It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

It was pretty stormy and as I was looking outside, I was thinking it might be a good night for plane pictures.  So I popped into FlightAware to see what was flying into Metro.  It looked like they had three race track patterns set up to wait out the storms.  It was clearing up here, so I figured it would be clearing up around here, so I figured it would clear up around Metro shortly.  Well at least it would clear up long enough so a few planes could land.
One of the planes that I saw in the pattern was Fed Ex 505 which is the MD-11 flying in from Memphis.  Unfortunately, the clearing up I saw in Ypsilanti was just a brief reprieve because they ended up diverting the MD-11 to Cleveland.   It started to clear up just before it got too dark, so I managed to get a couple pictures.

 Endeavor 3449 was a CJR-900 on a flight from Omaha, Nebraska to Detroit.  Despite spending some time in the queue, it only ended up being 20 minutes late.  I honestly would like to learn more about what they do in these situations and how they decide what's going to stay in the pattern and what's going to land.

 SkyWest 4829 was a flight from Dayton.  This is is a CRJ-200. I kind of liked the look of the skies and there was some lightning.  I was hoping I would get some lightning in one of my shots.  Guess I'm not that lucky.

 I decided to stick around a little longer because it looked like they were letting a few more planes in.  Lindbergh 6183 was a flight from Indianapolis.  This is normally about an hour long flight but with the time spent playing Nascar, it became an almost two hour flight.

 Delta 1357 was a 737 arriving from Milwaukee.

This Boeing 717 was arriving from New Orleans.

Even though I only got a couple of pictures, I don't think it was a waste of time.  They were still pretty neat.  As I've said a few times, I prefer gray skies to blue skies sometimes.