Pilot Takes Awesome Photo Of Haboob In Phoenix

Aerial view of thunderstorm and haboob
approaching Phoenix Sunday.  

Ryan Vermillion was piloting a Southwest Airlines flight Sunday that departed the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

His was the last flight that departed before the airport closed for a time, due to a haboob, says the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. 

A haboob is a big wall of dust that often accompanies a gust front from a thunderstorm in desert locations during monsoon season, which is now.

The dust is blinding and dangerous, so they always close the airport when one hits.

Once Vermillion got the plane up to 11,000, he steered east, back toward Phoenix and on to his destination.

He got a great view of the haboob and the thunderstorm causing it, and the photo is in this post. Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see.

Sometimes haboobs can cause pileups on local freeways since visibility drops to such low levels, but in this instance, there were no reports of serious problems in and around Phoenix.

Watch This Plane Get Hit By Lightning In Atlanta

A plane apparently waiting for a storm to clear
at the Atlanta airport was struck by lightning Tuesday.  

Planes in flight get hit by lightning all the time.

Aircraft are designed to take such hits with little or no damage, and passengers inside the planes are pretty much always safe, even if the lightning bolts scare the bejeezus out of them.

The strike here is a bit different.

In Atlanta, Georgia, Tuesday, there was a ground stop at busy Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as a strong thunderstorm with lots of lightning swept through.

Jack Perkins was aboard one of the planes stacked up on the ground waiting out the bad weather, and he decided to film the long line of airliners waiting to take off.

He captured a dramatic lightning bolt smacking into one of those planes.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution had no word if there was anybody on the plane at the time of the strike.

There's no reports of any injuries among anyone aboard the plane, though I've seen a lot of jokes that the plane had to return to the gate for "bio cleaning" the soiled seats left by passengers who had the wits and other things scared out of them by the lightning.

Here's the video:

Glad I Wasn't On This Flight To Netherlands Saturday

Big tree down in Amsterdam, The Netherlands after
worst summer storm on record Saturday. Photo
by Annemarje Heijerman via Instagram.  

The severest summer wind storm to hit the Netherlands at least since reliable records began in 1901 swept through Saturday, killing at least one person, injuring several others and causing widespread damage.

Winds gusted as high as 75 mph along the coast.  Tree damage was very bad in and around Amsterdam.

This wasn't a local thunderstorm. A strong low pressure system, very unusual for this time of year, blew across the region.

That storm did touch off a lot of severe thunderstorms ahead of its cold front in Poland and other countries.

One video that came out of the storm was a KLM flight trying to land in the storm. Spoiler: It did make it, and nobody got hurt, but I would have hated to be in this plane: