Pilots, can you riddle me this one? Why would a B747 fly this planned route, with the given weather, instead of taking the southern route to IAH? Surely the plane is certified over-water, so I’m confused? why fly into weather?
We don’t have weather radar coverage in GOM, so who knows what storm lurks out there.
Alternatively, could be other traffic causing capacity issues and delays if the GOM routing is clear and the passenger flights want to avoid the bumps over the storm.
I’ve seen this on flights to PHL were they need to come in after circling before it. You’d be amazed that they find the tiniest breaks and fly right into them. That plane, to me looks to be at 40k so should be okay to pass over.
The pretty “radar pictures” that are so common now are nice…but they don’t have all the information the controllers/weather service, etc have. On the “Radar Coded Messages” (example below, but this is probably an “old skool” way to display the info) the tops of the cells are displayed on the chart. Controllers and pilots also share information on cell tops. Pilots are not just poking around and hoping. Most of the time they have decent information to make a good choice. At 40,000 feet he was probably above everything.
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Just seems odd to fly north, then through the weather and on to Houston, when just going WNW out of MIA then turning to the Northwest once they got on the backside of that front would be less messy.
Copy paste, typical spam that post by DazzlingSkunk …