What’s your pet hate in flying?
I was thinking about that the other day. For car enthusiasts, it should be pretty easy. In road traffic, what most people seem to hate most is traffic jam/rush-hour. When you’re stuck in your car, NOT driving.
We don’t witness as much traffic jam in flying and I think, if there is such s thing as everyone’s pet hate in flying, it’s going to be more diverse. Will it be marginal weather for you (which other pilots might welcome as a challenge), complex ground operations and pre-flight paperwork (which, again, other pilots might find joy in)?
For me, after some thinking, it’s the lack of a critical mass which prevents good things from happening: Innovative engines, one-way rentals, successful flight sharing platforms – all things, that traffic participants on the ground are quite used to, simply because there are so many of them. I realize also that the lack of a critical mass prevents bad things from happening, too. More people flying could well result in less freedom in the air.
Agreed. The luddite and stick in the mud mentality. Like TAF’s and METAR’s and Area Forecasts in idiotic, gibberish shorthand that was devised in the 30’s to be sent via morse code. Why on earth do we still have to suffer through those reports and try to decipher every abbreviation? No need. Just write it in plain english. Thankfully there are apps that translate the nonsense into plain English. But it’s a mystery why it’s stuck around for so long. And it’s still here. Aviation is full of self-flagellation like that.
A nice weather forecast, that makes you plan an extended VFR-flight with passengers, getting progressively worse, ending finally in actual IMC.
Agree with all that has been said above.
My own pet peeve is if the airports and infrastructure I want to use is being needlessly restricted by slots, PPR and other “I say you may not”’s all over the place. I often find myself wanting to go to fly and can not because either there are no slots, VFR is suspended for one reason or the other (like right now in the WEF all VFR is grounded here) or I am denied PPR for some reason or the other.
I’ve learnt to accept the weather for what it is, working with it all day does that eventually. I’ve learnt a lot about it too in the last 12 years. Accordingly I have started to actively tune my flying and expectations towards realistic destinations rather than planning stuff I know will be impossible to do most of the time.
I really (like others i guess …) have problems with analyizing the weather and making go/no-go decisions based on wx reports. METARs and TAFs OTOH i find easy to read, that just needs a little practice. And they can be transmitted to the cockpit via satellite miuch faster than plain text.
Getting my planes in and out of my Swiss-watch style hangar arrangement is the thing I like least, but it’s part of my game and unavoidable. Otherwise I just avoid what I wouldn’t enjoy in other people’s aviation.
I forgot PPR. That is my main pet peeve.
AdamFrisch wrote:
Like TAF’s and METAR’s and Area Forecasts in idiotic, gibberish shorthand that was devised in the 30’s to be sent via morse code. Why on earth do we still have to suffer through those reports and try to decipher every abbreviation? No need. Just write it in plain english.
On the contrary. I can read an understand a coded TAF or METAR much quicker than a deciphered one. They are actually easier to read (if you know the code, of course).
Patrick wrote:
What’s your pet hate in flying?
Overly conservative weather forecasts.
Having to get up at four o’clock in the morning.
