See subject.
Query because today that prime intellectual resource for college lads, Nailed It | Nailed It Memes, Pictures and Videos - theCHIVE, posted the clip and filed it under their “Awesome” and “Nailed It!” categories.
Pilots have mad skillz, and I always thought instrument landing was just another thing.
Also, what was that big scary “whoop” sound for?
Airports never close. Pilots can choose to land or not based on the reported weather. Individual runways close to have the snow plowed off, but the reason for the closure isn’t that the snow depth exceeds some standard, but rather that the runway becomes covered with snowplows and hitting one would be bad.
Generally speaking, the worst acceptable weather allows the reported horizontal visibility to be as low as 300 feet or 100 meters. Which at touchdown speed is seeing about 1 second into your future. There are no ceiling height limits associated with such approaches / landings, so the fog can reach right down to ground level. In a big airplane your face is 40-50 feet off the runway when the main gear touches down.
These approaches and landings are flown by the autopilot with the pilots monitoring. If anything on the instruments or out the window looks crappy you go around. A very late decision to go around will result in the airplane bouncing off the ground. If there was an empty runway under you, that’s not a cause for alarm. If instead it was a car park or a freeway or an occupied runway that would be problematic.
The “whoop whoop” at the end is the autopilot disconnect alarm. As you get down to taxi speed you disconnect the autopilot and begin steering manually. The noise ensures everyone in the cockpit is aware of the transition. It also sounds if the autopilot disconnects on its own due to malfunction. You can imagine the Keystone Kops event that could happen if both pilots thought HAL was flying and HAL thought the pilots were flying.
At the end we can see visibility is about 300 feet. The white lights at runway edge are 100 feet apart. If you can see one directly alongside you, plus the next 3, you have 300 feet. On the film we see about 1-1/2 lights ahead, but the brightness is such that we can’t pick out any more. I bet, based on experience, that they could see another 1 or so.
It’s also commonly the case that the near end of the runway has better visibility as the fog is stirred up by all the aircraft, and warmed by all the exhaust. At the far end, or during taxi, it’s not uncommon for visibility to get worse.
Getting lost while taxiing is another way to become famous. Many people have been killed over the years in accidents caused by a lost airplane taxing onto an active runway.
“Awesome” and “nailed it” are comments by whoever posted the video, not by the guys doing it. For them it’s just another day at work. Not that many airports get dense fog. But the places that do (e.g. London, Frankfurt, Seattle, San Francisco) tend to get it often. So the crews that frequently transit those places get real good at their role in low weather ops.
They have closed the airport here in Portland, Maine many times due to snowstorms. Hurricanes, thunderstorms, and terrorist attacks also have a tendency to shut airports down.
Even when airports are closed, surely there must be times when you can’t just leave a 777 up there…
I mean, take-off is optional, but landing, in some form or other, usually isn’t.
[ETA @boffking]
I was exaggerating a bit. 
One of my pet peeve minor hot buttons is the common laypersons’ assumption that ATC is the one making all the decisions. If the question is “Does the weather ever make safe operations impossible or all-but impossible?” the answer is “Sure; of course weather does that.” (And at PWM in winter more often than not :D)
If the question is “Does ATC monitor the weather and switch the airport on and off according to their standards?” the answer is “No, not really.”
The truth is a pilot is completely free to land or take off in a thunderstorm or dense snowstorm. ATC doesn’t close the field. Company policy and the regulations against careless and reckless operation are applicable though. So e.g. aircraft very rarely take off under an obvious thunderstorm
As a practical matter everybody is working to the same goal: move the airplanes as efficiently as possible consistent with the regulatory standards vs. the weather at hand. In some spots we have a more complete perspective that ATC does and at other times they’re the ones with the bigger, better picture. We each defer to the other as appropriate to get the job done with manageable risk.
[ETA: as **Martian Bigfoot **said so much more succinctly than I]
The highly finite nature of fuel supplies means that occasionally pilots need to land in worse-than-normally-permissible weather when all the random factors line up badly. The one sure thing in aviation is that we’ve never left one up there yet, and barring orbital vehicles, we never will.
Bold added
Who/which company? So when I hear on the radio “JFK has grounded all flights for the duration” I think everyone infers that “the company” is JFK, or Port Authority of New York. Did they take a flash poll of the local airline bosses?
Inferences can be wrong, of course.
Talking to some paragliding pilots they can land anywhere, but are responsible for their landing anywhere.
It gets a bit deep a bit quickly. Airlines and most bizjets operate under instrument flight rules (IFR) which means all operations are a cooperative effort between ATC both at the airport and enroute, and the aircraft. Contrast that with visual flight rules (VFR) wherein (simplifying a bit) pilots are free to go where, when, and how they choose with zero interaction with ATC.
What often happens at busy terminals is enough thunderstorms fill the local area that there’s no hunk of clear air through which to route airplanes. The few up there are picking their way to a safe harbor as best they can and ATC recognizes they could not process the usual fire hose of departures through their usual finely pre-drawn tubes in the sky since the tubes are full of weather the pilots refuse to fly through.
So as a traffic management effort they say “we refuse to accept you into our inflexible IFR departure and enroute structure since you don’t fit.” For every you waiting in line.
