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 Its an outdated product thats fraught with problems.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:
- The official FBWinds (winds and temperatures aloft) forecast, widely used in flight planning, is an outdated, automated product often providing inaccurate data due to a lack of human oversight.
- Significant errors arise from FBWinds' poor spatial resolution, with widely spaced forecast stations making interpolation between them unreliable for specific routes and altitudes.
- FBWinds also suffer from temporal resolution issues, as they are only truly valid at specific 6-hour intervals, leading to potential inaccuracies when weather conditions change between the valid time and actual flight time.
- Pilots should recognize these limitations and consider more detailed, higher-resolution alternatives, such as Skew-T log (p) diagrams from models like the RUC, to ensure accurate flight planning.
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