From the 1930s until the 1980s, many pilots got their weather briefings from a meteorologist at a flight service station or airline dispatch counter. The counter often ended up being a center of discussion about the World Series and chatting with other pilots who arrived for their briefing. Those in-person briefings gave way to weather briefings by phone, which have subsequently been replaced by self-briefings using one of a few authorized web sites. Nonetheless, these are all considered a “formal weather briefing” and they make up the backbone of your flight plan.
But there’s long been the informal self-briefing. It’s an unstructured look at the weather, often to figure out an itinerary or round out little details about destination weather. Early broadcast television, which brought radar and satellite to the masses, was a big part of the informal weather picture. From 1978 to 1995 there was AM Weather on PBS with its aviation weather segment, and of course The Weather Channel.
