Flying Fires -- Fog, Smoke, and VFR or IFR: Introduction

My first memories of fog go back to our family vacations (long before the days of GPS) camping on the Maine coast. Fog was a not infrequent visitor to our corner of the Maine coast. We couldn't see. I still remember the sound of the fog horn from the light house on the island across the way. I knew that fog horn was important to marine interests because it warned of rock outcroppings, shoals, and the like that were shrouded by fog. I continued to run into fog as an adult, most of these encounters were inland. I always try to drive carefully when it is foggy.

I have a few second hand experiences with smoke as a hindrance to visibility, and these experiences. For several years I lived about four miles from an exit to the NJ Turnpike that was near the Hackensack Meadowlands in NJ. See the image below, look north of I-280 and west of the road marked 95 (actually the eastern spur of the NJ Turnpike). You will see a rather large undeveloped area, that is one portion of the Hackensack Meadowlands.

Every so often there would be fire in the Meadowlands that was bad enough to affect traffic on the NJ Turnpike, I-95, and I-280. There may have been traffic accidents on these interstates where smoke was a major player.

But fog, and smoke are not the only hindrance to visibility. Clouds are also a hindrance to visibility for aviation interests. Not having flown on a commercial airliner until I was about fifteen, I never gave much of a thought to clouds as a hindrance to visibility as a child/. I wasn't to fly again until I was in my early twenties. By that time, I saw that planes could and often did fly above the clouds. Sometimes we wouldn't pop out of the clouds until we were getting ready to land. I had a vague realization that the pilots were using instruments, combined with communications from air traffic controllers to navigate. As time went by, I picked up the vocabulary of visual flight rules (VFR) and instrument flight rules (IFR).

After I wrote my article on winds as affects aerial wildland fire fighting, I got interested in the question of fog and smoke as affects these aerial operations. After some e-mails with a couple of my tanker pilot friends, I knew that I had to begin this series by introducing VFR and IFR where I will provide an overview of each. I'd like to thank the tanker pilot friends whom I corresponded with for their help in this series of articles.

Here is a list of articles in this series (revised after the fact to include links to each article):

1. VFR, I can see (Jan 6)
2. IFR, I can't see but I have instruments (Jan 8)
3. Fog (Jan 11)
4. Inversions (Jan 12)
5. Flying fires: VFR or IFR? (Jan 13)
6. Reflections (Jan 18)