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This story portrays a chain of events that almost led to a Class A flight mishap-events that took almost 4 days to blossom.
The Scenario
A German Air Force unit was transferring its aircraft from the east coast to the west coast of the United States. The highly experienced aircrews performed the necessary preflight and route preparations for the trip to their destination, as well as their selected alternate airfields. The stopover airfields were able to support TACAN and ILS approaches even though the transferring aircraft could only fly TACAN approaches.
The Players
Due to technical problems, one of the deploying aircraft had to abort the planned takeoff and was rescheduled to depart 4 days later. Again the crew went into action and preflighted for the planned mission, filed a flight plan, and requested a weather forecast the day prior. The day of the mission, the crew received another weather briefing and read the NOTAMs. The crew felt the weather for the trip was reasonable-gradual weather improvements with clear skies after takeoff and visibility of more than 8 kilometers at the destination and alternate airfields.
"As the Knuckles Whiten..."
Halfway into a planned 3-hour flight, the crew couldn't ignore the simple facts that they still had not been able to see the ground, and the headwinds at altitude were 40 to 50 knots stronger than what was briefed by the weather shop. They decided they'd better get a weather update for the destination airfield which was now about 200 NM away.
It took almost 10 minutes (70 NM) to acquire the weather update due to the high volume of air traffic. The weather report they got was absolutely unbelievable: WIND CALM, VISIBILITY 1/4 MILE, CEILING 100 FEET OBSCURED. The...