The United States. “What a country!” as comedian Yakov Smirnoff once said. It’s equipped with first-class observation systems, sophisticated forecast models, and a lively research community. It has what is undoubtedly the most extensive weather infrastructure of any country in the world, and this is in part due to North America’s notoriously temperamental weather. It’s turned one of the most dangerous places in the world to fly, into one of the safest.
But weather-related accidents still litter the NTSB records. You might ask yourself how this can still be a thing in this day and age. Well, we all know that meteorology is not an exact science. Still, given the right combination of factors and the human tendency to tune out of important information, we find that pilots still get themselves into plenty of trouble. In this article we’ll take a look at two noteworthy cases that occurred just a couple of years ago and explore what we can learn from these tragedies.
