Weather message board?

[blakealbers]

Hey all. Just a thought, I finally got my instrument rating after 12 years with just the VFR ticket. While go / no go decisions are always on the pilot, would anyone find it helpful to post routes past present or future and discuss different weather conditions and what to expect/ or what was experienced. Seems like “stay out of the yellow” or “green takes the bugs off, yellow takes the paint off, red takes the wings off” are some of the old sayings we get. I think it would be more interesting for some of us new to IMC to have a hypothetical go/no go and why message board or a place for those who have more experience to talk about their experience with pictures of the forecast.

 

If this has already been done or there is a good thread point me that direction. Thanks!

 

 

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[Amelia]

What a good idea! I would find the thought processes interesting. I have to wonder, though, if respondents should admit their age...just how many grains of salt should we take with this old bat’s advice?. I’ve been flying a Mooney, sometimes in very hard IFR, for most of 35 years, The thing is, the more experience I get, the more timid I seem to get. My personal minima seem to have crept up, along with my age, and mortality becomes a concept more real. Or maybe I’m just getting too lazy to want to work that hard.

[gsxrpilot]

14 minutes ago, blakealbers said:

 

Hey all. Just a thought, I finally got my instrument rating after 12 years with just the VFR ticket. While go / no go decisions are always on the pilot, would anyone find it helpful to post routes past present or future and discuss different weather conditions and what to expect/ or what was experienced. Seems like “stay out of the yellow” or “green takes the bugs off, yellow takes the paint off, red takes the wings off” are some of the old sayings we get. I think it would be more interesting for some of us new to IMC to have a hypothetical go/no go and why message board or a place for those who have more experience to talk about their experience with pictures of the forecast.

Congrats on getting the IR and kicking off those training wheels  Now you can really start to use that Mooney!

Here's another one for you.

When the weather's good, go VFR. When the weather's bad, go IFR. When the weather's REALLY bad, go VFR.

[blakealbers]

What a good idea! I would find the thought processes interesting. I have to wonder, though, if respondents should admit their age...just how many grains of salt should we take with this old bat’s advice?. I’ve been flying a Mooney, sometimes in very hard IFR, for most of 35 years, The thing is, the more experience I get, the more timid I seem to get. My personal minima seem to have crept up, along with my age, and mortality becomes a concept more real. Or maybe I’m just getting too lazy to want to work that hard.

Yah, I just want to find that sweet spot where we get utility out of the plane and don’t add unnecessary risk or stress. There seems to be a pretty good gap in how we communicate about weather for some reason though. People have either been through it and know what they are comfortable with or they are newbies like me.


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[blakealbers]

Congrats on getting the IR and kicking off those training wheels  Now you can really start to use that Mooney!
Here's another one for you.
When the weather's good, go VFR. When the weather's bad, go IFR. When the weather's REALLY bad, go VFR.

Hahah I haven’t heard that one!


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[blakealbers]

I’ll kick it off with a discussion about this flight, good weather at departure and destination. Low IFR and weather system enroute. Looking to make this trip within the next few days, not gonna experiment with it this morning....but hopefully before we get some sort of domestic travel ban (hopefully doesn’t happen).


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[Greg Ellis]

7 minutes ago, gsxrpilot said:

 

Here's another one for you.

When the weather's good, go VFR. When the weather's bad, go IFR. When the weather's REALLY bad, go VFR.

This was one of the first lessons I learned from Richard Collins.

[blakealbers]

I’ll kick it off with a discussion about this flight, good weather at departure and destination. Low IFR and weather system enroute. Looking to make this trip within the next few days, not gonna experiment with it this morning....but hopefully before we get some sort of domestic travel ban (hopefully doesn’t happen).


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So I suppose if we had a discussion board for weather I’d post the flight and my info.

Newly instrument rated pilot with 2 hours of actual IMC single pilot. 700 hour pilot, 30 years old. 250 in the Mooney bravo. TKS but not certified, inadvertent Icing only. GTN 750 with G5 HSI and KFC150 autopilot


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[gsxrpilot]

16 minutes ago, blakealbers said:

I’ll kick it off with a discussion about this flight, good weather at departure and destination. Low IFR and weather system enroute. Looking to make this trip within the next few days, not gonna experiment with it this morning....but hopefully before we get some sort of domestic travel ban (hopefully doesn’t happen).

The best weather tools you have with that Mooney are speed and range. So looking at this flight, I'd be making an end run around the weather at the north end of the route. I don't want any part of that icing. And I'd probably run a little South West at the beginning to stay out of the worst of it. You might be able to stay in clear air between layers and see the worst of the build ups as you go west to get through the line.

[Hank]

34 minutes ago, gsxrpilot said:

When the weather's good, go VFR. When the weather's bad, go IFR. When the weather's REALLY bad, go VFR.

We all have our personal limits. Mine are slightly different than yours:

• If the weather is good, go VFR
• If the weather is bad, go IFR
• If the weather is REALLY bad, go CAR

   Hey, it works for me!

