Pilots Flee Frances…
It looks like airplanes and airports will weather Hurricane Frances a lot better than they did Hurricane Charley but that doesn’t mean things are terribly pleasant in Florida at the moment. If Charley hit like a set of brass knuckles, Frances is more like a big wet sponge, dropping up to 11 inches of rain in some areas and packing winds of up to 100 mph. AVweb contributor Tim Kern said many Florida pilots learned a grim lesson from Charley and got their planes well away from Frances. “All week, the airways heading north were as crowded as the highways,” he told AVweb on Sunday. Kern said many of the areas devastated by Charley (like Punta Gorda and Ft. Myers) are being missed by Frances’s high winds. “A lot of the temporary roofs in the area surely didn’t need the tropical storm-force winds and several inches of additional rain,” he noted.
