AssemblyBoard

snowfall n santa hats, in honor of chicago's snow dump this afternoon that has me stranded at work  :(

Wow, Brian--cool snow flakes here in California!!

feel free to take all you like. i feel like we are being too greedy, hogging them all here.  :D

i sure picked the wrong day to drive to work. it looks like every major road is a complete parking lot.  :o

Can you give us some windshield wipers to.........geT............rID...............OF...... THESE...... SNOWFLAKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!  :P

Had I known it would have taken me over 3 hours to get home from work (and that having left 2 hours early!) I would not have attempted it.

Brian, can you change them into pretty little Christmas lights for a couple days? or maybe pretty green and red christmas cookies? Californians will like them, too.  ;D

i abandoned my car in a metered spot downtown, and took the train home. walking in freshly fallen snow is so nice, and driving in it is just awful. as long as my car is there tomorrow morning, everything should work out great.

We all got to see what is going on in Chicago tonight.  That jet that ran off the runway at Midway got a lot of coverage.

I cannot believe that they actually attempted to land a plane in that storm.  You could watch it pile up on the tops of the emergency vehicles, and could see just how far you could see, or couldn't.

They said that visibility was 1/4 to 1/2 of a mile.  At an approach speed of 200 mph that is just a couple of seconds.

I'll take the train.

Blessings,

Thomas Maddux

while i like visiting the snow for play-time, i am sure glad i don't have to live in it.

Yeah, it's chilly here, too. I've got my Ugg boots on and the heat cranked up. It's 65 degrees outside! That is FREEZING by Calfornia standards!  >:D

Yeah, and I'm always trying to convince one of my kids to take Midway instead of O'hare, because it's only 10 minutes from the house and so convenient.  :o Compared to O'hare, it's like a bus stop.

The problem there is that it's in the middle of the city and there's no more room for expansion.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051210/ap_on_re_us/midway_accident

Chicago suburb? What kind of car is it?  >:D

These Santas are cute.

Moonie,

I flew into Midway in 1961 in a North Central Airlines Convair 440.  No problem for the old prop jobs. 

A bunch of us from Kincheloe AFB in northern Michigan were going on a TDY to Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. 

737's have good short field performance.  They fly into Midway every day.  The weather seems to have been the problem.

Thomas Maddux

I've landed at Midway when visibility was zero
speed was 152mph

Tommie, I figured you wouldn't let that one go.

The weather is always a problem here. But this kind of accident has never happened at Midway before. I've landed here in no visibility (as a passenger)  ;D

"Though the airport had about 7 inches of snow, aviation officials said conditions at the time were acceptable. And the plane did not appear to have any maintenance problems and had undergone a service check Wednesday in Phoenix, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly said."


"No less important is the fact that an especially high level of caution is required whenever severe weather that could compromise a safe landing is obvious and when runway conditions deteriorate," said Marc S. Moller, an aviation attorney and partner at Kreindler & Kreindler. "Weather doesn't cause accidents; people do. The fact that other aircraft safely landed last night before Flight 1248 and that the runway condition was reported as 'fair' would seem to suggest that there was something different about this plane's approach and landing. The 737-700 involved in the Midway crash should have had the auto brake system installed and, if used, that should have stopped the aircraft, given a normal and stable approach by the flight crew. Yesterday's crash is not the first in bad weather that should never have happened."

"Southwest Flight 1248 landed Thursday night on Midway's runway 33 center, the airport's longest at 6,500 feet.  While adequately long for jets of that size, and even for the larger 757, such relatively short runways significantly narrow pilots' margin of error — requiring even more precise control of speed and descent rate, and a more precise touchdown farther up the runway.

"That last factor became an issue in the Air France crash. Witnesses noted the plane touched down well past the standard touchdown zone, perhaps as far as halfway down the runway. It was not clear Friday just where the Southwest flight touched down."

i snapped some shots of the whirling chaos on my way home that day, cause i'm just a picture takin kinda guy. i liked how this one turned out:

Wow! Incredible shot, Brian. Suddenly it feels like the tropics here in CA.

Beautiful!
what kind of filter, if any, did you use on this one?
What were your exposure settings?
Verne

thanks!  :)  i really enjoy photography, in an amateur self-taught hobby sort of way.

verne, you asked about exposure settings. it was on auto, with the flash. here is what canon thought the right exposure would be:
1/60s, f/2.8, ccd width 5.69mm, focal length 5.8mm (no filter). i took it with my canon sd300 i mentioned on another thread.

i took a couple shots without flash, and one with. the ones without flash are the more classic "snowy city" shot, included below for comparison. personally i like the more chaotic effect of the flash bouncing off of the snow, and the way it oranged up the lighting.

Tough call, Brian-- they're both great scenes, each in its own way.  I might print & frame one of each if you wouldn't mind...