[toto]

Having a launch window several days wide is a real gift. It it were me, I'd be watching Windy like a hawk to see how things develop.

I normally pick what I think is the ideal departure time given the weather, a secondary departure time as a backup, and I work out what happens if neither of those is possible. Pre-purchasing a refundable airline ticket (SWA) is a great tertiary plan, and I've even been known to pre-book multiple one-way rental cars from possible "outs" along the route just in case. 

(Note this assumes normal travel options - in these Covid-19 days, I think I'd choose two departure times based on forecast+Windy, and my tertiary would be canceling the trip.)

[0TreeLemur]

Friday I thought about making a round trip flight from Tuscaloosa, AL to Laramie, WY, going west Saturday and returning today to rescue a son who is stuck at a college that has canceled classes.   The forecast I saw Friday night for today's weather made it a no-go for me.  Looking at your screen cap, the models were pretty close and it seems that they helped me make a good call because freezing level interactions in precip or clouds would be impossible to avoid along the route.  Remember the radar beam gets higher off the surface the further you get away from the radar.   Out in your part of the country the radars are pretty far apart so they don't do a good job of showing you where ice might be a problem. Ice in any form just can't be messed with in our planes.

About three weeks ago on an IFR practice flight here in AL I encountered freezing rain at 7000 with my outside air temperature sensor which mounted in the wing about 30" outboard from the cabin indicating that it was above freezing (+1C).  It happened really fast and accumulated much quicker than I would have thought with an airframe that is above freezing.

Windy.com shows modeled freezing levels.   Those models are initialized using the twice-daily weather balloon data so they have some validity and are quite good.

Remember, clouds below freezing can still be supercooled water drops.   Any time you go into a cloud and the temp. is less than 0C, keep an eye out for ice accumulation on the leading edge. 

Picked this up in about 120 seconds after I penetrated a cloud layer at 8000 over Little Rock, AR in Feb.   I knew that the tops were about 8,500, so I asked for higher and got above the clouds.   A Cirrus trying to climb up through the clouds after taking off from Little Rock was picking up enough ice that he told the controller that he was unsure if he was going to be able to climb through it.   He made it.  I'd just say that until you get more experience, avoid anything that looks like a freezing level interaction .    Wait until it warms up to spread your IFR wings.  Be a chicken.

[gsxrpilot]

If you use an iPhone (not sure if it works on Android), go download, and pay for, this app. SkewTLogPro. It will give you a very clear and very accurate picture of clouds and icing along your route. It will give you the bases and tops of clouds and their temps at regular intervals along your route. It's super useful when trying to decide if IFR in the clouds is prudent or not. Or if you'll be able to get on top.

It's pretty easy to use, but I'm happy to get on the phone and walk your through it if you like.

[blakealbers]

This is very helpful. And I agree, I actually have a little 100 mile trip I do between KOFK and KLNK that I fly very regularly. The original reason we got stuck was I made a no go call on marginal vfr with icing.

My intention was to slowly increase what I’m comfortable with on that little well known route /frequencies/approaches. Unfortunately my first actual instrument was inadvertent going from klcg to KOLV on our way back from a trip to Florida KTIX ....nothing like your first single pilot IMC trip being with your pregnant wife on Friday the 13th during world apocalypse to make you think really hard about go/no go decisions. So we just got back to Memphis late last night, and want to get the plane back home to the next few days. Fortunately we have family to stay with here.

What I will say though, is flying down the coast into KTIX for a Nebraska guy was the experience of a lifetime. And if you ever are thinking about whether or not to go to a space x launch, that’s a go! It’s amazing


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[blakealbers]

If you use an iPhone (not sure if it works on Android), go download, and pay for, this app. SkewTLogPro. It will give you a very clear and very accurate picture of clouds and icing along your route. It will give you the bases and tops of clouds and their temps at regular intervals along your route. It's super useful when trying to decide if IFR in the clouds is prudent or not. Or if you'll be able to get on top.
It's pretty easy to use, but I'm happy to get on the phone and walk your through it if you like.

I might take you up on that !


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[MikeOH]

19 minutes ago, gsxrpilot said:

If you use an iPhone (not sure if it works on Android), go download, and pay for, this app. SkewTLogPro. It will give you a very clear and very accurate picture of clouds and icing along your route. It will give you the bases and tops of clouds and their temps at regular intervals along your route. It's super useful when trying to decide if IFR in the clouds is prudent or not. Or if you'll be able to get on top.

It's pretty easy to use, but I'm happy to get on the phone and walk your through it if you like.

I just took a quick look at that app.  It looks pretty close to what I grab from the rucsoundings.noaa.gov site.  Does the app perform some kind of analysis to help, or is it just a different depiction?  Looks like it may have some filtering ability, but hard to tell from the screen shots on the App Store site.  Thanks!

