Who can land in 'fog'

As someone who lives in fog and flys in it often, I say yes. Fog is
almost never uniform. The odds of the flight visibility being the same
as the tower reported vis is almost zero. Most of the time, I just
start to make out the runway lights nearing 100 feet AGL. Once at 100
AGL you can see A LOT more (probably because fog effect slant line
vis). Remember you can go down to 100 feet after seeing the rabbit. Its
kind of cool to look outside and see nothing but fog but a white
electric rabbit running back and forth!!

-Robert, Sacramento CA

Worth trying with a safety pilot while under the hood is to fly your
airplane all the way down a time or two. Full ILS to mins, keep the
localizer centered, maintain rate of decent. Sometime when everything
is stacked against you you may have to do something like that in real
life. It's a confidence builder knowing you can get down in near
zero/zero.

Mooneys with their low wings tell the pilot when they are a few feet
agl. I don't know how a Cessna would feel though.

On 23 Nov 2005 12:58:14 -0800, wrote:

I read a report about a local airport with this statement:

"With existing Instrument Landing System (ILS) technology, inclement
weather, such as fog, is not a material obstacle to commercial service
operations."

I was under the impression that the FAA says fog is 1/4 mile
visibility. Can anyone legally land in fog?

That raises another question: Who here has gotten the certification
for non-commercial Cat II? How difficult was the certification? Was it
worth the trouble? How difficult was it to maintain the currency? I've
thought it might be cool to be able to fly Cat II in a Cherokee, but I
doubt it's worth the trouble.

RK Henry

It doesn't matter if the airspace around the airport is class C or B it only
matters if the requriements for the approach are met. Usually the hangup is
centerline lighting which is expensive to add. I'm sure that the airports
with frequent low weather are more likely to have the centerline lighting
although many airports in the PNW, including KBFI, do not have it.. I
suspect that there is an element of politics in who gets the money.

Mike
MU-2


"Peter R." wrote in message
...
Mike Rapoport wrote:

Most Cat II and III approaches are at major airports. One of the
requirements is that the runway must have centerline lighting which is
generally only found at the largest airports.

Could the presence of a CAT II or III approach also be a function of a
greater occurrence of low visibility? My home airport, Syracuse (KSYR),
has a CAT II ILS, yet it is only a class C airport. During the winter we
experience heavy lake effect snow bands off Lake Ontario and I had
suspected that this was the reason for a CAT II ILS rather than its size.

--
Peter

If you are really landing 0/0 I would toss out the idea of trying to
flare. The glide slope is good down to 100 feet, after that it does
wacky. You would want to get the plane in a nose up attitude and a slow
decent rate and just wait for impact. Those of us that fly sea planes
were required to do that for our checkride. Berry Scheff wrote about
doing this during an ocean crossing flight.

-Robert (Mooney owner too)

I"m not sure how you could know what the flight visibility was. I"ve
landed many times when tower is reporting 1/4 mile vis. There is no
requirement that you not land. The only FAA requirement is flight
visibility (which tower cannot measure). Since fog is almost never
uniform the odds that flight visibility are the same as tower
visibility is about as close to zero as you could get.

-Robert

In article .com,
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:

If you are really landing 0/0 I would toss out the idea of trying to
flare. The glide slope is good down to 100 feet, after that it does
wacky.

eh? For Cat III systems, the glide slope is good all the way to the runway.

--
Bob Noel
New NHL? what a joke

Robert M. Gary wrote:
If you are really landing 0/0 I would toss out the idea of trying to
flare. The glide slope is good down to 100 feet, after that it does
wacky. You would want to get the plane in a nose up attitude and a
slow decent rate and just wait for impact. Those of us that fly sea
planes were required to do that for our checkride. Berry Scheff wrote
about doing this during an ocean crossing flight.

-Robert (Mooney owner too)

Naw. Autoland systems exchange crab to wing low at 150' AGL and at 50' AGL
the throttles come to idle and the aircraft enters Flare. At wheel spin up
it changes to "Roll Out" and continues to track the localizer centerline to
keep the aircraft on the runway. It makes beautiful landings.

--

Darrell R. Schmidt
B-58 Hustler History: http://members.cox.net/dschmidt1/
-

Bob Noel wrote:
In article .com,
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:

If you are really landing 0/0 I would toss out the idea of trying to
flare. The glide slope is good down to 100 feet, after that it does
wacky.

eh? For Cat III systems, the glide slope is good all the way to the runway.

I think you got lost in the thread. We've not talked about CAT III at
all in this part of the thread just flying an ILS down to the ground.
If you notice, some other trees from this thread moved off and talked
about cat III. You won't find any talk of CAT III going up the chain of
my post.

In article .com,
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:

eh? For Cat III systems, the glide slope is good all the way to the runway.

I think you got lost in the thread. We've not talked about CAT III at
all in this part of the thread just flying an ILS down to the ground.
If you notice, some other trees from this thread moved off and talked
about cat III. You won't find any talk of CAT III going up the chain of
my post.

ok.

But let me add that a Cat I glideslope could be ok down to runway, but usually
isn't. It just won't be flightchecked

--
Bob Noel
New NHL? what a joke