On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Ronn! Blankenship < [email protected]> wrote:
> > The worst fog I have ever seen was one night > between Windsor and Toronto, where literally all > that was visible was a few feet of the road right > in front of the car. And all the natives were flying by at 70 or 75 mph . > . . Did you know that studies have shown that people unconsciously speed up in fog? People who can't see a speedometer will consistently think they are going slower -- significantly slower -- than they really are. We hit Tule fog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_fog) in the Central Valley a couple of years ago and I did what I know I should have done many times before -- immediately got off the road and stayed the night in a motel. That motel was close to empty when we checked in; it was full an hour later. Actually, it's not quite right to say we hit that fog. More like it formed around us. On the other hand, a year ago we got into some incredibly dense fog somewhere in Nevada, near Battle Mountain, IIRC, and decided to make our way east carefully - I checked current conditions in the next few towns and nobody was reporting fog. Sure enough, a half mile down the road we broke out of it into totally clear conditions. And, as long as I'm rambling on about fog... One of the more startling experiences one can have when landing an airplane is caused by a thin layer of ground fog. On approach, you can hardly even see that the fog is there, since you are looking down through its thinnest dimension. But just before touchdown, you're looking the long way through it and suddenly, really suddenly, you can't see a lot of the runway. Disconcerting, to say the least, because when landing you look way down the runway in order to judge how far off the ground you are. It suddenly becomes much more like a night landing than a daytime one. (When landing at night, you can't really judge your height accurately, so you basically fly the airplane all the way to the ground instead of gently settling it in as you do during the day. Ideally.) Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
