Take Advantage of Personalized Weather Training

While some experience is absolutely necessary, more experience alone isn’t the answer for most general aviation pilots. In fact, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a safety notice in October 2005 that states, “It appears that pilots generally require formal training to obtain weather knowledge and cannot be expected to acquire it on their own as they simply gain more flight experience.”

I fully support this conclusion. Any experience that occurs as a result of formal training leads to what I call applied knowledge. This is the kind of experience that truly matters.  

Once you finish your primary training, there’s no specific requirement to continue to learn about any facet of aviation, much less weather.

Yes, §14 CFR 61.56 states that you are required to do a biennial flight review that includes one hour of ground instruction that must consist of a “review of the current general operating and flight rules of Part 91.” In other words, there’s no regulatory requirement to go through any additional formal training outside of the single hour of ground instruction you receive during this review. It’s worth noting that the completion of any phase of the FAA WINGS program satisfies the requirement for a flight review. 

Even so, you might feel the need to attend a webinar or two in your spare time or watch a few YouTube videos. This is all voluntary, given there’s no formal curriculum you must follow or complete.

Weather, however, is one of those important disciplines that gets little emphasis during primary training, and few pilots seek out additional weather training after they receive their pilot certificate in the mail. Given that weather is the single biggest physical factor that affects your flying activity, it’s worth every penny that you invest in formal training to feel more confident in your preflight weather planning.

Here’s why. 

The FAA gives the PIC the final authority on the operation of the aircraft, which includes preflight weather planning. However, many weather-related aviation accidents operating under VFR are highly preventable and often the result of a chain of poor decisions and human error, including those related to inadvertent flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC).

Pilots must rely on weather forecasts that are inherently imperfect. While poor forecasts are cited as the probable cause of some weather-related accidents, they are not likely the underlying reason pilots find themselves inadvertently encountering adverse weather during a cross-country flight. 

A common contributor to these accidents is the pilot’s inability to definitively assess the hazard prior to departure from the relevant weather guidance available. Therefore, the lack of sufficient weather guidance and its accuracy are not the core concern, but instead the primary contributing factor is the way GA pilots consume the forecast guidance to develop a plan as a precursor to making a decision to fly.

Even though weather forecasts are now more robust and have become increasingly ubiquitous online, it is thought that pilots are not utilizing all of this information to their advantage. A GA pilot is not a trained meteorologist and often has a difficult time seamlessly distilling all of the weather guidance to make good preflight and in-flight decisions. 

Of course, weather is quite complex, and pilots tend to prefer an easy solution (e.g., press the “brief” button on their heavyweight electronic flight bag app) to get their weather information owing to the complexity.

Much of the weather guidance used to make an informed decision to fly is spread over many different and sometimes complex charts, diagrams, and textual reports. As such, many pilots have never been properly taught a comprehensive approach that seamlessly integrates in time and space all of the pertinent weather guidance to make it obvious if they will encounter adverse weather along a proposed route of flight that exceeds their personal minimums.

Every flight carries a unique set of weather circumstances that complicates the planning even further.  

Meteorology is likely the most complex topic that any pilot must master. If you do a fair amount of flying, it’s rare that you don’t find yourself muddling through a bunch of weather guidance only to walk away not feeling as confident as you’d like, especially if you are carrying precious cargo. This often results in canceling a flight that could have been easily accomplished given a higher degree of confidence.

Sure, a decision to stay is always a safe and conservative approach, but it’s important to be sure it’s not due to a deficiency in your weather knowledge. In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You don’t want to make a decision to go and discover that this deficiency reared its ugly head and that leads to a heart-pounding incident or perhaps an accident.  

What I found with respect to weather education is that GA pilots need a personalized touch—every one of them is unique.

That’s the beauty of personalized online training. In addition to having different personal weather minimums (i.e., risk), many also have a varied level of weather knowledge and how they learn complex subjects. Even seasoned pilots that I have trained over the last 25 years have quite a gap in their weather acuity. 

You can go online and become immersed in a self-study program by listening to dozens of random recorded or live webinars and read a plethora of articles on the subject of weather. You might also pick one of a dozen reference books on weather written specifically for pilots that includes the FAA’s new Aviation Weather Handbook or the book I co-authored, Pilot Weather: From Solo to the Airlines.

As I’ll cover a bit later, the biggest topic that is missing from these resources is how to seamlessly integrate all of the available weather guidance to make a confident go decision. 

Although weather itself hasn’t changed since Wilbur and Orville took flight, the products and outlets where pilots consume weather guidance for preflight planning have continued to evolve and grow dramatically over the last three decades. Therefore, doing a self-study program without any formal oversight can be overwhelming for the average general aviation pilot since they may not know what they don’t know. Most importantly, self-study doesn’t provide a means to ask a question and receive a pertinent answer.   

Personalized online training, on the other hand, can be highly structured complete with a detailed syllabus or it can be totally ad hoc.

For example, an instructor can teach a formal instrument ground school to a dozen instrument students or can get together online with his or her student the night before a flight lesson to examine tomorrow’s weather or prepare the student for the next day’s instruction. The nice thing about online training is that there’s no requirement to travel to meet up with your instructor. If you have a computer connected to the internet, online training is just a hyperlink away. Perhaps the biggest potential is gaining access to aviation industry experts throughout the world…all at a price, of course. 

