[radec]

Birmingham is in CENTRAL Time, not Eastern Time. So that wipes out your hour difference.

No. You're misunderstanding me. At 4:50 CDT (5:50 EDT the time of the crash) there is not a severe storm to be seen in the Birmingham area.

See for yourself. On your weather map, click radar only run the loop the the entire morning of the 14th.

When you back away, what you will see, from a lot of radar reporting stations in that area, is temperature inversion. That is because a cold front pushed through the Birmingham area the day before.

What is a temperature inversion?

A temperature inversion is a thin layer of the atmosphere where the normal decrease in temperature with height switches to the temperature increasing with height. An inversion acts like a lid, keeping normal convective overturning of the atmosphere from penetrating through the inversion.

This can cause several weather-related effects. One is the trapping of pollutants below the inversion, allowing them to build up. If the sky is very hazy, or is sunsets are very red, there is likely an inversion somewhere in the lower atmosphere. This happens more frequently in high pressure zones, where the gradual sinking of air in the high pressure dome typically causes an inversion to form at the base of a sinking layer of air.

Another effect that an inversion has is to make clouds just below the inversion to spread out and take on a flattened appearance.

Still another effect is to prevent thunderstorms from forming. Even in an air mass that is hot and humid in the lowest layers, thunderstorms will be prevented if an inversion in the lower atmosphere is keeping this air from rising. The conceptual opposite of a temperature inversion is an unstable air layer.

So.... severe weather had nothing to do with this crash. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong if you think so.

I'll stick with the airline captain with 43 years of experience who obviously looked at the weather at the time of the crash (before opening his mouth and putting his reputation on the line).

This will be my last post on the subject for now.

The black boxes should tell us more.

Good discussion.

Peace Out.

[Yosemitest]

Do you think after 30 years of air traffic control experience, watching D-Brites and regular Radar scopes, that I'm not familiar with temperature inversion?
What you're referring to is standard ground clutter, from having the radar beam turned up too high.
Temperature inversions can happen in the morning but usually happen after sunrise, and are rarely seen at night, unless over water or over a large city.
More often they're seen in the afternoon, at or just after sunset, and almost always when an approaching cold front is pushing out warmer air masses.
But that usually brings rain storms, and thunderstorms.
But weather radar is tuned slightly different that air traffic control radar, and I'm more familiar with ATC Radar.
However, we had to continuously watch the weather out the windows in the Tower,and you learn through years of experience of seeing out the window, compared to the computer weather loops that you monitor, and compared to the ATC Radar on the D-Brite or ATC RAdar scope when in the IFR room, what those returns on the scopes are.
I learned how to tell the difference between early morning bugs risings with the sunrise, birds migrating through the area, wind gust shear lines out in front of the main storms approaching, and your average temperature inversion.
It's visual and it requires motion to get a good feel for what your seeing.

You're grasping at video game "straws" and you're trying to compare all your years of playing with Flight Simulators to the real world.
There IS a difference!

Here'sa another question:

Is the BHM Airport a manned weather station, or is it an automated weather station that is remotely controlled from a central station in Atlanta Center?