I have just been reading one and to me these reports lose all credibility when they start referencing these forms.
I’ve been flying 39 years. As a kid I did piston AOC work and I have a lot of time flying in low VFR/IMC outside controlled airspace.
Back in the day we did use form 214 and 215 and I still do look at them. But primarily I use a mobile phone app. Not because I’m a rebel or a danger in the skies but simply because over time the phone app has proved time and time again to be better. Its more accurate and simply makes the flight safer.
I’m sure the people who produce these reports are experienced and probably better paid than I will be. But I think the sole reference to these forms is just wrong
I then struggle to give the rest of the report any credit even if it might be factually excellent.
I find F215 overly vague and overly cautious – there “might be” something somewhere in the area of the whole UK?!
And F214 for me this diagram has got a crappy resolution, comparing to, for example, SkyDemon.
Bathman wrote:
Back in the day we did use form 214 and 215 and I still do look at them.
Are those some UK CAA things or EASA or ICAO standard?
It is a UK Metoffice / UK CAA things
I stopped looking at them years ago. Even when I was introduced to them while doing my PPL in summer 2011, they seemed like something from another age.
As @arj1 says form 215 is too broad-brush in its coverage and overly cautious to the point of being useless. Everything might be everywhere, cloud tops are always off the scale, always icing and always turbulence.
The winds aloft on form 214 don’t matter any more since no-one calculates their nav plog by hand. One generally has an idea of the flow on any given day, but your favourite navigation planning software does everything for a cross country flight and for a local one it’s immaterial.
I think the point (that perhaps the AAIB could make more clear) is that if one isn’t going to use these sources, one does need to use something that provides the information actually useful to aviation (e.g. cloud bases and types) that doesn’t feature in mass media weather forecasts. Looking at the BBC website and seeing that it’s ‘mostly sunny with some clouds’ isn’t much of a weather briefing.
These are forms from roughly the WW1 era, and taught in the PPL. Both are largely useless.
Graham wrote:
I stopped looking at them years ago. Even when I was introduced to them while doing my PPL in summer 2011, they seemed like something from another age.
Well, do you at least download those? ;)
Graham wrote:
I think the point (that perhaps the AAIB could make more clear) is that if one isn’t going to use these sources, one does need to use something that provides the information actually useful to aviation (e.g. cloud bases and types) that doesn’t feature in mass media weather forecasts. Looking at the BBC website and seeing that it’s ‘mostly sunny with some clouds’ isn’t much of a weather briefing.
Well, allegedly, UK CAA says that these forms are the only official pieces of Aviation weather that they know of.
You might be getting the same info from somewhere else (some paid service), but they have no chance of tracking that.
Which means (when they investigate an incident) if you haven’t downloaded something from the Met Office website, they assume you haven’t done your weather brief.
Yes, I know…
UK CAA says that these forms are the only official pieces of Aviation weather that they know of.
Do you have a source for that?
It is of course BS, but there is a nugget of fact in that some wx sources have historically logged briefings, against your login credentials. The NATS notam site does it, Avbrief do it / did it, probably the Met Office does it (again against your login) and there may be others. It would not surprise me if SD log the user activity (I would if I was them; never know when it may be handy in my defence). But that is of potential relevance only if the pilot is dead, and how? I doubt insurance is affected (in the UK – unlike Germany we don’t have the “gross negligence” case) if you briefed from BBC news 
Also the vast majority of UK pilots, probably 99%, do not brief from any of these sources.
arj1 wrote:
Well, allegedly, UK CAA says that these forms are the only official pieces of Aviation weather that they know of.
You might be getting the same info from somewhere else (some paid service), but they have no chance of tracking that.
Which means (when they investigate an incident) if you haven’t downloaded something from the Met Office website, they assume you haven’t done your weather brief.
Yes, I know…
It was quite a long time ago that I stopped viewing the UK CAA as a source of expertise on anything.
I comply with the law. Beyond that, I’ve absolutely no interest in what the UK CAA thinks or does about anything. I’m more likely to listen to the pilot in the next hangar (or even my dog) about the optimum way of doing things than I am to listen to the UK CAA. They are quite demonstrably extremely bad at what they do.
I am not aware of any law or regulation which puts an onus on a pilot to leave some sort of electronic paper trail with respect to the weather information they obtain. If that changes, I’m sure I’ll find some way to tick that box while continuing to get my weather data (when required) from wherever I get it.
Graham wrote:
I comply with the law. Beyond that, I’ve absolutely no interest in what the UK CAA thinks or does about anything. I’m more likely to listen to the pilot in the next hangar (or even my dog) about the optimum way of doing things than I am to listen to the UK CAA. They are quite demonstrably extremely bad at what they do.
:))) So we are on the same page here!
Graham wrote:
I am not aware of any law or regulation which puts an onus on a pilot to leave some sort of electronic paper trail with respect to the weather information they obtain. If that changes, I’m sure I’ll find some way to tick that box while continuing to get my weather data (when required) from wherever I get it.
It’s more of the “oh, he did not login to the Met Office website, so we can’t find any evidence of him doing any weather briefing” after the incident.
