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Valley of the SunWeather Talk
Home›Valley of the Sun›Frying, Not Flying, in High Heat

Frying, Not Flying, in High Heat

By Andrea Aker
August 17, 2009
2081
5

Excerpt from Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona, a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published June 21, 2000.)

One of my masters wants me to fry an egg on the sidewalk. He thinks we should video it and put it up on the Web. I don’t know. I figure if it’s hot enough for a sidewalk egg fry, it’s too hot to be standing around outside frying eggs.

EngineI told him it was a good idea, but maybe we should wait until it cooled off. Then, I gave him my ballpoint pen and showed him how it works and he went away happy.

I think the last time we did the egg-frying thing was in 1990, when it hit 122 on June 26. It was so hot that some big jets were grounded at Sky Harbor International Airport.

This is why, according to Arv Schultz, a retired commercial pilot and publisher of Arizona Airways and the Sky Harbor Airport News: At the time, the calculations in the operating manuals for some jets didn’t
take into account temperatures over 120 degrees.

The temperature has to do with something called “density altitude,” which has to do with how much fuel and other weight you can carry and how much runway you need to take off.

“I’m not going to say the air is thinner (when it’s hot),” Schultz said. “It’s just that the density of the air is such that it requires a long take-off roll.”

Steve Biggs, Phoenix’s deputy aviation director for operations, said the numbers problem affected Boeing 737s. Other planes, such as DC-9s, had manuals that went over 120.

However, because of the density altitude thing, DC-9s that normally carried 110 passengers were taking off with just 49 people and no luggage on board.

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5 comments

  1. Peter Jones 18 August, 2009 at 02:03 Reply

    Working here at Sky Harbor, I heard about this extreme heat effect closing down the airport before. I look at it this way. When “climate change” becomes so hot the planes can’t fly, then they won’t be adding CO2 to the air anymore, and therefore, the climate will improve. Or we’ll figure out a different “cleaner” jet engine to drive our aircraft with. “Back To The Future” here we come!

  2. Lester LeMay 18 August, 2009 at 19:30 Reply

    I remember that day well. Our son-in-law was a postal carrier that day, working outside. He also had diabetes and the heat got too much for him and he called for emergency help. As they were rolling him into the hospital a news team was covering the “High Heat” and got his picture.
    Over in Kansas city, his grandparents were watching the news when they saw him and said “That looks like Bobby!” “No,” grandma said, “they would have called us if it was him.” He has since retired from the USPO.

  3. BOBAZ 23 August, 2009 at 11:28 Reply

    Hey Clay is a blast, but PLEEEEEEEZEEEE Let us see his picture. You can imagne the weird images one fabricates just from his articles and from his voice.

    [[IF that is really the mystery man}]

    Comeon now be nice—let us see him–just one time—OK??

  4. Phirestorm 9 July, 2011 at 08:04 Reply

    I am glad that you passed on the frying egg thing. It has been SO overdone. Every year at least one news crew has to make a big deal over it somewhere in the metro Phoenix area.
    BTW, man’s contribution to climate change is insignificant compared to natural volcanic emissions from active vents. On the order of 97% for the planet, 3% for man’s technology. (Now that’s an abstract thread to keep your spreadsheets busy with)

  5. SaraD 13 August, 2012 at 13:24 Reply

    I still have a tee-shirt: “I survived 122*, Phoenix, Arizona, June 26, 1990”. In the summer, I take it out of my closet to remind me that it could be worse.

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