[CLICKING] PHILIP GREENSPUN:
All right, folks. I know you're excited to
learn about weather data. I've been told you're excited
to learn about weather data. I'm going to do the
first few slides. Tina's going to take
over for the ones that require intelligence. And I'm going to
come back at the end. OK. Remember that VFR,
ordinarily, is a ceiling of 1,000 feet
or more and visibility of three statute miles or more. That's one of the few
things in aviation that's reported in statute
miles is the visibility. As Tina mentioned
earlier, a ceiling is a broken or overcast
layer, or sometimes, if it's really nasty, you'll see
a vertical visibility reported. So here are some of
the abbreviations that you might see
on the right in a METAR. Remember these weather
minimums, so VFR pilots, we're looking at
the weather reports to see if we're going to be
able to maintain these cloud clearances and, generally,
stay out of the clouds. So I wanted to tell you that
it's not quite as hard as you might think because
computer programs make a lot of what you're going
to learn about simpler. On the other hand, we want to
give you the good fundamentals, because what we're
going to show you, these are the basis of what
these computer programs are presenting to you. They're oftentimes
getting the same data and spinning it in some
interesting graphical way. So we're going to show you
all the fundamental text weather that people
have been relying on since at least the '50s. There are weather graphics
you can grab on the web or sometimes in flight. How do you get the
weather on the ground and how do you
get it in the air? So most of what
you're going to see in the rest of this
presentation can actually be summarized by
clever programmers. And I think the cleverest
programmer of all is this guy David Boozer who
taught the class last year. And fortunately, he's taking a
jet type-- well, fortunately, for him he's taking a jet
type rating course right now. So he couldn't be with us,
but here is WeatherSpork. If you want to ever have a
good illustration of the value of an MBA and
studying marketing, just think about the name for
this product of WeatherSpork. Let's say we want to go from
Bedford to the Gaithersburg, Maryland airport. It's going to show us-- this was I think
from Sunday evening. It's pretty nasty
here at Bedford. I believe that's low IFR,
that purple, and then here a marginal VFR, marginal VFR. Actually, sorry, maybe
the blue is a VFR. That's the problem
with color codes. Anyway, you get these symbols
for VFR, marginal VFR, IFR, and low IFR. But here, here's the altitude. We're going from C level up
to 11,000 feet or 12,000 feet at the top. It shows you inside
this blue area where the freezing levels are. It's kind of a weird
mixed up situation here with this freezing level here,
another freezing level here. There's AIRMETs. It looks pretty scary. Once we get down closer to
the DC area, it's not so bad. There's only one
AIRMET and it looks like we could be in the
clear of the clouds up here. But this is a good
way to summarize. It this already shows you
that it's probably not going to be wise
to go on Sunday at, I guess, this was
Sunday at 1:00 PM. OK. Here, notice on the bottom,
the time keeps changing. So we're going from
Sunday at 1:00 PM. The middle screen capture
is to go Sunday at 10:00 PM. This is at eastern time. And the last one is
to go Monday at 8:30. So you can see from this
already that you could take off from Hanscom field,
rise up to 1,500 feet or so on the right,
and just cruise along never even
getting inside a cloud until you landed
at Gaithersburg. That's kind of a low
altitude, so you might end up deciding, well, what I really
want to do is find a hole and go up to about 7,000 or
8,000 feet and go on top of it all and come back
down, but whatever. It looks like you could
probably remain clear of clouds, make it to your destination. You're not going to pass
through a lot of AIRMETs. Over here, let's look at
this one in the middle because it's not
quite as terrifying. There's a low turbulence low
from the surface all the way up to 18,000 feet. If it says a turbulence
AIRMET that goes up to 8,000, that's kind of normal. And oftentimes, if you climb
to four or five or six, it'll smooth out. But if the turbulence is
forecast to go all the way up into the flight levels, you
know that's a pretty ugly day. They're saying there's
going to be low level wind shear from zero to 2000 feet. There's going to
be IFR conditions. And it's going to be gusting
18 knots, so all of that is pretty bad unless
you really have to go. Here look, icing from
the freezing level up to flight level 230, just
a collection of hazards. But also look at the difference
between Sunday and Monday. If you just hang out in the
ground and you're patient. You don't need a
superior level of skill if you have a superior
level of judgment. Here's some more presentations
from WeatherSpork. Again, I kind of love this app. You have all the airports
you're going to fly near. So you go from
Bedford to Worcester, some places in Connecticut. I think that's Morristown
in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Lancaster, anyway, on
the way to Gaithersburg. And it shows you here's
your time of departure. You're going to depart, but hey
look, It would just get to be-- I guess that is. That does mean blue must
be marginal VFR, and then green it's going
to be windy, but it will be nice VFR weather. So if we just wait
a little bit, we won't have to fly through any
areas that are challenging. ForeFlight has a mode where
you can ask for your weather briefing in a PDF format. And this is the first
