Interesting night time flight diversion ! M/c Airport

[meddyg]

I was staying with my elderly mum in Wilmslow Tuesday night and was woken 210am  (=1 Dec 21) by aircraft noise … not normal for this location.
I quickly picked up my phone and looked him up on Flightradar24.


It looks – see photos – that EZY946W flew from Tenerife at around 2150h and 4 hours later approached Manchester from the north east; aborts a landing and flies over Wilmslow does a couple of loops over the Peak District and then heads north west to land at Glasgow.



Any insights or theories ?

[PaulF]

What was the weather like? If visibility was bad and there was a problem with teh instrument landing system either on the plane or at the airport that could have menat that they were unable to land.

[meddyg]

I think it was a bit wet and had warmed up - no ice on the windscreen unlike Tuesday and Thursday
so maybe.

interestingly  the Flightradar app lets you rewind and look at timings - not bad for the free bit of the app.
I logged my daughter's flight to LA recently over West Wales, Shannon- southern tip of Greenland and Hudson Bay ,
Salt Lake City and Las Vegas - interesting elliptical route. 

[tom_e]

Don't know about the flight in the first post, but your daughter's flight sounds like standard great circle? - the shortest route on a sphere:

https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=LHR-LAX

[Cudzoziemiec]

There was a tornado over Manchester caused by the vortex from the track team at the British Cycling Centre.

[Mr Larrington]

Don't know about the flight in the first post, but your daughter's flight sounds like standard great circle? - the shortest route on a sphere:

https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=LHR-LAX

This ^^^^.  Though they vary how close to the North Pole they get if favourable winds can be found off the beaten track.

[hellymedic]

I think partner's BA268 flight from LAX - LHR went a long way north.

Cast a shadow over my abode on approach to LHR, which was somehow reassuring.

[Mr Larrington]

Last time back from USAnia – Phoenix – the driver went far enough south as to miss Greenland altogether, to save petril.

[ian]

This is all nonsense as we know the Earth is flat.

[Feanor]

I've travelled that Great Circle route many, many times; often in winter heading to Denver for hill-sliding fun.

I look out the window of the plane, at 36000ft, and gaze down on the vastness of the white mountain ranges below me.
I have no idea of scale.
What height are those peaks, those ridges?

Has any human ever climbed them?
They seem countless in number, ridge after ridge of impenetrable snow-covered mountains, vastly remote from anywhere.

[ian]

They're a reminder the world is quite big.

I am always struck by the roads in northern Canada, where do they go, who the hell lives up there. Polar bears can't even get driving licenses (I'd blame racism, but they're definitely white).

On one of my more recent pre-covid trips we overflew Mount St Helens on the descent into Portland. Breathtaking.

[Mr Larrington]

In a lot of rural Canuckistan the roads only work when it gets cold enough for the muskeg to freeze solid, so for the handful of months a year that they're usable they need to be big enough to accommodate large trucks to bring in all the Stuffs too big for a Twin Otter even if they go through 500 km of bugger-all to reach a First Nation reservation with fifty inhabitants.  In the summer even GBFO Cat bulldozers get swallowed whole.

[Pedaldog.]

This is all nonsense as we know the Earth is flat.

And round too.

[chrisbainbridge]

I have been reading some interesting books recently which pointed out how our approach to getting to places is road centric.  The foirst was about sea kayaking down the Atlantic coast of these islands starting in the far North and going to the tip of Cornwall.  He would evidence as a geographical historian of extensive coastal commerce with many of the islands and the communities having no roads until the last century.  All of the commerce originally was coastal from moving the cows to finding a wife.  All being overwritten by an anglo Scottish centrist hegemony which said if you built a road you could tax it.  my mother in law wa born in a house, now abandoned, with no road and barely a path to it.  About 5 miles from the nearest road.

The second book is about the Yukon salmon and follows them from the spawning grounds down to the ocean again by canoe.  Again I was struck by the massive 6 lane highway available to all the First Nation tribes which is totally ignored by a road centric European invader.  And now the progressive loss of the river as a highway as the young were initially forcibly assimilated, lost their skills and now all drive trucks.