In October 2006, following a series of fatal crashes, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a safety alert describing procedures pilots should follow when dealing with “thunderstorm encounters.” Despite these instructions, incidents continued to occur. One concern is that terminology often used by meteorologists is unfamiliar to some in the aviation community. For example, the fatal crash of the Hawker 800A at Owatonna, Minnesota, U.S., in June 2008 (See “Too Late to Go”) involved a “mesoscale convective complex.” The crash of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009, involving an Airbus A330 with a loss of 228 lives, was believed to involve a mesoscale convective system near the equator. More recently, the fatal crash of a medical helicopter in March 2010 in Brownsville, Tennessee, U.S., was related to a “mesoscale convective system with a bow shape.”1
To improve the warnin…
