Come on in and pull up a chair. From time to time when I worked the forecast desk I used to get curious pilots wandering in with questions. Usually it was a B-1B Lancer crewmember who was delayed by a crowd of other pilots at the base operations counter. Since the weather station was 20 feet away it provided them with an opportune time to get all those questions answered that popped up at 30,000 feet.
One of the more interesting questions I’ve occasionally had is about our charts. Not what the markings mean, but what do we see? What are we thinking when we look at those charts? While there’s no way we can cover all the basics in this article, one thing I can do is walk you through a chart sequence and explain how it all comes together. The basics aren’t really that difficult so I’m confident you can learn a few things too.