page of that PDF format. It shows some of the same ideas. There are these graphics, these
blue half moons, if you will, for icing. You can see there's
a key down here. It says icing severity. So up here, you've got
varying degrees of ice. You probably don't
want to be up there in an aircraft like the Cirrus. It doesn't have
de-icing capability. So now I think it
said all up to Tina to talk about the exciting
world of actual weather data. TINA SRIVASTAVA: All right. So we're going to talk
about weather data in the form of reports
as well as forecasts. So what is the difference
between a report and a forecast? So a report is
actually telling you what's actually happening,
so it's a current weather condition at a
particular location. A forecast is a forecast. It's a guess as to what
is going to happen. So it's really important to know
the difference between these. We now have Mark
Nathanson up in the back who's going to be
talking to you at 4:00 about some really cool stuff. And as we talked about,
he's an FAA examiner. Probably doesn't remember
this, but he asked me during my oral exam, for a
given piece of weather data, is that a report or a forecast? And if it's a forecast, how
much should I rely on that or depend on that? And so that's
something to really keep in mind the
difference between knowing what the actual situation
is and what somebody guesses the situation is going to be. And of course, depending
how far out that guess is, it may or may not actually
turn out to be true. So a METAR is a
report, and so it's timestamped so it will
tell you the weather at a particular time and
a particular location. And one thing that's
important to think about when you think
about direction is the way that the
wind is reported. So if you hear it, so like if
you're listening to the ADDS. We talked about the
ADDS quite a bit, so you tune in the ADDS
frequency and you listen to it. They're going to be
telling you that wind direction in magnetic. If you read it on
a printed document, it's pretty much
always at true heading. And certainly, on the internet
as we'll give you some sources, that's like the
same as reading it. We already covered ceilings. I won't get into that. So let's just talk about the
breakdown of a METAR report. So I discussed that generally,
for example, at Bedford. You might hear the METAR
updated every hour or so. And we talked about
the identifier, that this is
information whiskey, maybe an hour
later it's the next as they keep going
through the alphabet. And one time that you
might see it updated more frequently than
once every hour or so is if they need to
do a special report. And so that's the other type
of acronym that you see there S-P-E-C-I, and that's if the
weather is changing a lot. That's usually a bad thing. You don't like weather
changing frequently. It's probably not something
you want to be flying in, but maybe the conditions
are deteriorating, the wind or the
conditions or the ceiling has changed
significantly, so they'll update that information. So there are a whole bunch
of different abbreviations when you read these reports. I highlighted a couple in red. You could make your way
through sort of guessing, OK, thunderstorms is TS. It seems kind of
intuitive, but I highlighted some that are
really, really kind of get you. So hail is GR and mist is BR,
as someone was pointing out on this side. Yeah, so mist, if you just look
at it and you try to think, oh, is it broken? No, broken is BKR. So they just try to
trick you with that's, so try to keep an eye
on those, and it's good to refresh your
memory on these. So this is an example
of a METAR report. So it starts off
with the location and then the first
two numbers, the 16, are telling you that it's
a 16th day of the month. And then it's followed by
1653, so that's the time and has a Z for time in Zulu. We already talked about
how you subtract hours depending on Eastern standard
time versus Daylight Time to get to the current time. And then instead of telling
you a heading of the wind, in this case, it has variables. So sometimes, it will say winds
variable at about four knots, in this case. And then the next
is the visibility, so 10 SM is standing
for 10 statute miles. And then, in this
case, the ceiling is overcast, overcast at 6,000. The next two numbers,
you see the 14 slash 07? So that's talking about the
temperature and the dew point. So who remembers
what is dew point? Yes. AUDIENCE: The
temperature where the air reaches saturation for water. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So we
heard the temperature where the air reaches
saturation for water. So what happens when the dew
point and the temperature are very close to each other? So here, we have seven
degrees Celsius for dew point, 14 degrees Celsius
for temperature. What if the dew point
and the temperature were much closer, only
a couple degrees apart? Yes. AUDIENCE: Clouds would form. TINA SRIVASTAVA: Yeah,
it can be very humid. You could be inside of a cloud
or heavy fog or precipitation. Exactly. So here's a good source
of weather information. So you can go to
AviationWeather.gov and they have a bunch of
menu options up there. So if you click on METAR
right here, this METAR button, it will take you
to a place where you can request the METAR data. And it asks for an ID, so
that's the airport identifier. So in this case, I
wrote in KBED which is Bedford airport,
Hanscom field that we keep referring to. And then you can actually tell
it to decode the data for you. So as much as you
want to memorize all of these different codes and
symbols, in general practice, you can hit decode it
and it'll tell you that. You can look up at the
