Worrying the night before a flight - is it normal?

Fly more!

It is normal though, and I’d say healthy to have a certain amount of anxiety. Use it to your benefit, and it usually increases concentration.

Don’t hesitate to ask another (senior) pilot for his opinion on weather/flight plan/mission plan. Just see how he thinks and feels about it. Can be a confidence booster.

I have to say this thread made me think quite a bit.

For most of us, this should be a hobby and therefore fun. Fun does not translate to sleepless nights for me I am afraid.

While I am probably one of the more conservative planners here and do cancel way to fast and early, I can not say that I have lost sleep over a upcoming flight recently. I did during training maybe or before exams, but not before planned flights.

Maybe the reason is that I plan very conservatively and am more likely to cancel even before I get to be worried if I don’t like what I see even earlier in the planning process. I have to say that I have had quite some frustration in recent years with the dispatch reliability in VFR, this is well known here I think, but most of the time I pulled the plug on upcoming flights early enough so not to having to worry about go/no go on the day. Most of the time, the post mortem showed the decision was founded, a couple of times it was not.

What I do notice is that with age and experience I do become more conservative in planning than before. While I did do some trips which in retrospect were questionable from a pre-planning point of view and some ended in diversions or delays, I still did them, primarily because at the time there was no such stuff as internet based planning platforms such as GFS/GME Model forecasts and other stuff. One talked to a weather man and went off. Now I AM one of the weather man and I know all there is to know about the forecasts and that most of the time puts a full stop to my preplanning at least 2-3 days before I ever take off.

I consequently have scaled down my flying to realistic operations for me which does not leave my comfort zone unless I really have a lot of time on my hands and equally a lot of time for planning. As that has not happened recently, I usually do day trips or 1-2 day affairs which do not have any consequences when I have to cancel.

Loosing a night’s sleep over an upcoming flight would be a reason to cancel it. First of all, any flight crew which is not properly rested is not really airworthy. Secondly, if your concerns about an upcoming flight are such that you are not comfortable enough with your preparations that you can rest before the flight, then there is something wrong with the flight assignment itself: Either you lack confidence or your lack ability or both. I would regard both of them problematic, with fatigue after a sleepless night being the absolute showstopper.

Again, what most of us do, the accounts of people like what next about his early professional flights non withstanding, is supposed to be fun, is supposed to be relaxation and a joy. I can not really match this with sleepless nights and anxiety.

And no, I am no cold fish, just the opposite, I have been maybe rightly been classified as the biggest coward here as I do cancel fairly early, but the moment I get sleepless nights over upcoming flights, I’d consider something seriously wrong with my planning.

Earlier on this thread, we’ve had the issue of how weather planning isn’t an exact science and there is no black/white answer to whether you should venture out or not and how this may contribute to the sleepness nights.

I’ve slept okay last night but still today is a splendid example for uncertainty on my account: The plan is to fly out tonight from Paderborn EDLP to Hamburg EDDH. What’s at stake is a nice week of being in Hamburg and being able to do local trips in the evening. The trip itself is NOT at stake because if I don’t fly, I’ll be on a train. Now, what’s at stake obviously shouldn’t influence the go-/no-go decision at all, so let’s forget about that.

So what’s happening in terms of weather? There’s a rather slow moving occluded front moving in from the East and by the earliest time I can fly, it will probably have reached the route area. Gathering from various weather products, I’m expecting clouds all day, generally at VMC levels, i.e. 1500 ft or higher. I’m also expecting occasional/regional areas with lower level clouds down to 600 ft and rain/showers with reduced visibility.

On the pro side, terrain isn’t much of an issue. Maximum elevation for the first 45 NM is around 700 ft AMSL and then, nothing worth mentioning. MSA is at 2000 ft though, due to some wind turbine parks along the way.

So I’m torn between just pulling it and reading a nice book on the train later on – and giving it a go and driving out to the airfield (still a 1:15 hour drive). What’s in it for me is to get more experience in marginal, yet not dangerous (as in thunderstorms etc.) conditions. Worst case I divert enroute or fly back…

I’ll be watching the met sources and thinking about this for a bit longer today.

