Peter wrote:
Many are simply not on the internet.
Dan wrote:
Or some spend too much time on the internet, iso of practical flying
Let me throw another spanner into the works here: Many rely too much on the internet.
Particularly in convective situations I would say that the Internet can give a false sense of what is going to happen. Brutally said: In a convective situation, forecast “echos” say only one thing: There will be convective weather in that area. It won’t tell you where and when as convection is highly unpredictable as to the actual path and severity.
And then there are many “tools” such as various Gramets and other stuff which may look a darn sight better than the actual situation.
From what I can see on the various fora (screenshots of various wx apps e.t.c.) flying into this kind of crap weather is simply no go, not only VFR but for most airplanes also IFR.
It is the typical situation: You get the so called “Ascension weekend” which get lots of people to say, oh, great let’s go fly and of course the pax want to go to the sea. And then they sit south of the Alps on Sunday and get panicked because it is bloody obvious they won’t be at work on Monday morning. So they fly anyway because they “have to” and end up dead, which I suppose is a good enough excuse for most bosses for someone not appearing at that all important meeting.
We’ve said it many times: VFR is unsuitable as a means of transport if time AND destination are fixed. If crossing of the Alps is included, the chance of that happening is 30%. If convection is predicted, stay away. Stay flexible for destinations. On Sunday, France was widely open, Croatia was not.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It won’t tell you where and when as convection is highly unpredictable as to the actual path and severity
You have to be flexible, can you add 300nm to your 200nm route to remain VMC? can you make a stop ‘anywhere’ and let it wash the aircraft while you are on the ground? C182 is by far one of the only SEP I am aware of that offers that flexibility in term of fuel endurance and short runway performance
If your route is a rigid one (IFR in Frankfurt TMA or between terrain in Alps) and it cuts through convective or icing forecast in cruise or near your destination, then you should stay at home, otherwise randomly along your cruise it does not hurt to fly with enough precautions & contingencies
Things like convection & icing will hardly materialize in every point inside say 300nm*300nm*10kft volume, on those days just the act of driving to the airport feels so wrong…
The ADL weather that Emir depicted said it all…..last week Wednesday this was south of Hungary, I flew inbound on Thursday…I would say you cant use the internet enough and please buy an ADL device. I returned from Hungary on the 29th I took off at 6:30 AM for tactical reasons, rain front slowly coming in from Croatia with lowering freezing levels, TCUs CBs over Belgium in the afternoon in combination with very cold weather. Freezing level was low over Germany at 6000 lower in cloud, glad I had TKS, on the descent over the Ardennes. I went from minus 4 at FL100 (cloud deck was till 9000) with the expected ice up but TKS handled it fine I broke out 2000Ft 3 miles from destination. Sebastian earned a little bit of money as I set my ADL to continues downloads for METAR/TAF and ENR :-) weather, I pay this invoice with pleasure….
To fly in convective weather requires lots of experience and sensible decision making. You can do a lot, but need to know what and how. Often, convective weather provides some open passage every now and then. It’s always changing and mixing and moving. So from one single picture of a weather information you cannot tell how things were in the cockpit.
I would not point the finger at the pilot. Not yet.
Rumours have it that the pilot sent a distress call prior to the crash. I would wait with further analysis until we know what problems were stated.
Is there a map showing the crash site?
To fly in convective weather requires lots of experience and sensible decision making.
I would say above all use the right tools to identify its getting bad…From the moment you start to see strikes in general it gets nasty……Strikes start to pop up often when the clouds are still in TCU stage…things can change in minutes.
I still prefer my stormscope over the ADL strike data no latency on the WX1000….Fly early or very late often helps in central Europe….Terrain in combination with TCUs is volatile cocktail that can change fast in my experience starting from 11AM….. If CBs/ TCUs are earlier the situation was already bad and more linked to frontal weather ,,,,,
I still made a local flight on that one, but would never go X-country :-)
I agree that Stormscopes are way more indicative on places where you should not go but heavy turbulence & icing can happen without air-air or air-ground discharges
For some reason, lighting strikes have higher psychological effects on people than turbulence which is more deadly…I recall in gliders, the moment you see lightning you pick field and start your downwind for anything else you have the impression that the show can still run few more minutes
I still made a local flight on that one, but would never go X-country
Well I think that makes a lot of difference, while ago I went for local flight without purpose just to build hand flying currency in turbulence, asking Southend for SVFR transit while they had a mess with IFR
As a side note, the AG operator at North Weald decided not to reply back to our radio calls given the amount of heavy showers he was under, I understood, it’s not the right time to go there and we diverted until everything settles…
When you are flying XC in busy controlled airspace or internationally things gets more constrained, the pilot is likely to fly in places where he would not go under his “normal will”…
UdoR wrote:
To fly in convective weather requires lots of experience and sensible decision making.
I would say that the moment there is wide spread convection around, for the overwhelming share of pilot population out there, there is exactly one decision to be made: Avoid by a large margin and if you can’t, stay on the ground.
What is a real bummer is that in Europe we still don’t get decent in flight weather, even tough quite some planes are capable of receiving it. It is high time that this becomes available on a wide base.
Sebastian’s company and his products certainly have saved many lifes and if there were something like a special award for flight safety he would have my vote!
But it’s high time Europe starts working on how to get those things into the cockpit of airplanes so that SIGMETS and radar pics are available when you actually need them. We all know this works in the US, so we all, including airlines, should stew the bean counters into a good old fashioned Gulash and make force the services to provide this data via the same means available in the US.
Where is the crash site?
