If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you might have noticed that I’m kind of a weather wonk as well as an airline dork. So I was really interested to see that a recent Air Canada flight that hit turbulence may have encountered an undular bore. What the heck is that?

You may have heard about this flight. An Air Canada A319 was going from Victoria to Toronto when something happened and the plane had to make an emergency landing in Calgary. At least 10 people were injured, but not much other information has been released, except that there was a computer problem.

I read a post in the Turbulence Forecast blog today pointing to an article saying that it could have been a rare atmospheric (aka undular) bore that caused turbulence severe enough that it impacted the computers (or more likely just knocked out the autopilot).

I had visions of a giant tidal wave in the sky crashing down on the plane, but admittedly, I had no idea what an atmospheric bore was at all. Turns out I wasn’t quite right. A little research brought me to this fascinating blog post from ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama of all places. Now, I’m a huge fan of true weather wonks. I regularly read Tom Skilling’s blog for WGN in Chicago, and I used to really like watching Sean McLaughlin when he worked for channel 12 in Phoenix. After reading this post by Tim Coleman in Alabama, I think I’ve found another weather geek to follow.

Tim explains the undular bore phenomenon very well. Basically, when a warm air mass comes into contact with a cool, stable air mass (or vice versa?), they can create waves in the air similar to what you’d see when you drop a pebble into a body of water, only these waves move at 10 to 50 mph. The tops of those waves will have winds going one way while the bottoms may be going another way. On October 3, 2007, a webcam caught an amazing view of one of these undular bores. Check it out.

Watch the trees at the very beginning. As the waves roll by, the winds quickly shift direction. That’s just cool. But this post makes it sound like this isn’t the rarest event. It actually happens quite often, though you often can’t see it because there are no clouds to show it. That’s a stark contrast to the original article saying it’s an extremely rare event. Maybe it’s only rare at such high altitude. I’m just not sure. Pretty cool stuff though, huh?

I’m just glad I didn’t have fly through it. Then again, it’s nice to know that flying through such violent air only resulted in some minor injuries and the plane landed safely.

I’ve finally done it. I’ve done my first ever podcast. Thanks are certainly due for Addison Schonland for convincing me to actually do it. I spoke with him yesterday about my Essential Air Service post earlier this week, and we talked a little more about the program.

If you have 13:29 to spare, click here and have a listen. As you might be able to tell, I was a little nervous in the beginning. It’s not so easy when you can’t double check everything before posting. But I think I came through ok.

If you’re interested in seeing other places I’ve been quoted outside of the blog, I’ve put up a link called Cranky in the News in the upper right side of the page. I’ll keep that updated as often as someone is crazy enough to quote me.

If you’re flying to the west coast today, be ready for a delayed and bumpy ride. We’re getting hit with the worst storm we’ve had in 3 years over here. Check out the satellite shot right now. Looks like a freakin’ hurricane.

If you’re up in San Francisco, things are really ugly. As of 1130a PT, SFO was seeing delays between 4 hours 1 minute and 4 hours 15 minutes and INCREASING. Holy crap.

I’ve been listening to the live air traffic control feed at SFO this morning (yes, I’m a dork), and it’s ugly. There are constant windshear alerts and there have been microbursts on the runway. I just heard an aircraft cleared to land with 42 knot winds gusting to 52 knots and a windshear alert with a 20 knot loss of speed due to wind change. Those controllers and pilots deserve medals for flying through this stuff today.

And outside my window in LA, the rain just started. We’ll get the worst of it tonight and tomorrow, hoping that the recent burn areas hold up and don’t end up turning into mud rivers. All that being said, we need the rain and snow throughout California. Stay safe today.

You know the feeling. You’re sitting there reading your book when the seatbelt sign comes on. Then you start bouncing around. Just about everyone has heard the captain ask the flight attendants to sit down as a precautionary measure at some point. Many people have seen it bad enough that drinks start coming out of the glass. And the chosen few have seen it get so bad that people end up injured.

There has long been an effort to avoid turbulence and in general, airlines do a pretty good job today. When you think about the old days when planes would penetrate thunderstorms below 10,000 ft (sometimes with catastrophic results), things don’t look so bad. But it’s still not pleasant and it can be scary. So, the airlines are always looking for better ways to avoid the stuff.