Peter,

fully agree with your post. What bugged me was the level of anxiety displayed here, not the fact that people are concerned (as a better word) or worried to the point where it influences their ability to rest before a (longer) flight. Because that would be a safety issue.

For instance, I do not fly after a night shift (not even after the 8 hours of sleep I usually get after a night shift) as I know that my body clock is not up to speed. For me, a good rest before a flight is a minimum of 8 hours of which I have before starting to prepare on the day and leave the house. I might do a small local flight to an airport I know well but that is about the scope of it.

Peter wrote:

And one worries more about the return trip than about the outbound trip, IMHO, because if you scrap the outbound trip you are still sitting in your comfortable home.

Usually the return trip is the more difficult one to plan because you rely on unreliable model data which shows to be pessimistic at most times. If I have learnt something in 12 years of weather service it is that there can be a overflow of inaccurate information particularly while planning a longer undertaking, where the critical part starts about 2 days into the forecast. I’d say we can forecast pretty well up to that time, thereafter it is usually a much worse indication than the actual case. Unfortunately you can’t plan with this either, as sod’s law will usually not give you that improvement when you need it.

Peter wrote:

The glorious summer of 2003 in particular has never been repeated.

Interestingly, it is just in progress right now of being repeated. What i can see from here, weather was really good the last few weeks and I am sort of kicking my ass not having taken the Mooney to Bulgaria, even though there were other reasons not to. If it holds, i’ll try to take it there in August.

Peter wrote

I don’t think cancelling VFR trips is being a coward.

You never said you did, but I’ve had other comments on my over restrictive cancellations. And judging by what others are doing probably there is a point to it, even though I would like to call it over cautious maybe rather than simply cowardly.

What I have observed in myself and also others is that in more than one way while our information level on the met side has improved massively over what was available when I started, the flood of information and “forecasts” derived from models over longer periods have NOT increased dispatch reliability one inch, but on the contrary reduced it. The reason being that in the “old” days without the long range forecasts and all that I would for the lack of it having been more optimistic about a longer trip than today, where the models very often are very dissuasive of trips which, with post mortems showing that they would have been possible. And that is me, who has meteorological training and therefore should “know” about the reliability of the long term forecasts. What about “normal” internet users? I am getting the impression that the overflow of model data may well result in the opposite than what might be expected: It actually dissuades people from conducting a flight on the basis of data whose reliability can not be adequately assessed by “laymen”, with that meaning anyone who has not got day to day experience with model outputs.

Even though right now I am getting the proof that my gut feeling especcially about the alpine weather is not actually wrong, but even optimistic. I’ll let you guys in on those statistics when they are completed, but so far it appears that over the year a VFR alpine crossing is reliably planable only on about 35% of the days across the year, with a low of 15% in Winter and 45% in Summer. In contrast, planability in the low lands of Switzerland is considerably higher than I thought, with an overall of around 70% varying from 10% in Winter to 90% in Summer.Again, this is a “first look” into this kind of data and will most probably change still, but I was still baffled by the initial results. I am really looking forward to completing these statistics to finally getting some reliable figures on this.

Anybody who will critisize another pilot for beeing cautious, or even “over cautious” (whatever that is), is simply an idiot. One of the few rules I have for my flying are:

- I will never fly because someboy else tells me “it’s ok”
- I will never let a passenger influence my decision to stay on the ground and I will never fly because of “an important appointment” if I don’t think it’s safe. The can take a train, hitchike, I don’t care one bit, because I told them before.
- I don’t care if other pilots are more brave, better, cooler, whatever! While I think that some of the stories I read here are very interesting, I am sure that I would not try some of the flights described.
- On the other hand I am sure (see other thread) that at a certain point a pilot should start traveling with his airplane. I can see where “mh” is coming from, and of course I like the “live and let live” attitude, but I think in many, if not most, cases pilots who only fly around the airfield (“churchtower flyers” ;-)) simply don’t dare to plan and execute a longer trip. And all of the ones I know who finally did it were so proud that they crossed this border!

