The heaviest hailstone that has been authenticated by official authorities fell during a severe hailstorm in the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh on April 14th, 1986. It weighed in at 2.25 pounds (1.0 kg). The intense hailstorm killed 92 people.

This left 92 logs available, and out of this number no fewer than 73 show that hail was experienced at some time or other, that is, 79 per cent of the observers, in other words, four out of five visitors to the Arctic regions, fell in with hail.

The deadly storm killed 246 people with pieces of hail as large as “goose eggs, oranges and cricket balls.” In the U.S., hailstorms resulting in loss of human life are quite rare. NOAA keeps records of hail and other severe weather fatalities each year. Since 2000, only four people have been killed by hail.

Hail forms when strong currents of rising air, known as updrafts, carry droplets of water high enough that they freeze. This is why it can still hail in the summertime – the air at ground level may be warm, but it can still be cold enough higher up in the sky.

The so-called “gorilla” hail (term coined by storm chaser Reed Timmer) damaged multiple vehicles with dents and destroyed windshields. Last week, similar weather in east Texas produced large hailstones and high winds, causing damage to trees and power lines in the area.

Hail is frozen precipitation that can grow to very large sizes through the collection of water that freezes onto the hailstone’s surface. Hailstones begin as embryos, which include graupel or sleet, and then grow in size.

Americans define sleet as ice pellets. It’s very similar to hail, but much smaller — less than 5 millimeters in diameter — and forming under different conditions. Sleet is a winter weather occurrence and is usually appear as clear, hard pellets..

It is a mixture of human biowaste and liquid disinfectant that freezes at high altitude. Airlines are not allowed to dump their waste tanks in mid-flight, and pilots have no mechanism by which to do so; however, leaks sometimes do occur.

You can get stuck on a plane toilet if you flush while sitting down. You can get stuck, but only if your body forms a perfect seal on the vacuum toilet. This is difficult to do. Adam Savage of “Mythbusters” tried it out, and despite serious suction, got up without a problem.

When you fly, the pressurized cabin can make you want to poop. That’s a lot of poop, and it requires a miracle of engineering to handle it all. That’s where the airplane-toilet flush comes in, a noise so loud it’s as if the toilet bowl opened up to the skies to release its contents.

Yes, the FAA permits pilots to listen to music as long as it’s not distracting. Some headphones have the ability to have two inputs, one for comms and one for music, and can silence the music whenever audio is detected on the comms input.

The traditional method of disposing human waste from trains is to deposit the waste onto the tracks or, more often, onto nearby ground using what is known as a hopper toilet. This ranges from a hole in the floor to a full-flush system (possibly with sterilization).

sleet

Ice storms occur when precipitation particles melt and then fall through a layer of cold air near the ground. Sleet results when the layer of subfreezing air at the surface extends upward far enough so that raindrop freezes into a little ball of ice.

“Whilst ice falls from aircraft are rare, ice can form on the outside of an aircraft when it is cruising at high altitude and as it descends into warmer air, these chunks may break away and fall to the ground. This rare occurrence usually results in discoloured ice and is commonly referred to as ‘blue ice’.

The primary reason airplanes don’t fly over the Pacific Ocean is because curved routes are shorter than straight routes. Flat maps are somewhat confusing because the Earth itself isn’t flat. Rather, it’s spherical. As a result, straight routes don’t offer the shortest distance between two locations.

On a lot of planes you won’t really have a choice, so the “right” lavatory is the one with an operative bowl and a sink. But if you find yourself on a larger plane with entire bathroom sections, find the largest concentration of bathrooms and go there.