“Visibility 2 meters” (1:10 in video):
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/23/world/asia/taiwan-plane-crash/index.html
Is that even to the nose of the plane?
A few years ago, late winter, we were driving west on I-40 thru the Texas panhandle and hit a wall of the thickest fog we’d ever seen. You couldn’t see the side of the road, let alone any offramps...just the vague glimmer of tail lights ahead; traffic didn’t slow, so we white-knuckled it for close to a hundred miles - virtually blind and going 70MPH, praying that somebody coming up from behind didn’t run through our tailpipe.
That’s got to be a typo or a screwup. 2 meters visibility is effectively “zero/zero” weather (zero ceiling zero visibility), and the only types of aircraft allowed to land in that weather are those with highly sophisticated Category III auto-land systems—AND, the landing would only be permitted at an airport with special high-precision ILS systems that the computers onboard the airplane could use to make an automatic landing. In short, both the airplane and the particular runway have to be certified for Category III landings.
I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think a regional turboprop like an ATR-72 would be certified for Cat III autoland. I could be wrong, though, but I’d be surprised.
}:-)4