time, so you can actually ask for weather
data in the past. And you could include a TAF. What does TAF mean? Yes. AUDIENCE: Terminal
area forecast. TINA SRIVASTAVA:
Terminal area forecast. That's right. So if you do that and you hit
Enter, it gives you this data. So first thing it
does is it tells you the date at which it's
producing the data for you. And then the first is the METAR
and the second here is the TAF. And so the METAR here is
telling you the location, so it starts with KBED. And then here is
the information raw, so you see that data right here
or you can have it decoded. So again, the first
two numbers 23-- that's the date-- 20 23rd, and then it gives
you the time in Zulu. And then they
basically go forward with all that information. So it it's defined it here
because it's decoded, so you see the temperature, dew point. So I actually just
updated this this morning so you could see the weather
and what it's looking like. Now I'll go over to the
Document Viewer for a moment. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Oh,
probably don't want the light. Or maybe we probably need this. OK. Qualified personnel are here. I'll entertain you. That first METAR was from PDK. Anybody know where that is? KPDK. Southerners? AUDIENCE: DeKalb. PHILIP GREENSPUN: DeKalb, yes. Peachtree DeKalb in Atlanta. It's the Teterboro or
Hanscom Field of Atlanta. I landed there once
in a Diamond Star. I had to have the wings
taken off in Florida to fix a fuel gauge. I took off from there
and I filed a VFR flight plan, landed in
DeKalb, and I forgot to close my VFR flight plan. So the FAA and flight
service folks at the time, they start searching for
me and calling everybody. And they called the tower at
DeKalb and they said, hey, did you see 505 whiskey tango? And they said, no, we
hadn't seen an airplane. And I really freaked out. And I was right
there on the ramp. So I kept silencing
my phone because I was at a barbecue
place with my friend and didn't want to be disturbed. Anyway, so they called the
mechanic who took the wings off and they told him like
the aircraft was missing. He had some choice words for me. So now, whenever I activate
a VFR flight plan usually, if I do a flight
plan at all, its IFR. They close that for
you automatically. I move my watch from my
left wrist to my right as a reminder to
close the flight plan. All right, Tina. Take it away. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So this
is the ForeFlight app. I've passed the iPad
around a couple times, so I think you guys have
gotten to play with it. This is just a setting where
the blue dot is showing where we currently are,
and I've actually overlaid one of those instrument
flight plans on top going here. So this is it an instrumented
approach to Bedford. But if I wanted to get
this weather data here, I can go to Airports
and pull up the airport that I'm looking for. And then click on this Weather
and it shows me the METAR. So it has both the raw data
there and then it depicts it. And again, blue is
showing marginal VFR, and so it explains that. What's also nice is it tells you
the weather at nearby airports, as well. And then you can
also go to your TAF, your terminal area
forecast, and you can look at how that
is changing over time. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Oh, Tina, you
don't mind, click on MOS, also. Yeah, if you're
planning travel, MOS is good because it gives you
weather a few days in advance so you can decide whether
or not it makes sense to depart here on
Friday and hope to come back VFR on Sunday. TINA SRIVASTAVA: MOS is
talking about the models, so the weather models and
what the outputs are. PHILIP GREENSPUN: I think
it stands for Model Outputs Statistics, not very helpful,
but anyway, it's a longer-- ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot
and some other sources, like WeatherSpork,
will turn that into a sort of a
virtual TAF for you that lasts three days
instead of just 24 hours. 30 for the big airports. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So another
type of weather report is a PIREP or a pilot report. And so this is where a
pilot could be flying and wants to report the
condition, so for example, turbulence or icing. Those are types of things
that are frequently reported by pilots. And you can actually
report one, as well. So one time when you're getting
your flight instruction, if you do notice a wind
shear, turbulence, icing, try to see if you can actually
provide your own PIREP. And it'll ask you
certain information such as your location, the
time, the altitude at which you experienced it, what
type of aircraft. I think that's really
relevant because, for example, wind shear experienced by a
small Cessna is one thing. If a large aircraft, like a
big jet, a JetBlue aircraft, is telling you that
they have wind shear, I'd really pay attention. If they seem to have
trouble with it, that means you're definitely
going to have trouble with it. And then you could also have
printed weather forecasts that tell you-- so we
just talked about the TAF as an example. And as Philip was just saying,
it only goes out 24 hours. So same type of
information as a METAR and similar abbreviations. And then we were just talking
about that those models, and so you can forecast
even farther out if need be. You can also get a forecast
for a general area. So this is what we
were discussing earlier when we were
talking about radios and you might want to call in
and ask for a weather forecast or weather brief for
a given flight plan. We talked about how you'd call
in, give your tail number, where you were starting,
where you were going, about how much time is out