It reminds me of a guy who one day asked me to do his PPL bi-annual checkride with him (I am only a CRI, not FI, but i can do those). I knew that he had flown for some years, but from the start he was excusing himself all the time (“I hope i am good enough …”) and he was really stressed. Then we flew together and he flew fine, actually he was very precise, had good situational awareness and good flying technique. Then, during the flight, he told me that he was flying for 8 years now but that he never flew alone, only with a safety pilot. I thought, to myself, a good pilot like that should at one point really make that step and start flying alone. I do think it is importance for building confidence, and I was sure that he himself did not like that situation. After we landed I tried: “Hey, know what – I’ll get out now and you take off again and fly another hour, ok?”. He would not do it, he was scared as shit! Of course I did not try to talk him into it.

Three years later i saw the guy again: "Hey, Alexis (beaming!) .. you know what? I fly alone now, all the time! I even rent a Cirrus …. ". I could see that he had really made a step and that he was having fun now.

Peter wrote:

TAFs always throw in everything including the kitchen sink, often using the PROB30 TEMPO code for CYA purposes. These codes have specific meanings for AOC ops e.g. a PROB30 TEMPO of a TSRA can be disregarded whereas the same for a persistent condition like fog cannot. But it serves to put off a lot of pilots from doing a flight. You get a PROB30 TEMPO TSRA on any day where there is a trough

Actually, that is exactly according to what I learnt which was at the time JAR OPS in Swissair. Prob/Tempo gets disregarded, Either Prob OR Tempo doesn’t.

Peter wrote:

The other thing worth knowing is that just about all free weather websites get the stuff from the same place: GFS. The graphics might be more or less pretty but the data is the same. In Europe, very little nationally produced wx data is available to us.

For free I agree, however most people around the German speaking part use the DWD service “Flugwetter.de” which I personally like quite a lot. It has a lot of additional data and EZ as well as Cosmo Model charts. In Meteo Swiss we have high resolution Cosmo Model outputs available as well. The thing I like about especcially the Cosmo series is that it doesn’t pretend to “know” the weather for 3 weeks in advance as GFS does. Anyone can drag out a model to 3 weeks or even years, but it is not serious.

As far as I am concerned it is high time that Europe stops with it’s pay for everything idea and opens up the model data that we can finally use high res data for our applications in Europe instead of working on a low res system like GFS. Make no mistake, I am immensely grateful to the US for making this available for free, simply for Europe there is naturally better stuff, like the US have better stuff for their territory. The only way I know for getting the European model data however is via paywalls. If the product is as good as Flugwetter.de is, then I am fine to pay for it, but many national sites are not.

172driver wrote:

Also, I don’t fly for a living and am generally not too stressed about canceling a flight. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

That’s how I feel about it also. I am a bit amused about the stress level here. Is the stress maybe caused by being anxious about cancelling a flight, not so much about the weather itself ? Also, you can always start a flight and return or land somewhere else if the weather turns out to be worsening.

This discussion was not about anxiety or extreme stress. It was about beeing a bit nervous about a longer flight the next day about “butterflies” in the stomach … It was also not about professional pilots who fly up and down Europe every day. Believe me, if I flew 5 hours daily IFR through weather after one month I’d probably think about it less.

We all know that we can stay on the ground, cancel the flight, divert to a better place. But that’s not the point. what Peter (and me, and others) reported has (IMHO !) to do with the character feature of trying to be a perfectionist. we want to plan our flights as good as we can, we check all available weather sources (and we spent hours every day here, trying to learn more). And at the same time we are always aware that tomorrow morning when we drive to the airport the weather will again be different than forecast. We fly with our wives and our children, and we don’t worry so much about killing ourselves (over 50 you become more fatalistic than with 30, at least it happened to me) … and we feel the responsibility to save our gene pool for a next generation :-)

So, since we don’t do long distance flying 5 times per week like an airline pilot (who always has a second pilot who has checked the weather :-)) … it sometimes makes us a bit nervous to understand that not everyhing will be under our control: EFATOs, Weather, Greek Handling companies …

I think it is very normal. Of course there’s pilots who have none of that. That’s the “bold pilots” from the famous saying!