Runway conditions is one part of aviation that has never quite sat right with me. There are so many vaguely worded definitions and word-of-mouth interpretations for it. The testing equipment varies widely from airport to airport. I've heard rumors of wet being "we patted a napkin on the runway and it came up damp."

I've had several occasions where it's raining and the field is reported as dry, or it's dry and has been dry but they're calling wet. Sometimes we'll get a "standing water" when in reality there's a puddle on the overrun. Not a huge deal to get more braking action than expected, but I've been in situations where we had to offload gas to be able to takeoff with poor runway conditions.

My understanding from talking to the airfield ops guys is they do their best to make a rational call, but it's difficult to say a runway is dry when there's a puddle because god forbid an accident does occur.

The engineer in me knows that there isn't going to be some elegant solution to this that just scans the runway and spits out a number that we throw into our performance calculators, but it does feel like there should be a better solution.