Flight to Florida -- The Cure for Winter

On Mar 30, 10:55 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:

Weather is a dynamic, ever-changing thing. If you're flying anywhere near a
front, as we were on this flight, over a five-hour duration (at spam-can
speeds of 170 mph), you cannot "already know" the weather without XM.

Without XM you can look out the window, you can call Flight Service, and you
can try to extrapolate the weather predictions you received from a briefer
five hours ago -- but you cannot "know" it in any way -- EXCEPT with XM
weather on board.


Jay,
I don't have XM weather yet but have witnessed its great benefit
while flying our long dual cross-country trips with an instructor (as
part of the commercial requirement). His plane is equipped with the
Garmin 430W, a stormscope and the Garmin 396. I totally agree that
weather is a dynamic, ever-changing thing and having XM weather
onboard helps with modifying your flight plan while enroute. However,
our instructor, Doug Stewart (dsflight.com), the National Flight
Instructor of the Year for 2004, kept emphasizing that XM weather
should be used as a strategic and not a tactical tool. The added
benefit of XM weather to ADDS info, duats, standard briefing, FSS is
that it gives you a much shorter term strategic plan. Two years ago
when we had to delay our trip from NY to Oshkosh a day due to
thunderstorms while Doug and another noted Aviation Safety Seminar
speaker, Bob Martens went ahead with their trip also from NY. I had
fun monitoring their flight path on flightware observing them skirting
around thunderstorm areas with the help of the stormscope and XM
weather.

I had done many cross country trips without the benefit of a GPS
(some of them not using GPS on purpose to practice our pilotage and
dead-reckoning skill). We have also flown many long trips (one all
the way from NY to CO) without the benefit of a weather tool on
board. Of course we can fly without GPS and XM weather but having
them on board will definitely make our trips much safer providing that
we follow the advice given in this AOPA article about Scott
Crossfield's accident " Don't let the equipment lead you into a place
you wouldn't go without it"

http://www.aopa.org/asf/asfarticles/2008/sp0804.html


Hai Longworth