you'd be en route or in flight. And then, they might
tell you the weather for the general area as well
as the local current readings as well as the forecasts. PHILIP GREENSPUN: And notice
that these area forecasts, if you go to the page
on AviationWeather.gov, they're now only available
for two or three regions, like the Gulf of Mexico. They used to have them for
all over the continental US and they included cloud
tops, which was very useful. The forecast top of
the cloud because if it was, say, 4,000 feet,
you would know that as long as you get
on top of those IFR, you're not going to pick
up any ice because you'll be above the clouds. And now you have to try to
tease that out of the MOS data sources or use something
like WeatherSpork that tries to depict graphically
where the clouds are. I think ForeFlight's
Profile View will also try to do some of that. TINA SRIVASTAVA: You can also
get forecasts of winds aloft. We talked about
that a couple times. And so this will tell you kind
of what the winds are going to be at a particular
altitude, for example, at 3,000 feet or
6,000 feet, and so it helps you estimate especially
in a cross-country flight or a longer flight
how long it might take for you to get there. On apps, such as
ForeFlight, if you-- in fact, we'll just do that
right now so you can see. So you can actually
enter in a flight plan very quickly, so you can
have a starting place. And then-- so where do
you guys want to fly to? AUDIENCE: Boston Logan. TINA SRIVASTAVA: That's a
pretty short flight, but sure. PHILIP GREENSPUN: You guys,
if you have the patience to stay with us tomorrow
afternoon starting at 3:00, the founder of ForeFlight's
going to be here, and I'm sure you'll get
a pretty thorough demo. He and a colleague are going
to talk for a couple hours about first the app,
and also the startup, and then some of the
engineering behind it. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So
the blue dot is showing where we are here at MIT. But of course,
generally, you'd be doing this when
you're at Bedford and you're flying to Logan. And then here,
it's telling you it wants to know about
the aircraft that I'll be flying in order to calculate
some of the information. But when you do these types
of things with the flight, it can estimate kind of how
long you'll be in flight. And you can provide what is
the altitude at which you want to fly. And then it will be able to-- so it says coloring
based on winds aloft. It looks like it's not
detecting that maybe because I haven't given it all
of its data right now. So in terms of what that means
is just that the winds aloft are a good way of
helping you predict how long it's going to take
you to get to certain places. And it'll be part of that
cross-country planning that you'll have to do. PHILIP GREENSPUN:
The winds aloft forecast also shows you the
temperature, which is critical because that's going to
tell you whether icing is-- icing is not possible if it's
above freezing, generally. TINA SRIVASTAVA:
There are also a bunch of severe weather reports. Philip has already
talked about a number of them, AIRMETs and SIGMETs,
as he was talking about. And then they have different
abbreviations, even more abbreviations, related to this. So what they mean for
icing and turbulence. So here we'll look at some
examples of an AIRMET. And in the picture,
it shows a broad area where that AIRMET is valid. And so this is talking about
icing and freezing level. So SIGMETs also talk
about hazardous weather such as icing, turbulence,
volcanic ash, which I don't think you'll
encounter very often, but it was an issue in
Europe, for example. And then here's a
breakdown of decoding a SIGMET, as an
example, to show you the type of information,
what it stands for, and you can read through
these to understand the adverse weather. And certainly, if
you're planning your own cross-country
flight, I recommend you also use your normal
weather data sources, as well. So just turn on the Weather
Channel or Weather.com or Accu Weather, whatever you
use on a regular basis. If it's a crummy day, it's
probably not a good day to go flying anyway
and you may not want to dive so deep into
all of these different tools. But if it seems like
a nice day, then I would really recommend
diving more specifically into understanding if
there's a front coming in or other types of issues. And then, convective SIGMETs
are really, really concerning. So there are things that are
much more severe, so you're talking about
thunderstorms, hail, some things you
really don't want to be flying during at all. There's a lot of different
ways that the weather is also produced not in a text form
but in a graphical format. So this is a relatively
complicated weather depiction chart. So we'll break it
down in detail. But let me just tell you
some of the main things. Do you have the-- oh, I left it over there. Thanks, Phillip. So can anyone guess what
all the little circles are? We see some circles
that are white and some circles that are black. Does anyone know what those are? Any guesses? AUDIENCE: Weather stations? TINA SRIVASTAVA:
Weather stations? Good guess. So it's actually
trying to tell you what the cloud cover is like. So you can see certain places
where the circle is empty. It's a clear day when
it's fully filled in, that it's showing
the cloud cover. And then you see some that
are like little pie chart, so that they're
partially filled in. So the purpose of looking
at a weather chart like that is just to get the
general conditions. There's a lot of
different things. So here, it's more
specific so it breaks down that the circles indicate
