Flight changes for Haima not handled well
What irony and waste of public money it was, that the storm-penetration aircraft was unable to take off due to the onset of adverse crosswinds of the very storm that it was supposed to penetrate and report on?
Surely, if the Observatory really wanted it to take off (to read the actual winds which might prove or disprove the forecast), it could have done so in the many hours after the No 8 signal was hoisted but before the adverse crosswinds actually struck (typically over 25knots/46.3km/h sustained wind, not gust). With a flight endurance capable of loitering in the storm for hours before landing at a storm-free alternate aerodrome, it could have taken off comfortably.
The Observatory said, “Chek Lap Kok was consistently affected by cross winds of 50km/h for several hours”.
At 30 runway movements an hour, if “several” means five, then five hours would have caused only 150 to have been cancelled or delayed. But more than 780 flights were cancelled or delayed. Clearly many were cancelled or delayed unnecessarily early.
If the decisions to cancel or delay flights were only taken after the storm-penetration flight reported back, many would not have been cancelled or delayed.