[gsxrpilot]

5 minutes ago, MikeOH said:

I just took a quick look at that app.  It looks pretty close to what I grab from the rucsoundings.noaa.gov site.  Does the app perform some kind of analysis to help, or is it just a different depiction?  Looks like it may have some filtering ability, but hard to tell from the screen shots on the App Store site.  Thanks!

Like most iPhone apps, it's just super easy to use. I've seen the site you mention, and yes, I think you can mostly get the same information from there. But the app just makes it easy to enter an origin and destination, a departure time and arrival time, and in a few seconds you'll have a series of graphs spaced along your route at appropriate time intervals. It's easy to use on the phone and I can even take a quick look while sitting in the cockpit just before take off, to get one last quick look. The website just gave too much information and too many options. 

There is a cost for it, I don't remember what it was. But it's a one time thing and compared to what we spend on this activity, it's nothing.

[MikeOH]

Just now, gsxrpilot said:

Like most iPhone apps, it's just super easy to use. I've seen the site you mention, and yes, I think you can mostly get the same information from there. But the app just makes it easy to enter an origin and destination, a departure time and arrival time, and in a few seconds you'll have a series of graphs spaced along your route at appropriate time intervals. It's easy to use on the phone and I can even take a quick look while sitting in the cockpit just before take off, to get one last quick look. The website just gave too much information and too many options. 

There is a cost for it, I don't remember what it was. But it's a one time thing and compared to what we spend on this activity, it's nothing.

Aha!  That sounds pretty neat!  I've spent quite a bit of time working my way through my proposed route looking at soundings.  I'm headed to the App Store now to spend the $15.  Thanks again for the PIREP.

[carusoam]

Knowing the weather is everything...

1) IFR Bad stuff....

• Icing 
• Thunderstorms

2) Long flights... it helps to have two sources of weather on board... because everything changes while you are out...

• tactical... strike finder, real time where is the lightening happening now...
• Planning... where is the front lines, current rain, temps and stuff....  ADSB and XM solutions...
• These devices are imperfect... but we know to avoid where the lightening strikes are happening...

3) Tough weather conditions quickly overload the ability to ask about weather conditions via radio... 

4) Goofy stuff happens... escaping an oncoming hurricane... we launch IFR.... and are vectored into a hold closer to the hurricane we are trying to avoid... incredible amounts of rain is handled by the intake system...  it makes you wonder how much it can handle...

5) One thing I immediately found funny... If not heading toward your target destination... slow down! 

• Don’t go fast in the wrong direction
• Only go fast in the right direction
• Know thy Maneuvering speeds... use it... things go from bumpy to slamming iPads off the ceiling without warning...

6) Wide spread low IFR...  makes off airport landings really hard...

7) Low ceilings during T/O.... getting cleaned up, trimmed up, and set-up before going into the clouds is important... a small distraction at this point combined with a missed trim situation... you will have landed somewhere off the runway... while expecting to be climbing....

8) Give ATC a pirep...

9) IFR flying is pure magic...

• Make it happen
• Stay current
• know your stuff

PP thoughts about when I was newly IR’d...

Best regards,

-a-

[DonMuncy]

4 hours ago, blakealbers said:

Yah, I just want to find that sweet spot where we get utility out of the plane and don’t add unnecessary risk or stress. There seems to be a pretty good gap in how we communicate about weather for some reason though. People have either been through it and know what they are comfortable with or they are newbies like me.
 

Unfortunately, everyone (to my knowledge) has the same experience. And I have no answer. The only way I know is to just fly in it. When you first start, work really hard finding trips to make which involve weather. First plan trips with IMC forecast enroute, but ceilings high at destination and departure. Intentionally fly at a level that puts you in the clouds, until you are totally comfortable. Then pick trips with high ceilings at the destination, but low at departure. Until you are comfortable. Then pick destinations with lower and lower ceilings. Always have an out, like higher ceilings close by.

[gsxrpilot]

There are a lot of good suggestions and advice in this thread. So I'll try to add to it.

Get a regular safety pilot. There are lots of pilots out there who don't/can't own airplanes and will almost never turn down an opportunity to ride along. So get a safety pilot and do lots of practice under the hood. Fly lots of approaches using your autopilot and fly lots of them by hand. Fly so many of them that you'll never even come close to being out of currency.

The goal is to get to where your personal minimums are printed on the approach plates. But with full understanding that this is not an end goal, but a standard to maintain. You'll get there, and then go three or four months without flying any approaches, and realize you've slipped badly. These are very perishable skills and have to be kept sharp.

The good news is, it is pure fun to be out on a nice day, with the hood on, a good friend and fellow pilot in the right seat, and shooting approach after approach. Without any danger of getting caught by the weather, or getting to a destination with a plane load of family. Just fun, fun, fun. But also extremely valuable flight time that will pay huge dividends when you need to call on those skills in a serious situation.

[FLYFST]

Sometimes the weather makes the decision of whether and when to fly easy, as the attached shows. I was at Daytona the front was moving slowly, and the mission was just an IFR practice flight. I punted to live and fly another day.


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