the percent cloud cover. So if it's a quarter filled,
it saying few clouds. If it's 3/4 filled, it's broken. And then it also
has shaded areas that depict when you
have the IFR conditions. So zooming in, you
can just kind of see those circles a
little bit bigger, and the charts provide a
lot of information, as well. But you can see
a little bit more clearly also here some
of the circles that are like pie charts
that's showing how much they're filled in and
what the cloud cover is looking like. And again, you can actually
get the same type of thing on your ForeFlight. It's basically an option. For every airport
that it depicts, it can show this
cloud cover, as well. And you can also look at
a radar summary chart. There are a bunch
of prog charts, so they talk about when
you're looking at a front. You guys have seen a
lot of these things on the Weather Channel, probably
didn't pay attention to them very much, but it's
good to understand what the different
types of fronts are, what's happening across
the country, more than just your particular region. So if you're planning
you know if it's a-- I think today's a Wednesday, so
if you're planning on a flight this upcoming
weekend and you want to think about what's
going to happen, basically, you're
trying to see are there some fronts coming in? What's happening? Or is it likely to
going to be a clear day? And then, of course, as we've
talked about, all of these have good legends
just like we talked about the sectional
chart quite a bit and the details of the legend. It's always good to
take a look at how they have indicated these
different lines, where the fronts are. And you really want to
know which ones, again, are reporting the actual
conditions versus which is a guesstimate of what's
going to happen in six hours, 12 hours from now. Again, if it's a forecast,
it could be wrong. And then this is just a
little bit more detail of types of things you
can see on a chart. I think the most
important thing to look at is this weird little
R symbol with kind of an arrow at the bottom. It's indicating thunder. So that's a big one
to look out for. If you see that, it's
probably not something you're interested in flying in. I'm not, for sure. And then, there are a
couple of shards here that are not
specifically on the-- usually going to be asked
about, but it's good to see. So you might have seen these
kind of surface analysis charts. And they talk about high
pressure areas and low pressure areas. And so that high
and low pressure, what are we talking about? So that's the same thing is that
pressure that you're dialing into your altimeter, right? So we talked about
29.92, but there might be a day where it's
really dropped very low and it's 28 or something
very, very low. That means you're in
a low pressure area. And if it's very high,
you're at 30 point something, it's a higher pressure area. And if you see that as
you're flying around that pressure setting is
getting updated very rapidly and changing
rapidly, that usually is related to a change in
your overall weather system. So you really want to be
aware if that number is changing quite a bit,
that's a big problem. You can also take a look at
when you get into your airplane and you're first
setting that dial when you're sitting
on the ground, see how much it's changing. You might want to-- in general,
when you get into a plane, I like to think about when
the plane was last flown. There are parts where you
are checking the oil that you can kind of generally
feel the engine and see if it's warm or not, if
it needs to be primed or not, those types of things. If you see that the
plane has just been flown and you're really dramatically
having to change that pressure setting, that means the
weather has recently changed quite a bit. It makes you want
to really make sure that your projections and your
knowledge about the weather is still accurate. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Tina, you want
to mention these numbers here are the metric equivalent. So instead of 2 99 and 2, you'll
see 1,000 millibars or so. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So we
have a bunch of these. And all of these are also
on that first website, the AviationWeather.gov. You can look at actually
seeing the clouds from a satellite picture
and kind of just seeing what's going on. These are hopefully
not the first time you've seen these
types of charts before. And then this is a way that they
like to depict the winds aloft. So these little lines,
and then depending on how many lines are
coming off the side, it indicates how strong that
wind is and what the amount is. So you can see
here some that have a lot of little
dashes coming off of it, whereas some
that don't have any. It's a way to very quickly see
where the wind is very strong and where it's not. And this is what I had
talked about last time when we're in the radio section, the
radio ATC and communications section. But just as a reminder, this
is the number that you can call and you can get your full
weather briefing done there. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Tina, do
you want me to take over now? TINA SRIVASTAVA: Sure. PHILIP GREENSPUN: All right. So thank you. Tina covered the stuff
that requires a brain. Now, I'm going to just tell you
about how do you get this stuff as a practical matter. You can call this phone
number it's very good when you're a novice pilot. Again, think about crew
resource management. The weather briefers are another
person that you can pull in. They may say VFR
flight not recommended. That's there at the bottom. That's worth paying
attention to. They used to work for the FAA. They were outsourced in
