Today we had the class of Visibility… something related to types of mist and fog; or better said, how to identify each one of them according to weather conditions and its importance. You probably remember me mentioning the Atmosphere and its layers (some of them probably), and well, we had a specification of structure and how to identify them. This helps us to be aware of the climate conditions for our craft and flight trajectory.
Things to remember are the temperature, density and pressure (for example). In fact, there are so many other things but I can’t just give you all the insight 😌
Anyways… everything has a reason to be learned. The visibility as you may notice changes in the night as in day light; and we have many reasons of changes and types of problems, from precipitation to pollution. If you had the chance of driving around mountains and then driving through the city, you might have already experienced some of the different “fog” (or sort of saying). You can also feel the difference in the breathing, in some parts is very clean and easy to breath, in other parts is heavy and in other parts is just impossible to breathe due the pollution. So, we can have an idea of the environment when flying as well. Something like that. It will also vary on the location or the geographical topography; meaning that some latitude will induce a variation on the visibility as well.
Then we passed on the study of the clouds. I must say that I’ve always been an observant of the sky; therefore the clouds are part of my artistic inspiration; from photography to drawing and painting. I used to give shapes to the clouds and with time I started noticing that all clouds were different and these also had different distances from the ground. So, today we learned their names… not like every single cloud name😰, but more like what it would be a family name 🤓 … or type of cloud, and in which group it belongs. Some of these names sound funny, that’s because terminology comes from Latin, and as many of the words in our vocabulary they have influences of other languages, such as Greek. Having knowledge of these languages has allowed me to have a wide perspective of the meaning or definition for each (as in any other subject I guess).😴😴😂
And as in everything, it also has a formula to learn and practice for density, as well as for exact altitude, in order to determine their level and how would they develop. Another thing that got my full attention is the fact of trajectory memory of the clouds; if the clouds pass by a mountain, they will develop a trajectory to go around or up, and then they will continue going up and down even when there aren’t more mountains to follow. Cool right?! Better called; turbulence. And then we saw the way to identify such cloudy conditions officially; the coding.
At the end of the class we had the lesson of the dangerous conditions when we supposed to avoid flying. These were about visibility conditions, but also about other kind of weather problems, such as icing. 🙆
LIDIA AVILES 