Bart Bear's Blog

For most of our recent trip to Hamilton Island the weather was bad, but it started to clear up for the last few days. On one of these days I saw a freak of weather that must have really upset lots of pilots and passengers. In the top photo you can see a long, low cloud just above the water. You can see the top of a hill on Dent Island (the next island across) and if you have really good eyes you can see a small helicopter in the top of the fog. Well, the bottom photo shows you what it looks like there in clear weather. That's right, the airport runway was under the low cloud. What happened was that after the rain the combination of very wet ground and a warm wind that came over the highest part of the island caused this very low cloud in a long strip at the foot of the hills, just where the airport is. It stayed there for most of the day. I have seen cloud like this hugging the tops of hills, but never a long strip at sea-level. The rest of the island was in sunshine, just a bit of high cloud. For hours we saw aircraft circling the island, trying to get a clear patch big enough to land safely in. We sat at the end of the runway for a while and saw two big jets having to cancel their try at the last moment and roar back up, just over our heads. Exciting stuff for small bears but it must have been really frustrating for the pilots who could see the whole island except for the bit they really needed to see, and for the passengers who lost most of the first day of their holiday.

Labels: aircraft, Hamilton Is, Queensland