CBreezy

Someone toss Nick a life vest.

Puddytatt

So much wasted typing after this when you could have just stopped there.

FangsF15

Bingo.

"...but [I'm going to judge and throw shade anyway]."

Vsop

Why?

2StgTurbine

You will not be in a "world of hurt". If UNFORECASTED weather causes you to divert to a field that doesn't have customs, it will be a pain in the a$$, but that's for the company to deal with. If a crew ends up diverting to a non-customs airport, I will assume they came to that decision after much thought. As soon as holding is an issue, you've got 3-4 pilots worth of experience all thinking about a backup plan.

I had a similar experience happened to me and while it was a long day, I never heard from the FAA or customs. Last flight out of Canada and thunderstorms caused a ground at our destination. A few hours go by and we are at the end of the duty day, but customs has already closed for the day. A couple of hours later and operations got someone in customs to open up. We exceeded our duty day, filled out an ASAP, went to the hotel, and then returned to work the next day.

Nantonaku

I checked the ATC tapes at Seattle. The airport was NOT below cat 3 mins. Go listen. They never called any of the RVRs below cat 3 mins. That flight said they were fine and then came back later and said they were going to Yakima. All the 737’s got in just fine before and after they diverted. All of our airbus have lower mins than the 73’s. Was the CA high mins or was something broken on the plane because the airport was most definitely NOT below mins for any of our planes in normal ops without a high mins CA.

Khantahr

I'll take your word for it, I'm not going to waste my time listening to recordings. ATC can sharpshoot RVR, published reports can't.

Nantonaku

Okay, don’t waste your time then. I’m just trying to figure out what happened and maybe learn something at the expense of this crew.

What published reports are you talking about? The ATIS wasn’t publishing RVR’s. Only approach and tower were giving them out.

CBreezy

Just curious, what is the mins on the big bus?

Khantahr

The FAA RVR monitor website. Updates every minute or so, I think.

I'm just going off of memory, I was watching the TAFs for the area throughout the day. We took off around 1945 I think with 600 RVR on 16L IIRC.