At the present moment this technology is highly affordable even for the smallest flight school, including freelance instructors.

There are dozens of vendors that provide this capability, including the one that I use, namely, Google Meet. There’s no special software to buy or complicated licensing. I have my own Google business account with virtually unlimited use of the web conferencing tool that now becomes an important profit center for my business. More importantly, there are no geographic boundaries. I can hold a live training session online with anyone in the world who has connectivity to high-speed internet.      

You don’t even need a working camera on your device since screen sharing is the mainstay of this technology. Any document, such as a Microsoft Word document, PDF, or PowerPoint presentation, can be shared with the student. Software applications, such as a Garmin simulator or many of the heavyweight aviation apps, can be shared as well. Even a web browser can be shared so that the instructor can access live sites from the internet in real time with the student. 

Browser sharing comes in handy, especially when providing personalized weather training with my students.

For example, using my progressive web app, EZWxBrief, I can walk my students through a complete preflight briefing as they look over my virtual shoulder for a cross-country flight they are proposing. While this likely doesn’t count as a “formal” weather briefing under §14 CFR 91.103 (b), it does provide the student with training on how to accomplish this process effectively using live weather guidance. Given this is a flight they are planning to make, they have skin in the game, and this kind of training has a better chance to sink into their long-term memory.   

Anything that can be shared can also be annotated by the instructor, including a whiteboard capability. A highlighter, drawing pencil, cursor or arrow can be used by the presenter to pinpoint certain areas on the chart, diagram or presentation that is currently being discussed.

Even more useful, the entire session can be recorded for later review. After your long cross-country flight, you can go back and review the preflight weather against the actual weather you experienced. This can be done even if the flight was canceled for whatever reason. Don’t underestimate the power of the past.

Over the last 20 years I have been offering online aviation weather training that is personalized for each student. My primary students are certificated instrument pilots who are typically aircraft owners making frequent cross-country trips in their fixed-wing airplanes. The most common request from my students is to learn the nuts and bolts of how to do a preflight planning session that results in a complete weather briefing.

As a matter of fact, the holy grail of weather training is learning how to consume all of this weather guidance and integrate it into a plan to make a go or stay decision. Doing a comprehensive weather briefing is perhaps the greatest challenge for many pilots that want to feel confident they can launch and be prepared for what might go awry. Therefore, planning for an alternate course of action is also critical when the weather along your route is challenging. 

This really comes down to five buckets of instruction.

The first is how to interpret those extended-range forecasts where you are looking three to seven days out. Often these extended-range forecasts have few details and are steeped in uncertainty. For example, airframe icing and turbulence forecasts are unavailable out this far in the future. Nevertheless, perhaps you are concerned about your return leg or you have a fair amount of flexibility and just want to narrow down the best day to depart over the next week. It’s useful to know how to leverage forecasts that exhibit a fair amount of uncertainty.  

Second is how to effectively utilize the short-range forecast that provides guidance from six to 60 hours. Usually, I am looking at this guidance the night before the flight. In this period, there are typically rich and robust weather products available to utilize that have a higher temporal resolution and focus specifically on the adverse weather elements such as icing, turbulence, convection, ceilings and surface visibility. For my own flights, this is where I spend most of my analysis time and usually will make a go or stay decision from this guidance. It’s where I focus on teaching my students how to understand the big weather picture.   

Third is what I call the NOWcast. This is the time that is within six hours of your proposed time of departure. I’ve likely made a favorable decision to go based on the briefing the night before and need to determine the proposed route and altitude and whether or not a fuel stop is warranted. Training includes how to integrate the latest terminal aerodrome forecasts (TAFs), area forecast discussions (AFDs), winds aloft as well as observational data such as pilot weather reports (PIREPs), surface observations (METARs), satellite imagery, and ground-based radar.

Lastly, SIGMETs, G-AIRMETs, and CWAs provide the latest advisories of adverse weather. At this point in time there is more certainty, so I focus on training students how to use this guidance to fill in the gaps and confirm what was seen the previous night in order to make any minor adjustments in the time of departure.  

Fourth is learning how to determine a rock-solid alternate in the event you cannot get to your destination. As mentioned earlier, we know that all forecasts are imperfect, but they are still incredibly useful. Moreover, the spatial and temporal resolution of these forecasts and their probabilistic nature leave a lot of holes and uncertainty. Therefore, this bucket of instruction focuses the pilot on how to “leave an out.” Finding a safe alternate needs to be woven through the entire fabric of your preflight planning from beginning to end, not just moments before you depart. 

Last, but not least, making real-time decisions while in flight is a class of instruction all by itself. This varies from learning how to make tactical decisions to avoid flying into certain clouds and how to use in-cockpit weather to make strategic route and altitude changes to circumnavigate around or fly above the weather. Teaching this is quite difficult due to the wide variety of weather challenges that can be faced during any flight. It also depends on the type of aircraft and its capabilities (e.g. onboard radar). Nonetheless, there are some good rules to follow to minimize your exposure to adverse weather while en route to your destination.     

Many of the instructors I have known over the last two decades rarely think about setting up an online curriculum outside of doing an occasional webinar or two. Understandably, that webinar is designed to generate traffic to their social media pages or their website.

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering this kind of training, but personalized online training, especially as it relates to weather, can go a long way to giving a pilot the confidence they need when making a difficult decision to go.

This feature first appeared in the November Issue 952 of the FLYING print edition.