Page 4 - Storm Cells News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Done make me an apprentice. i'm a fully fledge pilot. it's a team effort and a joint decision when these things are happening. it's rare to turn around and go back or to be grounded out right because of bad weather. normally what happens you deviate, go above or around storm cells if necessary. i can't imagine that this crew intentionally flew into a thunderstorm. as les can attest that's about the biggest no-no that exists in commercial aviation. you don't fly into what would be a big red blob on their radar screen. could they have found themselves inadvertently in that situation and the airp...

Take off at all? >> there's a lot of decisions made about any flight. the thing about thunderstorms, you take off and conditions may be different from 40 minutes later when they encountered the storm. it's not uncommon to take off with a line of thunderstorms ahead of you and make a real time decision based on what you see with your eye balls and weather radar. it happens every day. you may have been in planes where you deviate around storms. you've got to clear 20 nautical miles. you don't fly through them. any decision to fly through them is taking a risk and technically against the rules as...

The night as well. they build up to the major storm cells can build up to 55,000 or 60,000 feet. it gives you some idea of the extent of the clouds. the vertical winds in the clouds are quite violent. they can reach speeds of over 100 miles an hour vertically. when the aircraft is traveling horizontal through this you get buckling. there is icing, hail heavy water. in fact there have been occasions that clouds have extinguished the engines. they are effectively jet engines burning fuel in an air flow. if you get a lot of water in them the engines can cut out. normally you can pick your way aro...

Computerized systems so that information wasn't found out until two years after the event. it took a long time to find the flight data recorder cockpit voice recorders, wreckage was found within a couple weeks but it took a couple years to find those because of the depths of the ocean. the java sea is much shallower than the search locations for air france 449 where we ended up with malaysia 370. that's a positive when it comes to this search and rescue operation. >> you have logged thousands of hours flying. if you're the pilot going into this storm, obviously this storm went in and asked for...

Tell us what it's like. >> quite often it's smooth and fair conditions. other times you have the thunderstorms. it's very much pot luck whether you're going to end up with bad weather on your route. there are thunderstorms usually in the area. it's a tropical location. it's a situation of picking around them and avoiding the worst of the weather. looking at radar slots that you had shown on your program, it appears that there wasn't really much room for maneuver in the sense the weather was really particularly bad over an extensive area with large storm cells. it is entirely possible that the ...