2005, and now they're contractors from a
company called Leidos, so you might hear
the name Leidos. You can get a full weather
briefing over the phone. I actually do this sometimes
if I'm in an Uber on my way to the Gaithersburg airport. I'll just call the
weather briefer and that makes life very easy. OK. So AviationWeather.gov,
as we mentioned earlier, has all the chart that we saw. The weather briefers
themselves run their own website, which is a
little bit of a twist on that. I kind of like this
site, actually, because you get to set
up a home page where you pick your favorite airport. So I picked Bedford,
Teterboro which is where you go in the
New York Metro area if you enjoy paying $8 or
$9 a gallon for gasoline. And then Dulles Airport where
the two competing FBO's also charge about $9 a
gallon for gasoline. But anyway, they'll
have the METARs for your favorite airports
and the TAFs and all this, and you can set up these charts. So basically, as
soon as you log in, you get a whole bunch of
current weather information. That's kind of a nice
feature for this website. And it is free. They will give you, just like
AviationWeather.gov, they'll give you the METAR. Here's one for Bedford
from the other day. I guess that's from the 21st. Yeah. The wind was 310. So it was on the 21st at 0256
Zulu, so it was late at night, early in the morning in London. Wind was 310 at 18
knots, gusting 25, 10 miles of visibility, clear. Temperature was
minus 11, dew point minus one niner, altimeter
two niner, four seven, and there's a remark. The peak wind was 310 at 31
knots and that happened at 0225 Zulu time. OK. There are private websites. The most popular free one is
probably fltplan.com at least among the turbine crowd. They have very accurate models
for a lot of jet powered or turboprop aircraft. And they have some
example briefings that I think I do
want to show you. OK. Again, you'll have
access to this. So one nice thing
about fltplan.com is they start you
off with a nav log. Remember, we talked about that? And in the nav
log, they tell you what magnetic course to steer. Oh, sorry. They give you the
magnetic course? Sorry, magnetic course is 303. I guess they don't give you the
wind correction angle, or maybe the wind's right in our faces. No, it's not. Maybe this is not
such a great site. All right. Well anyway, they tell
you roughly how long it's going to take you to get there. And they will calculate
your ground speed for you. So I think I put in the
Piper Warrior or something, so this is a pretty low
airspeed, 124 knots. And you can see at the
different altitudes how much fuel
you're going to burn and how long it's
going to take you. So there's really not
a lot of difference. You can see here, you
could go at 10,000 feet and take 58 minutes. You could go at 4,500 feet
and it would take you an hour. So there's not a
lot to choose from. Your airspeed goes up a little
bit as you climb higher, but the wind is also
a little bit stronger. They're giving you the
weather to go from Bedford to Bennington, Vermont. Giving you a little bit of
information about the runways. You can look at the
approaches there. Departure airport
forecast, so look at this. Departure airport NOTAM, so
they did a pretty good job here. They pulled out the
most important NOTAM. They were doing snow clearing. So at Bedford, they said,
look, runway 112 niner is closed except with one
hour of prior permission to this phone number. Now how about that? Look at all those other NOTAMs. You can really get
lost because they're telling you about stuff-- taxiway-- Let's go here. Taxiway November edge markings
obscured maybe by this snow. I don't know why. Anyway, that's probably
not really important. That maybe is taxiway that
you're not even going to use. So this is actually a pretty
good computer program, I think, because they put that
closed runway NOTAM right up at the top where you
might actually see it, and they put it in boldface. Anyway, so that's a
fltplan.com weather briefing. Let's see how ForeFlight
presents the same information. You saw that before. They also give you this wind
temperature and turbulence. Oh, this is to a different spot. This is to Gaithersburg. Significant weather from
flight level 250 to 630. Not going to be able to use that
in the Cirrus, unfortunately. That's up above 25,000 feet. We get the METARs. It looks like, sorry,
the METARs and TAFs. So we get our METAR
for Hanscom and it looks like they put in
boldface the relevant portion of the TAF. So they're saying, look,
at your flight time, this is the one
that's going to apply. It's going to be better
than six miles of visibility but overcast at 800, so not
a bad IFR situation as long as you can handle any icing. They've color coded
a bunch of stuff. So you can see here at
Worcester, they've got-- well, that looks pretty nasty. They're forecasting, for
example, wind 030 at 11 knots, only half a mile of visibility. Tina, help me out. What's minus PL? Freezing fog. I don't know what minus
PL is, but it sounds bad. Overcast 500. So they're calling that low IFR. Where are the NOTAMs? Let me see what they
did with the NOTAMs. I think it was the same day. Ice pellets. OK. Well, we don't want that. So this is an interesting thing. ForeFlight kind of missed-- I think it was out
there, maybe it's here. OK. So up at the top, it says
runway 523 is closed, which normally wouldn't bother
me at all because that's the crosswind runway
and we don't like to use it unless we have to. Maybe that NOTAM was not out at
the time that I got this one. Yeah, there's nothing
about that PPR. I guess they hadn't started
plowing the snow at that time. Anyway, so the
