Roehris Aviation Pages - Gallery on the job

This day I was called to duty from standby. Happy to fly some hours instead of hanging 'round, I boarded a Lufthansa Flight at Frankfurt, which brought me to Hannover. During the two hours of planned "buffer time" between Lufthansa arrival and check-in of our flight, I quickly visited our HLF headquarters to say hello to different people like to our crew planners and our human resources department. I then met my crew, and soon we were airborne, heading southeast towards Antalya. On our way down, the air was already "bubbly" and convective, ready to pop up some thunderstorms. We were therefore alerted and took on some more fuel at Antalya, allowing us some extra manoeuvers or holdings inbound to Frankfurt, should the forecast be accurate and the weather murky. On our way back to Frankfurt, I caught some interesting cloud formations. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
	Turnaround at Antalya was quick despite our full load of 271 passengers. We are soon ready to takeoff on runway 18L (yes, the new one!), to fly a KUMRU departure towards the north, direction Afyon in central Turkey.
	Captain Jörg-Dieter Katins enjoys the views of the Taurus mountains gliding past beneath our Airbus.
	Approaching the Afyon (KFK) VOR, a large thunderhead is standing in our way.
	But a quick look at the weather radar brings some carification: The only "active" zone is the buildup to the left, on the western end of the whole cumulonimbus (CB) cloud. There it's really active, with heavy precipitation, hail and severe turbulence according to the weather radar. The whole cloud "monster" to the middle and right of the picture is only a quite dense blownaway part of a former thunderstorm buildup, and is only showering, but not this active.
	Based on weather radar information, we take a track to the east of the thunderstorm, and fly well above it...
	...even if it might look as if we were crashing into the buildup soon.
	The thunderstorm cloud glides past beneath the belly of our bus...
	...guided and well-observed by Jörg-Dieter.
	"He, you got a thunderstorm chasing your neck!" We are past the huge cloud, and are heading towards Istanbul and later on towards Varna at Bulgaria's black sea coastline.
	Two hours later, we are crossing the border between Austria and Germany in the region of Linz, heading towards Nürnberg and Würzburg. The atmosphere is still unstable, and several thunderstorms are lingering around in the southern part of the country.
	A very "light-hearted" buildup lies exactly in our path, and as we are already descending from FL380 to FL240 on request of Rhine radar, we will well be touching it. But as we are well ahead of schedule and flying slowly (this reduces the effect of turbulence in clouds), and the weather radar confirms what we see visually (there is no activity in this faint cloud), we decide to penetrate the cloud.
	Then let us ride it, Captain!
	Interesting colors and effects.
	The farther we descend, the more "dangerous" is the look of the cloud.
	Famous last words... "no, it's so small, nothing will happen" :-)
	During penetration of the faint mist the cloud consists of.
	We made it, and felt even no bump.
	To the right, there are even gaps without moisture and clouds.
	A view back "over the shoulder".
	We take a direct heading towards LEDKI, the final approach point of ILS25L into Frankfurt, Jörg-Dieter provides the latest weather report to the passengers and tells them goodbye, and soon we touch down picture-perfect on Frankfurts southern parallel runway, taxy to the gate and spit out our "self-unloading cargo" (passengers in the terms of an old United B747 captain) into the jetbridge at gate A15.