Practical weather

You’ve dreamed of the epic aviation adventure—an aerial “road trip” across the country, taking friends and family on vacation, or flying to an aviation event like Sun ’n Fun or EAA AirVenture. On any long trip, weather will be a factor. Don’t let the threat of poor weather intimidate you. Here are five practical tips to keep in mind about planning for and around the weather Mother Nature might throw at you.

1. Before you launch on your big trip, study the weather along your route a couple of weeks in advance to get a sense of weather patterns. Depending on the time of year, you may be dealing with lines of thunderstorms stretching from Michigan to Texas, smoke from wildfires out West, widespread rain covering an entire region of the country, or snow.

Seeing these weather patterns in advance will allow you to plan around them. Pay particular attention to big-picture patterns two to three days out as you start refining your planning and nailing down a route with stops. Your route of flight doesn’t need to be direct from Point A to Point B. Add a dogleg to get around the system, plan to get out ahead of it, or take other measures to ensure a safe flight in VFR conditions.

2. Remember, a weather briefer is there to help. Too often, weather briefings consist of the pilot providing his or her planned flight at the beginning and then the briefer launching into an almost-scripted description of weather conditions from a computer that ends with, “Have a nice flight” or “VFR not recommended.” The briefing should be more than a box to check on your preflight checklist. The more you put into it, the more information you’ll receive. While the briefer can’t tell you what to do, you can ask questions (it’s OK to interrupt!) that will help you make a better go/no-go decision. If there is a specific weather concern along your route of flight, have a radar map pulled up on a computer or mobile device so that you can see what the briefer is talking about. If you are both looking at the same information, it will help you understand the briefing better and allow you to ask more specific questions.

For example, if there are thunderstorms, IFR conditions, or gustier surface winds than you are comfortable with, ask the briefer questions about how long the conditions are likely to last, or if they improve farther to the north, south, east, or west of your course if you’re considering a route change.

3. Is the weather improving or deteriorating? What direction is it moving, and how fast? You’ll want to look at the weather and its trends to help you decide your next course of action along each leg of the trip. By looking at weather maps, checking aviation routine meteorological reports (METARs) and terminal aerodrome forecasts (TAFs), listening to hazardous inflight weather advisory service (HIWAS), and discussing trends along your route with a flight service briefer, you can determine how quickly the weather is expected to get better or worse. If a line of thunderstorms is moving to the northeast at 35 knots, and you are flying west, you might be able to deviate to the southwest well ahead of the storms and go around the system to the south. A deviation of 50 miles isn’t bad if you’re flying across the country—in the big scheme of things, that’s a minor deviation.

If ceilings and visibility at your departure airport, en route, or destination are marginal VFR, you’d probably want to stay on the ground if flying at night—or during day or night, if the conditions are trending toward instrument meteorological conditions. If conditions are forecast to become VFR in a couple of hours, stay put and wait it out—grab a bite at a nearby restaurant, relax, and be ready when the conditions improve. Make sure you always leave yourself an out. Conditions may change faster than forecast, or you may run into something that wasn’t forecast. When it comes to safety margins, bigger is better.

4. You may start with fuel stops and overnight destinations planned, but be prepared for those to change. If you deviate around weather, you’ll need to recalculate your fuel range; you might need to pick a different fuel stop. (If you are using a flight planning tool on your mobile device, many apps will allow you to select an overlay that displays fuel prices at airports.) You also may need to change plans based on unforecast weather or surface winds that exceed your personal minimums at your destination, cutting your flight leg short, or finding an alternate airport with runways better aligned to the wind. For example, your planned fuel stop might be 200 miles away, but weather along the route is questionable. You can plan an intermediate stop to re-check the weather. If the need arises to land short to reevaluate the situation en route, contact flight service over the radio to amend your flight plan or notify air traffic control of your change in plans if you are receiving VFR flight following. You’ve practiced diversions before, so it’s nothing new. If you set out with an attitude of flexibility, you’ll be less likely to suffer from “get-there-itis” and be all the more prepared to make that decision to divert.

5. Weather information on board can be an excellent resource to enhance your situational awareness en route. Using on-board weather should be just that—an enhancement, not a replacement to your other resources, and it never should be used to skirt perilously close to weather like thunderstorms. (Pilots should always stay at least 20 miles from a thunderstorm.) Some rental aircraft are equipped with glass cockpits and weather subscriptions. Make sure you have been thoroughly checked out in using the equipment, and work with an instructor to ensure you understand all of the weather information you’re seeing and how best to use it to keep you safe. (Do you understand how old the information you’re seeing is? It may be older than you realize.) Portable devices also can bring weather into the cockpit. Some devices, including Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast receivers and XM Weather receivers, work with flight planning apps that can be purchased and downloaded on an iPad. They will allow you to overlay the weather display on your charts on your device. If you can’t pull up and accurately interpret the data, it won’t do you much good.

By using all available resources, such as HIWAS, METARs, TAFs, thorough preflight briefings, and in-cockpit weather (when available), you can form a better weather picture during your epic flight, helping to ensure the trip remains epic because of the amount of fun you had on the trip—not because of the weather encounters you experienced.