With the Cyclone being close to the airport in Brisbane in the next few days and assuming the airport remains open. I was wondering what new or enhanced risks a cyclone brings and what controls you would enhance when landing and taking off to mitigate the risks?
Whilst the cyclone may be unusual for Brisbane, the crews flying there would see bad weather in all sorts of places, so it's possibly less unusual for them. Operations within the limits, with no attempts to extend them, should see things happen safely, though perhaps not expeditiously.
I am not sure of the details with qf 1 in 1999 in Bangkok but I think aquaplaning was an issue.
Whilst aquaplaning ultimately became part of the problem, it really started going wrong before they even left Sydney. It was a classic case of management (in this case pilot management) not listening to the line pilots. You just know you're being scammed when you hear the words "resistant to change".
Basically they had a couple of ideas, all based on reducing costs, but which came with some negative aviation connotations. Firstly, reducing reverse thrust use back to idle only, was based on reducing wear within the engines. Use of flap 25 was supposedly based on flap track wear. Both of these would mean more energy had to be dissipated by the brakes, but the newish (then) carbon brakes supposedly wore better if actually used a bit harder. With F25 the aircraft was also a bit less stable on approach than it was with F30. None of this was really an issue on a nice day to a long runway, but sadly it was being pushed (quite forcefully) as being useful in all cases. There was quite a bit of push back from many of the Captains, who were, of course, resistant to change.
Reverse thrust, generally, does very little. It's more a case of getting rid of residual forward thrust than it is of producing real negative thrust. But, they didn't even consider its blast effect on wet runways, which tended to get the water out of the way of the tyres, so that they could sit down and not aquaplane. F25, gave a faster approach speed, and aquaplaning is affected by speed. The faster, the more likely. And the biggest issue of all was that this was being pushed via the training department as the 'standard' way of doing things. It was a classic failure of management.
Many years later, it had a rebirth, with idle reverse and reduced flap being their preferred option, but this time they were smart enough not to push too hard. I started with the assumption that I wouldn't use it, but may have relented on the day if the conditions suited me.
How would you avoid similar issues in Brisbane?
Don't go there....
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