switched to 103, so we moved the gear there, then it got switched to 202L, all whilst it was holding just off the runway, so we had to get everything to the stand it eventually came onto. 

This sort of stuff all led to a few knock-on issues, for example, an Air France A319's crew went out of hours whilst waiting for a de-ice which meant passengers and bags had to be offloaded, this meant that A319 departed the following day as a positioner back to LFPG with only crew bags on board. that same day another Air France Airbus, this time an A321, flew in to us from LFPG. Since we only had two Air France AKH ULDs on station, it arrived with four empty AKHs in the front and the full ones with the bags in the back, four of those. We had to offload these empty cans first in order to get them to the bag hall and spin them for use with the onload outbound bags, which meant that (unusually), we were offloading the front hold before the rear one (you wouldn't normally do this because of the risk of tail-tipping). So this thing eventually went out five ULDs full of bags in the back hold stations, three of these ULDs having come in on the flight just an hour before with the other two being those we had at EGCC. Everyone did a remarkable job on that flight to get it offloaded and onloaded so quickly.

 

 

[V1ROTA7E 718]

19 hours ago, Mace said:

@V1ROTA7E what are you using for AI?

I’m using PSxT with AIG & FSLTL models. Hate to say it, but it’s really become a must use program when flying now. 

[V1ROTA7E 718]

1 hour ago, Farlis said:

If you are on the hunt for low visibility I find the best way to do it is use https://metar-taf.com/

 

You just have to zoom in enough and look for the purple L's to find airfields where the METAR is currently reporting IFR near and below the minima for CAT I.

 

52 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

An alternative site is https://www.badbadweather.com/visibility
Lets you know which airfields have strong winds, strong gusts, low visibility, rain, low temperatures, high temperatures, thunderstorms and snow.

I prefer the visual element of the metar-taf.com/ site you linked though.

These are great. Sky vector works well too. Personally, I’ve been just using LittleNavMap. Airport weather is color coded too, so it’s easy to find low weather too, and conveniently it’s connected to the sim.