News Archive

‘AOPA Pilot’ aviation weather specialist is author of new book on ‘Flying America’s Weather,’ region by region

Tom Horne, whose popular features on aviation weather appear regularly in AOPA Pilot magazine, is the author of Flying America’s Weather, a new region-by-region guide to flying weather and climate.

Horne shows how global forces create understandable and repeating patterns as they act on regional geography. Using new understanding of climate and weather phenomenon, his own extensive flying experience, and case studies of weather-related accidents, Horne backs his findings with descriptive maps and charts illustrating regional weather patterns and trends.

Flying America’s Weather will be valuable to pilots flying in an unfamiliar region of the country, or to any pilot who wants to learn more about “big-picture” aviation weather.

Starting with Hawaii and Alaska, Flying America’s Weather covers each region including extensive sections on the Pacific Northwest and California. Moving east, Horne discusses “Mountain Highs, Colorado Lows,” “Don’t Mess With Texas,” “America’s Siberia,” “Storm Central and Tornado Alley,” the “wet and wild” Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley “pipeline” to East Coast weather.

Explained are dry lines, cut-off lows, and significant weather phenomenon region by region. Selected aviation accidents in each chapter dramatize the real-life hazards of each area’s challenging weather.

An extensive appendix of weather charts, color photos, and satellite vapor images illustrate regional weather patterns. Dramatic satellite imagery documents that mountain waves can occur east of the Appalachians as well as the Rockies. Another shows the effect of an autumn outbreak of Canadian cold air on the Midwest: extensive fog deceptively covering only low-lying areas, making inaccessible the region’s many airports in valleys or flood plains along rivers.

Horne’s “Wx Watch” features have appeared in AOPA Pilot since 1982 and are among the most practical in AOPA’s monthly magazine. He has authored some 650 magazine articles in all, plus portions of three Time-Life books and two book-length safety reviews for the AOPA Air Safety Foundation, including ASF’s extensive volume on weather accidents.

The author is a 3,500-hour commercial pilot and certificated flight instructor with instrument, multiengine, and glider ratings. His 24-year flying career includes flight experience in some 200 aircraft and 14 solo transatlantic crossings.

Horne has been at AOPA Pilot since 1979, with stints as editor of AOPA’s former Ultralight Pilot magazine and as AOPA Pilot editor in chief. He has been a television documentary cinematographer and a public relations representative for Canadair Challenger business jets.

Flying America’s Weather is available for $19.95 from publisher Aviation Supplies & Academics, Inc. For more information, call 800/ASA-2-FLY.

99-2-039

June 18, 1999