I was interested to read this article in the Rocky Mountain News about a National Center for Atmospheric Research project that is being tested with United in the Rocky Mountain region right now. The idea is to use ground-based radar to look into areas of rain, clouds, and wind and create a plot 100 miles ahead and 40 miles on either side of a plane showing turbulence. This info can be downloaded every 5 minutes by the plane, so it’s near real-time, and that’s helpful in avoiding the rough air that you usually find over the Rockies.

The idea is to avoid large storms, so without a system like this, pilots will often be very cautious and go much further out of their way than they need to. With more accurate plots, the pilots can feel more confident deviating less and that means shorter delays and fewer airspace constraints.

This program still doesn’t appear to help with clear air turbulence, the really bouncy stuff that is harder to predict. That is a whole different area of research. Believe it or not, Northwest is one of the leaders in this area. (Yes, I know. Something positive about Northwest is hard to come by.) They actually put out a daily turbulence plot that gets sold to other airlines. So hopefully one of these days, clear air turbulence will be completely predictable, but for now just wear your seatbelt. (Note: Turbulence doesn’t hurt people, not using a seatbelt at all times hurts people. Oh, and guns hurt people too, but that’s a whole different story.)

If you’re really worried about turbulence, there’s a great site for you called TurbulenceForecast.com. Actually, it’s questionable if it’s a great site for you, because having all this info may just make you more nervous. You can get all kinds of maps ranging from areas of potential clear air turbulence to storms and cloud top heights like you see below. (Yes, that one passing through Louisiana saying 690 is the remains of Humberto and yes, the clouds are topping out at 69,000 ft. Wow.)

You can even go into the forum, post the route you’re flying within a couple days of travel, and they’ll respond with a personalized route forecast for you. For some people, this may be great. But for others, it may just make things worse, especially if you’ll be flying a projected bumpy route.

If you’d rather not know, just keep in mind that the pilots are doing everything they can to avoid the turbulence, but that’s not always possible. If you keep your seatbelt on, you’ll be fine. Otherwise, well, severe turbulence may be rare, but without a seatbelt your head might end up visiting the ceiling, and you really don’t want that.

In case you were wondering, no, I am not above using a Supertramp song title in my subject line to lure readers. (Would that really lure anyone?) Anyway . . .

The FAA came out with a groundbreaking program yesterday that will help speed up summer travel. In a nutshell, when there’s bad weather around, those flights that won’t be going through the bad weather won’t be delayed. Um, did I say groundbreaking? I may have to take that one back. How was this NOT happening before?!

Here’s a little more detail. Let’s say you’re in Chicago and a line of storms stands between you and your destination in Las Vegas. In the past, you would have had a ground delay program and you would have been stuck until cleared. Now, they’re saying that if you’re willing to load up on fuel, you can fly around the storms and then you won’t have a delay. Again, common sense, right?

Last year they did this for 7 northeast airports, but this year they’ll expand to 18 total airports including some in the Midwest. So is this one of the first flights to take advantage of the new policy? Thanks to FlightAware, you can see it went way south to get around the weather. (This shot shows the weather after it had moved further east.)

I don’t know. It seems like I’ve done this many times in the past. What is so different here?

There seem to be a lot of stories today that I’d like to talk about, but as I wrap up work and get ready to head out of town, I thought I’d better just summarize . . .