In Olden Dayes it was common for some brave soul to say “To heck with that, I’ll launch VFR, pick my way along at low altitude until I find clear enough air, then ask to rejoin the IFR system 50 miles away where all is sunshine and unicorns.” To which ATC would say “OK”, since it’s not their place to say “no” to a legal request.
Sometimes that worked; sometimes it didn’t. Nowadays it’s simply Not Done.
Looking now at arrivals rather than departures …
Busy hubs, e.g. JFK have a certain well-known and well-understood capacity for arrivals per hour. Which depends a bit on the weather and winds. In general airlines collectively schedule up to or slightly past that maximum good weather capacity. So when the weather is much less than good and capacity is much less than normal, something’s got to give.
FAA ATC HQ is the neutral arbiter that says “we think that 4 hours from now we’ll only be able to accept X arrivals per hour, which is 50% of normal scheduled. We therefore decree that we will not accept inbound IFR flights towards JFK in excess of that number.” And they have a rationing program to intelligently and “fairly” enforce that reduction across the competing interests.
Naturally aircraft already airborne coming from distant locations have priority over aircraft that have yet to take off from close-in locations. So the priority scheme at e.g. JFK has the effect of allowing the transcon and transatlantic flights to arrive while killing the short-haul commuters coming from other cities in the northeast.
Just curious: when did the Olden Dayes end, approximately, and why? Too many accidents or close calls?
Would have been common into the 60s, and fading out by the late 70s.
There used to be much more of a premium placed on getting the job done against the odds. Part of that was there simply wasn’t good weather info available, so the only way to know whether it was good enough, or too bad to stand, was to go look.
The first guy in line (or maybe the hotshot just behind him) would volunteer to go see and report back whether he was pleased with his decision or now wanted his Mommy.
Nowadays with networked nationwide hi-def radar, etc., there are very few scenarios where we need to go see to know how bad it is(n’t).
The other thing is the risk tolerance has changed. We’re now 1000x safer than 707s in the 1960s were. No exaggeration, it’s 1000x. And we’re working daily to lop another zero off our accident rate. The industry didn’t get there by continuing to accept occasional risk-taking in the name of machosity or schedule reliability.
I realized I didn’t directly answer the OP’s title Q:
How rare is it for a civilian jet to land in zero vis fog?
Under truly zero vis conditions, airplanes don’t ever land except in emergency conditions where the alternative is fuel exhaustion. So the direct answer to the title Q is “It’s very, very rare, bordering on never.”
As said in my first post, 300 feet/100 meters is as low-vis as it gets, and even that is restricted to only the most highly equipped airports, aircraft, and crews.
For those very, very low-vis approaches we don’t actually need to see anything when we execute the maneuver; HAL will land and stop on the runway centerline all by himself. But we’re not permitted to attempt the maneuver unless the visibility sensors along the runway indicate the vis is at least 300ft/100 meters.
There are certainly days in fog-prone places where once stopped on the runway we can’t see to taxi; we’re high enough up that all we can see is one or two lights embedded in the ground and no context or signage. In which case a pickup truck covered in flashing emergency lights comes out to us, and we follow the glow of his light show as he picks his way along from what he can see down at ground level.
Eventually we’ll have onboard nav systems with radar & GPS & synthetic vision to be able to navigate safely on the ground to the gate with negligible forward vis. As they’re also working on synthetic vision to see through the clouds to land. But the industry is not there yet.
I seem to remember a ‘Sight Seeing’* flight in Hawaii that ‘collided with terrain’ (as the NTSB likes to say) while flying ‘under the clouds’.
It seems the pilots in this operation had developed a system whereby they would fly from one tall, visible-even-if-nothing-else-was landmark to another.
This time, that didn’t work.
The term for this ‘brilliant’ technique is ‘scud running’, if you want to lose respect for the intelligence of certain pilots.
Thanks, LSLGuy.
By the way, it is legal (under IFR rules) for a General Aviation airplane to take off in 0-0 conditions (probably not wise, but legal)
Brian
I did that at Cape Girardeau, MO. in an Aero Star 601. I had 3 feet of visibility over the nose, I could see about a foot of the center stripe. Stripes are how we could find the runway.
The tower was most helpful with the clearance to ‘VFR on top’ and was pleased with our weather report after getting in the clear.
Hard tops at 300 feet AGL with sever clear and unlimited = beautiful day above.
Lots of reasons for going but I have made much more dangerous departures on clear days due to various conditions, locations & equipment. 
What does General Aviation mean?
I lived in St. Louis for many years. I often said “Around here you’re never more than a mile from a beautiful day; shame it’s usually a mile straight up”. Gawd did the seemingly eternal overcasts get on my nerves.
All flying that is neither regulated airlines nor military. Anything from hobbyists in Cessnas to GusNSpot’s aerial photo-mapping work to police and air ambulance helos to helos ferrying workers to oil rigs to bizjets hauling CEOs and tycoons to weekend multi-supermodel orgies.
I’ve got other questions for later, but for now: “to transit” as a transitive verb (hey! heh) is a new one for me. Not quite at professional argot level, but definitely not standard English.
Trade-specific English is fun.
Scroll down past the ads to see the verb-forms: Transit Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster. Per this site, that usage dates to the 15th century.
Huh. I still think it’s weird.
“Once you transit that stretch of woods, the hiking should be much easier,” their example, also sounds wrong.
But so far I’m outvoted.