Can we talk about the trick I found for reading wind at 200 ft?

Last Tuesday I was on a 180 ft tower crane near the river in Portland and the gusts were bouncing between 15 and 25 mph, so my load of plywood bundles was swinging way more than I liked. I started watching the exhaust steam off a building stack across the lot instead of my little wind sock, and it showed me the lulls about 4 seconds before they hit, which let me time every landing clean. Does anyone else use smoke or flags or anything besides the sock to read the gusts up top?

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laura9404d ago

I read a piece from a glider pilot group where they talked about this exact kind of thing, using smoke and dust and even birds to see what the air is doing before it gets to you. One guy said he watches the tree tops on the far side of the field because the leaves flip over a few seconds ahead of the gust hitting the runway. There was also something about parking lots and how heat ripples off the blacktop can show you where the wind is pushing. The main takeaway was that any steady visual cue beats a wind sock because the sock only tells you what is happening right now, not what is coming. Your steam trick fits that same idea perfectly, anything that shows the air moving upstream gives you a heads up.

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