NOTAMs are important. They can tell you
if the airport is having some kind of
construction going on. Mobile apps-- ForeFlight is
for the iPhone or iPad only. That's a major difference
between ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot. NavMonster is a fun, free app. It works at least on iOS, I
think on Android, as well. That gives you a
lot of good stuff. WeatherSpork is all
three platforms. So we're just going to
show you ForeFlight in case you're not able to come to the
talk tomorrow starting at 3:00. Here's a little
flavor of ForeFlight. Notice that in the
airport information page here on the left,
they highlight the fact that runway 523 is
closed by NOTAM, so they're making an
attempt to pull out the most significant runways. But actually, they missed one. Look at this. Runway 112 niner is also
closed except for this one hour prior permission. Somehow that exception didn't
get the software excited. So if you showed
up, actually this is a good example
of when you might want to run your
minimum fuel burn, maximum endurance airspeed. So you get to the airport and
you didn't check the NOTAMs or maybe it was a
newly issued NOTAM. And they tell you
the runway's closed and it won't reopen
for another half hour. So in that case, you're going
to go out and loiter somewhere until the airport
reopens unless you want to land somewhere else. OK. The next page is
apparently about NOTAMs. And over on the right,
we have the weather which Tina already showed you. And you see the
density altitude? Look at that. It's minus 2,500 feet. It's 2,500 feet below sea
level at Hanscom Field. ForeFlight can give you the
TAF and the MOS, as I said. So this was, I think, on Sunday. And have a look there. We're getting the
weather for Wednesday, so we can plan our
trip to return-- what's today, Wednesday? And look, the MOS
is pretty right. It's nice. It's not too much wind. 190 at 5 knots,
overcast below 12,000. Here's Garmin Pilot. Garmin really believes in
the old white on black, like a 1970s monitor. ForeFlight will actually flip
into sort of a style like this at nighttime. And this one, it doesn't
highlight for you. It's the same time as
I was using ForeFlight, and nowhere in here
does it highlight that that runway 523 is
closed or that two niner is having any kind of issue. I think it was the same time. I could be wrong. Yeah, see? 523 closed. Runway 1129 closed except
one hour prior permission. So you're fat, dumb, and
happy looking at this page, getting all ready to
go to Hanscom Field, and then if you don't
check the NOTAMs, you discover that
there's no runway. So another good reason to
always have some reserve fuel and not overcommit to your plan. All right. In-flight weather sources. There's something called TWEB,
transcribed weather broadcasts. You might be asked
about it on the exam. I doubt it. Anyway, that's my friend
Eric, again, with his DC-3. If you were flying
a DC-3 in its prime, you might have heard of TWEB. HIWAS is still
being broadcast off of certain VORs that are
indicated on the chart. So look at this, see that H
symbol there in the middle? That H symbol tells you that
if you tune in to this VOR and tell your audio
panel in the airplane that you want to actually listen
to whatever is being modulated, that you'll hear this
pre-recorded weather announcement about
maybe thunderstorms in a certain area. You can call Flight
Service Enroute. They're very helpful. They'll take a PIREP
from you and they'll tell you what is going on. They can call your mom if
you're going to be late due to forecast headwinds. I was actually flying through
New York on my way to DC, and there were
horrible headwinds. I was in a Diamond Star, which
was not a very fast airplane, so when you've got
a 50 knot headwind, you slow down to a
Honda Accord speeds. So I asked New York
for a frequency change to Flight Service and they
said, well, why do you need it? And I said, well, I want
to have them call my mom and tell her I'm
going to be late. And they said, oh, we
can do that for you. So in between vectoring the
airbus's out to Germany, they were calling my mom. I think each
controller in New York has an assistant right
next to him or her and that was who actually
made the phone call. TINA SRIVASTAVA:
Just quick note. The last point there. So Flight Service can
accept your PIREP. So when we talked about
how you should make a pilot report or a PIREP, you can
call them and tell them, hey, I experienced turbulence. PHILIP GREENSPUN: I think
if it's really ugly, the controllers can also put
it in, like if it's icing or-- TINA SRIVASTAVA: Wind
shear they usually accept cause wind shear
is such a bad thing, and you're fighting
the wind shear and trying to deal
with the wind shear, so they'll usually
except that PIREP. PHILIP GREENSPUN: All right. NEXRAD. So this is an actual
photo of our Cirrus screen on our way to Oshkosh. So remember, I showed you
that one earlier which with the track from FlightAware. So we had planned to go from
Rutland, Vermont, oh, sorry. We had planned, I guess, yeah,
we came up with a new plan. We really wanted to go from
Bedford over to Syracuse, and I think initially we
decided that going to Rutland would keep us away
from the rain. The NEXRAD radar, what
they're really seeing is water in the clouds. So they can actually see rain. They can't see a cloud
that's just vapor and it's going to produce
a rain storm at some point. They're really seeing the
big water droplets of rain. Anyway, so we
elected to fly over here and refuel at
Watertown, New York instead of at Syracuse. Oksana was on that flight. We flew through
some of that rain and it actually
