Your favorite flight-planning website might conveniently calculate times and fuel burns at a most favorable altitude, but there are times when it’s likely to be dead wrong.
Forecast-Wind Follies
If I were crowned king, my first decree would be to abolish the official winds and temperatures aloft forecast, also known as the FBWinds. Its an outdated product thats fraught with problems. The problems get compounded when pilots unknowingly misuse the forecast.
Key Takeaways:
- Flight planning tools frequently rely on the "FBWinds" forecast, which is an outdated, automated product often highly inaccurate due to poor spatial and temporal resolution, lack of human oversight, and no amendment criteria.
- These inaccuracies can lead to significant errors in calculating flight times, fuel burn, and critical weather factors like icing, especially when weather conditions are dynamic or routes pass between widely spaced forecast stations.
- Pilots should be aware of the FBWinds' limitations, particularly when forecasts are used outside their precise valid times or require extensive interpolation, and consider more detailed, higher-resolution alternatives like Skew-T log (p) diagrams (RUC model) for better accuracy.
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