The day before the lesson, the wind was forecast to be 24 mph (20 knots) and gusting even higher.<\/p>\n
So, I was well prepared when the phone rang for this lesson to be cancelled.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a total loss, I guess as my instructor was just going to be sitting around anyway she said to come in and we could get some other ground work bits and pieces signed off in my training record.<\/p>\n
You don’t pay if the propeller ain’t spinning (money makes the propeller go round<\/em>), so this was a bit of a freebie, we like free stuff \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n TAF’s & METARS<\/strong><\/p>\n Metars are actual<\/em><\/span> observations of the weather, they attempt to give you a picture of what it’s like right now.<\/p>\n TAF’s (Terminal Aerodrome Forecast) are, as the name suggests, forecasts of the weather and give you a ‘best guess’ at what it might be like in the near future and for how long it might be like that.<\/p>\n Both come in an encoded text format, standardised by the ICAO if you can read them in one location, you should be able to read them anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n Met Office : Aviation Services<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong>If you want accurate and up to date METAR’s & TAF’s, one of\/the best source at least in the UK is The Met Office and thankfully they offer an “Aviation” service<\/a>, for free.\u00a0 You just need to register (free) and then login and you can get at all the information.<\/p>\n In addition to METAR’s & TAF’s, The Met Office provides Form F214 & 215, which provide wind speeds and graphical displays of the weather updated regularly during the day.<\/p>\n Really good service, if you haven’t found it\/aren’t fully using it to its full potential yet, check it out.\u00a0\u00a0 As with all big websites there’s a lot of information and it’s sometimes hard to find where the good stuff on there is, but just those handful of bits are useful.<\/p>\n Aerodrome Information<\/strong><\/p>\n Having gone through that lot and decoded a few METAR’s & TAF’s (more stuff signed off in the training sheet), I was shown possibly the only book I’ve yet to buy, the UK VFR Guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped in with “Ahhh yes, I need one of those….”\u00a0 Because the excitement was shot down pretty promptly by a reminder that actually, it can go out of date and the publisher is under no requirement to inform you.<\/p>\n