was pretty smooth. So we probably could have
just charged through, but we took a more
conservative route. OK. So NEXRAD data,
instead of paying for a receiver in your airplane
and then paying a subscription fee, the FAA give you
NEXRAD data as well as a bunch of other stuff,
like some text weather data. That's another good reason
to be able to read METARs because if you're looking
at it in the cockpit, it could be on a
pretty small display and the raw format is very
compact and actually very convenient for in-flight use. Anyway, here's a little diagram
of how it's transmitted. You have to have this-- you have to have-- let's
see if we talked about this. Yeah, so you have to have a
UAT receiver to get these data. The aircraft position,
see the big airliner transmitting on 1090 megahertz
extended squitter it's called. That's fine, but you need
to be able to receive on 978 megahertz, which is this
alternative frequency that I guess had more
bandwidth available. And that's where the FAA
can push all these data up to you, like about
other traffic, even traffic who doesn't comply with
ADS-B. Although by January 1st of next year, almost
everybody will have ADS-B out at least. Anyway, so that the feds
are pushing this stuff up to your airplane. I'm going to turn it over
to Tina now to talk about-- TINA SRIVASTAVA: Yeah, so
I just added in this slide. This is the one that we
had been talking about. If you're in a plane that does
not have the ADS-B receiver but you want to receive
that information so that you get real-time weather
information or real time traffic information,
you can actually make that happen by
building it yourself. And I did that. It really doesn't
take very long. If you want to seem
really cool, you can go and buy just a
regular Raspberry Pi and a couple different parts. And also that link will
show you how you can just buy a little kit where they've
put everything together and you just buy it. It's very easy to assemble. So it just has a little
Raspberry Pi inside. And it has a little cooling fan,
and then it has these antennas. The Stratics
Software is actually kind of free, open
source software, and it's really great. And it syncs up to
your other apps. So for example with
ForeFlight, it just shows up like a Wi-Fi
signal that you connect to. And then while you're
in the air, when you don't have
access to this data, this will actually update. So you can see on the right
is kind of a zoomed in picture from ForeFlights. So it shows that you
can see the weather on the bottom left
corner and then you also see these little
pictures that show traffic. So yeah, exactly. So on the further bottom
right, you can also see-- it just shows you other
airplanes, other traffic, and kind of the altitude
that they're at. And so it's really
useful I think it's kind of nice to have,
especially in a little airplane to have that visibility and
knowledge that you're not just relying on Flight Service
giving or kind of like a area controller giving you
traffic advisories, but you can see it in advance. We're about to dive
into human factors, and Philip has talked a lot
about using the person sitting next to you whether they
are actually a pilot or just a friend. Even just a friend can sit
there and hold the iPad and see the little blue traffic. And then when they hear on the
radio that's someone saying, hey, it looks like
in this situation, no traffic, 3 o'clock, you're
trying to look for that plane. Well, they can have a
little sense of, OK, yeah, it's near that,
and they can help you find the other aircraft. So it's very helpful. PHILIP GREENSPUN: How much
were the parts for that, Tina? TINA SRIVASTAVA: It's like $80. PHILIP GREENSPUN: OK. Yeah. So the ones that you can buy
commercially all packaged, like the Stratux-- I think this is a
play on Stratus. This is one of the
competitors in that market. They're anywhere from
$400 to $1,000, I think. The commercial ones also have
an electronic gyro in there and AHARs, attitude
heading reference system. So they can actually give you on
your iPad an attitude indicator and some information about
your speed and so forth. All right. So this is a reminder
that, again, all those data are intended to help you
fly within the VFR weather minimums, which provide
a good margin of safety. I put this $20 magazine
up here for you guys because this whole
talk has really been about software and
different ways of spinning the same data. So this is everything, in case
you're not a core six major. This is everything
you need to know to become a programmer
in one $20 magazine. TINA SRIVASTAVA: So we're
running a little behind. So I'm going to go
straight to human factors. While I'm pulling
it up, let Phillip know if you have
any more questions. PHILIP GREENSPUN: Yeah,
anything going on? AUDIENCE: How do you know
if your weather briefing is adequate with all these sources
out there and you're not good. I'm just not really sure. PHILIP GREENSPUN:
That's a great question. How do you know if you're a
weather briefing is adequate? The professional weather
briefers at Leidos, at 1-800-WX-BRIEF, they tend to
go a little above and beyond. They'll give you NOTAMs about
any VOR that's out of service on your route of flight, even if
you're navigating with the GPS. So if you're at all unsure,
just do your self-service stuff online, and then just call
1-800-WX-BRIEF and ask for a full briefing. It won't take you
more than 10 minutes, and you will definitely
be at least-- you'll probably be over
briefed, at that point. They'll tell you
about an unlit tower even if you're flying
at noon, and there's no possibility of it being dark
and the lighting on the tower making a difference.