• London Fog - The mythic London fog apparently isn’t just a rumor as it battles Denver for weather story of the week. London and other parts of the UK are completely socked in, and flights are severely delayed or canceled. Naturally, this is causing complete and total chaos. Heathrow is by far the hardest hit of the airports - right now it is seeing freezing fog with no vertical visibility and only 400 ft forward visibility on the runway. Ouch.
• Cash for Emissions - The EU announced plans to include airlines in an emissions trading plan. In 2011, all flights within the EU will be restricted while in 2012, all flights to or from the EU will be included as well. Basically, airlines will be given an allotment of emissions “credits” based on their actual emissions in the 2004-2006 time period. If they want to go over that amount, they’ll have to buy credits from someone else who is willing to sell them. If they’re under, they can sell their credits to someone else. It effectively caps total emissions at today’s rates.
• Beeches in Boston - Delta announced a deal with Big Sky Airlines to fly 8 19-seat Beechcraft 1900 aircraft from Boston beginning next spring. No routes have been announced yet, but with those small planes, it’s bound to be smaller regional routes. Big Sky must be breathing a sigh of relief since they’re owned by Mesaba’s parent company, and Mesaba is in dire straits. This should help them bolster their own business going forward.
• Cross one off for US Airways - US Airways announced they had come to an agreement with the flight dispatchers’ union which has both old US Airways and America West dispatchers transitioning to the old US Airways contract which presumably was higher paying. This is a nice development, but until the pilot and flight attendant deals are done, nobody can breath easily.
• Muslims Welcome in Tel Aviv - In a welcome piece of good news, the Israel Airports Authority has decided to open a mosque in the Tel Aviv airport. This is only one of the efforts made by the authority to reach out to Muslims. They have also created a special team to be in charge of customer service for Arabic-speaking passengers, and they have launched a website in Arabic as well. It’s a small olive branch, but it’s certainly the right thing to do.

That’s all for me this week. I’m off to Indiana tomorrow and I don’t expect to be writing again until Tuesday or Wednesday. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate. I’ll talk to you again next week.

As you can see by the picture on the right, Denver is completely and totally snowed in today. Ok, maybe that’s just a white square, but I bet that is what the city looks like right now.

If you go to the FAA’s website, you’ll see a dreaded black dot under the Denver airport. That means that the airport has been officially closed as of 245p Mountain Time. They are unable to clear the runways fast enough.

If you’d like to see actual conditions at the Denver Airport, you can go to the National Weather Service’s weather page where they have the METAR. The acronym apparently stands for something in French, but it’s basically the aviation weather report.

Right now, the Denver METAR shows this:
KDEN 202131Z 34028G34KT 1/4SM R35L/1400V1800FT +SN BLSN FZFG VV002 M04/M06 A2984 RMK AO2 P0000 $

For those who don’t speak airline/weather dork, it basically means this:

• KDEN - The four letter ICAO airport code for Denver’s Airport
• 202131Z - The report came at 20:21:31 zulu time (GMT) The report came on the 20th day of the month at 21:31 Zulu time which is usually equal to GMT
• 34028G34KT - Winds are 28 knots gusting to 34 knots and they’re coming from 340 degrees (north northwest)
• 1/4SM - Visibility is 1/4 of a statute mile
• R35L/1400V1800FT - Runway Visual Range (RVR) - so on runway 35L, you can see between 1,400 and 1,800 feet ahead of you depending upon where you are on the runway
• +SN BLSN FZFG - Snow, Blowing Snow, and Freezing Fog
• VV002 - Since you’re in the fog, there is no real ceiling, but you can only see 200 ft above your head
• M04/M06 - Temperature is -4C and the dewpoint is -6C
• A2984 - That’s the barometric pressure

The rest of it doesn’t really matter, but you get the point. This is some horrendous weather. BTW, for a full tutorial on how to read METAR, here’s a great resource from Weather Underground.

Yesterday’s midwestern snowstorm is moving north while heavy rain heads into the east as I write this. If you’re traveling today, it’s going to be ugly.

Chicago/O’Hare is going to be a complete nightmare today. As if the heavy snow wasn’t enough, a Fedex plane went off the runway into the mud and is now stuck. That will keep that runway closed for a few hours. Currently, O’Hare is showing a low cloud layer at 1200 feet with snow. Winds are out of the West Northwest at 19 knots gusting to 24. Visibility is just over a mile. The FAA site says arrival delays are averaging over 3 hours right now, but I’m hearing that the airport may effectively be closed for a few hours at this point. St Louis isn’t much better.

Once you head east, um, well, you probably won’t get there anytime soon either. Boston is averaging arrival delays of 42 minutes, La Guardia is at 1 hour 48 minutes, Philadelphia is 2 hours 48 minutes, JFK is at 2 hours 57 minutes, and Newark is at 3 hours 40 minutes. the problem out there isn’t snow - it’s low ceilings and wind.

Good luck today out there.