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Advice/Guidance: November Touring / Winter IFR Weather

I am planning a trip from the UK to southern Germany and potentially Austria for a week during the last two weeks of November. The trip is meant to be flown IFR but since I am relatively new to the world of IFR flying and have little experience with winter weather (got the IR in spring/summer) I was hoping to open a discussion / get some detailed guidance from some of the more experienced members on this forum as to what you look out for. Specifically:

  • Planning thought process (process from inception to day of flight)
  • Things / weather phenomenons to definitely avoid
  • Time frame of planning
  • Go-no-go factors
  • Tools used

I know there are several useful sources already out there and I have read Peter’s post on IFR weather planning / cloud tops and this has helped on past trips (link here).

In part I hope this can be a useful pool of resource for other IFR pilots looking for guidance around weather planning in the upcoming winter months.

Below is a little more detail around the specific specs of the aircraft I will be using:

  • Ceiling: 17’000ft (oxygen available)
  • Endurance: 6hrs
  • TKS available (non-FIKI and usage time of circa 60min, 30min on max)
  • ADL120 for in-flight weather
EGSX

A few points:

Southern Germany (especially the southeast) has lots of fog in that kind of season, which might preclude a landing, possibly even if your destination has an ILS (don’t know if you are comfortable flying one to near mimimums.)
Often, planning to land in the early or mid afternoon helps, but not always.

Then of course, avoid flying on days with noticeable frontal activity on your route, mainly due to the icing risk. From the UK all the way to the south of Germany, this might preclude many days. Still, generally speaking, vertical extension of clouds is much less in the end of November than say in spring. With an aircraft that climbs well, you should be able to find a cloud-free altitude most of the time.

Consider that your AC might get frosted over during the night if parked outside. That can be a real bugger. As an emergency measure, carry along a spraycan of TKS fluid.

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

TimR – what aircraft will you be flying?

I don’t think the planning is different for November relative to say June. You can get comprehensively iced up at FL150 anytime. And warmer temps are much worse e.g. 6 weeks ago I was crossing the Alps at ISA+15 or so… we were at FL160, could not get any higher due to the warm air, but -5C was absolutely perfect to generate loads of icing which used up 3/4 of my TKS tank just on that bit of the flight. -25C would have been just fine…

VMC on top is the way to go, anytime of the year, unless you want to take risks with the TKS lasting longer than the IMC.

Ground ice/frost can be a real bugger – a thread here on some equipment. Carrying the dispenser is ok since it weighs almost nothing and you would carry a tub of TKS which you would pour into it only if it is actually needed.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

TimR – what aircraft will you be flying?

From that…

Ceiling: 17’000ft (oxygen available) Endurance: 6hrs TKS available (non-FIKI and usage time of circa 60min, 30min on max

SR22 NA would be my guess

Last Edited by tschnell at 01 Nov 19:46
Friedrichshafen EDNY

Out of interest: why do you plan to do this trip end of November? There are a couple of really nice places in southern Germany, if you come to EDFM to visit Heidelberg, we could have a beer, but I would consider a different season for a visit.

EDFM (Mannheim), Germany

boscomantico wrote:

Consider that your AC might get frosted over during the night if parked outside

I don’t know whether to believe it. but an ex British Airways pilot told me he bought a few hundred bottles of duty free vodka on the company account when the airport had run out of de-ice

EGHO-LFQF-KCLW, United Kingdom

Thanks for all the feedback. tschnell you are indeed right, SR22 NA.

Terbang, agree there are better times of the year to visit Germany I have family living around there and am considering the trip as an alternative to the airlines. I’ll definitely keep EDFM as a plan for next spring/summer!

One thing I struggle with is evaluating cloud tops from the IR satellite images. How do you determine the real vertical extent of “very white” areas (i.e. very cold tops). It could just be a layer of altostratus or something? Is it just overlaying the information with GRAMET and looking at Skew-Ts?

Speaking of SkewTs, this website (link) has GFS model plots. What exactly does that mean, I presume they are not physical balloon ascents? How reliable is that info?

Thanks all!

EGSX

One thing I struggle with is evaluating cloud tops from the IR satellite images. How do you determine the real vertical extent of “very white” areas (i.e. very cold tops).

You basically cannot. The data does exist – EUMETSAT has it, with calibrated IR images, but only via a hefty B2B deal – and if you combined it with the GFS temp profile, you could get something reasonable. AFAIK all the websites which offer a colour coded cloud tops image don’t do the temp correction and just use ISA, which we all know is virtually useless, with ISA+15 (typical in the summer) being worth about 7000ft extra on the real cloud tops.

The best you can get, by looking at the IR image, with some experience, is the tops plus or minus a few thousand feet, so if your plane can do say 18k, and the tops look like 10k, it’s a GO. Some notes here. One would think this is a business opportunity but in GA so much data is free that few would want to pay for it. Also, often, one finds the stratus tops rise through the day, at anything up to +50fpm.

It could just be a layer of altostratus or something? Is it just overlaying the information with GRAMET and looking at Skew-Ts?

Yes; you look at other stuff like the radar and the general MSLP data. Often it is cirrus, say FL300. If the radar is clean then it is probably the very high cloud.

IME it is extremely rare to see a high pressure area and not be able to reach VMC at say FL100-150. I saw it only once, 2008, and had to abandon the plane at Split for a week, then retrieve it. Even the A320 was in IMC and turbulence, at FL300+.

You can find baloon ascents at a few places, notably the Univ of Wyoming, mentioned in detail here. These are done at 0000Z and 1200Z but at only a few places in Europe. They can give you a useful guide to support other data, in situations where the general picture is stable.

The GFS plots are, ahem, as good as GFS itself, which is accurate when it is accurate Slick graphics can’t hide a low quality model. It’s like the Autorouter gramet plots; they show blue sky most of the time nowadays…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

One thing I struggle with is evaluating cloud tops from the IR satellite images. How do you determine the real vertical extent of “very white” areas

In short: you don‘t. You just depart and then during the climb go searching for the best altitude to fly at.

Last Edited by boscomantico at 02 Nov 11:38
Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

Peter wrote:

AFAIK all the websites which offer a colour coded cloud tops image don’t do the temp correction and just use ISA, which we all know is virtually useless, with ISA+15 (typical in the summer) being worth about 7000ft extra on the real cloud tops.

Sebastian Golze has told me that the ADL system does temperature correction of its IR data based on the GFS temperature profile.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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