The Weather Man (and Woman)

With this week's awful weather I have been spending more time at my university office, doing research and getting ready to teach a new course in the Fall. The work expands to fill the available time...

The graduate director came by to introduce a new graduate student. "He's a retired meteorologist," she said.

She turned to him "Jim is a pilot." She has flown with me to several conferences, and her husband has flown with me for fun.

And this is where it gets weird. "'Mister, I met a man once,' it always begins."¹ The man (it's always been a man) is a professional or military pilot. "The weather was awful and I said 'Do you want to fly in this?' I don't think so..."

"What was the weather?"

"Really low. 300 overcast." It's always 300. Going to an airport with an ILS. Not 100; that's below minimums, so nobody would go. Not 200; that's at minimums, increasing the pucker factor. But always 300. Now, depending on who you are and what you fly, 300 overcast may or may not be low. To a military pilot in a jet, it's no problem (assuming there's an ILS). To an ATP in a turbine airplane, it is definitely no problem. To a student pilot, or to a guy in a J-3, it's probably a big problem. But they're never briefing a student in these stories.

In defiance of all logic, meteorologists and pilots can't communicate. I got a hint of this in November, when a student and I visited the local Weather Service office. A couple of other encounters reinforced the feeling, because I keep hearing the same story.

Their point is that we don't listen to them; mine is that they don't listen to us. Conclusion: they don't know much about flying. We don't know much about weather. Yikes!

I've had lots of wacky briefings from meteorologists. There was the Base Meteorologist (I flew with an Air Force Aero Club). He spent his day briefing C-5s and B-52s. "I dunno," he shook his head, "moderate ice at Flight Level 230." But I was flying an Archer!

I told one of our local forecasters a story about a flight over town. "There was a rotor cloud, and I had my student fly along the edge of it so he could get a feel for the turbulence."

The forecaster turned white. "You flew below a rotor? You're lucky to be alive!" Well, I disagree. Pilots fly into rotors all the time (glider pilots routinely do it when towing into the wave, and that's in formation). They are very rough, but airplanes are very tough. When I was flying turboprops I would go out of my way to avoid rotors, only because it might make the passengers uncomfortable. But I least I knew where to look.

It seems like to most meteorologists we still fly "Piper Cubs" into dirt strips, and that's their idea of a G-1000 Turbocharged 206. But of course the 206 can reach that ice at 2-3-0 (that's bad), and the 206 at least has XM weather so has a chance to dodge those thunderstorms (that's good). And a proficient instrument pilot can shoot an ILS to minimums in an Archer while pouring a coffee and telling a dirty joke. I don't think they know about LPV approaches with a 250 foot decision height.

But we pilots are worse. We don't turn white when they tell their stories; we just nod off.

Whose fault is this? The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within the stars, but within ourselves.². The fact is, pilots are not demanding that the National Weather Service provide quality briefings, and we are not helping them give us quality briefings. We have not told them what we need, and what we can and cannot do.

And it's too late.

Since the privatization of Flight Service, the National Weather Service is not allowed to do pilot weather briefings. They make aviation forecasts; they enjoy discussing the weather with us; they make the observations (or, should I say, supplement the observations?). But they may not brief us!

And so we have reached the era where pilots brief themselves. We use DUATS or DUAT or FltPlan.com, supplemented with NWS's Aviation Digital Data Service. These give us the facts, but we also need that extra insight from the experienced weather guy.

Sometimes, he's right.

---

¹Casablanca
²Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Compartmentalization

One of the worst things we do in aviation is putting our experience into little compartments that stay on the shelf until the exact circumstance repeats itself. One example is the pilot who has been flying twins and forgets to keep a landing spot in mind when flying a single. It's a form of complacency.

This came up the other night while flying with a student. We had been scheduled for the night before, but a strong cold front came through, attacking us with ceilings around 1500' and lots and lots of wind. Gusting to 30 wind. The ceiling was too low for a first night flight and the wind was too strong for a student. So we cancelled.

Now we had clear skies and light winds on the ground, although the winds were around 20 knots 1500' above the airport. I gave him the Introduction to Night Flying lesson, and off we went.

I wanted to take him over the city and its reassuring lights first. The winds were favoring runway 21, and the city is east of the airport, so the natural thing is a left downwind departure. But that's where the hills are, too, and I convinced him that it would not be prudent to take off toward high terrain at night with a big tailwind: every hesitation in the turn to downwind and in setting up a crab into the wind would take us toward the mountains. Google Cory Lidle, the Yankee pitcher who hit a building in Manhattan, for a reminder of what happens when you ignore obstacles in high wind.

In the picture, the left downwind departure is red, and the right downwind departure is in green. Each has a crosswind turn, then a distorted downwind leg. The left downwind departure goes directly through a tower 1700 feet above the airport and only about 4 miles away. A 172 can't outclimb that.

The tower approved the right downwind departure to cross overhead, and soon we were over the city. The city is in a triangular valley, and I told him to fly closer to one side so that we would have room to turn around. There was a long cloud over the city, surprisingly low, but not low enough to prevent VFR. Just one long cloud, running parallel to the valley, illuminated by the lights below.


Any glider pilot would recognize the cloud, but my glider knowledge was in a compartment back home, not in the airplane. It was a rotor cloud, sometimes called a roll cloud. The picture to the right, from the FAA's Glider Flying Handbook, shows what was happening. The strong wind from the west -- the same wind we had just discussed -- passed over the mountains at the edge of the valley producing a strong downdraft (we found it), a rotor, and a strong updraft (we found that, too).

The thing is, the rotor can be really turbulent, and this one was. So our smooth introduction to night flight became an object lesson in the positive and negative effects of mountain wave. In the end it was fun, but for a few seconds there I could that my student had that uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach, the one that comes up when there is unexpected turbulence.

---

I've written about complacency before: see Missing the Signs, back in September, or How Far Can You Go? in August. Writing about complacency is a weak way of avoiding complacency, better than nothing. But avoiding complacency takes more; checklists help some, but it almost takes minute-by-minute vigilance to guarantee success. Do you daydream while your student checks the magnetos, or do you watch carefully to make sure that both are on before takeoff? Do you believe that your student looked outside during the clearing turn, or do you look, too? Do you yawn through the pretakeoff checklist, or do you sit there with a smile plastered on your face reciting "Controls Instruments Gas Attitude Runup" to yourself while you verify that each has been done?