IFR just 5.4% of the time

First, Thomas, let me congratulate you on the civil tone of your
response. It's quite pleasant, thank you!

And now you expect me to congratulate you on being condescending and
arrogant without any provocation and totally out of the blue? Why on
earth are you doing that? It could have been an interesting discussion.
Sad...

Sorry, I didn't mean it that way. Your method of posting is usually
so confrontational that I truly was thankful that you had restricted
your remarks and opinions to aviation.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:

4. This explains why just half of all pilots have pursued the
instrument rating, and why a very small percentage of instrument rated
pilots are current or proficient.

And the numbers for that can be found where?


First, Thomas, let me congratulate you on the civil tone of your
response. It's quite pleasant, thank you!

The low number of current/proficient IFR pilots has been discussed by
Richard Collins in Flying magazine (I don't remember the source of his
data, sorry), and it's backed up by my personal observations. After
five years of catering to pilots at the hotel, of being our AOPA
Airport Support Network Volunteer, and of running our airport advocacy
group, "Friends of Iowa City Airport", I know one helluva lot of
pilots -- and I can count just TWO that are both current and
proficient instrument pilots.

I think that is somewhat unique to your location. Where I live, a
1,000' ceiling above the airport barely clears some of the nearby
mountains. So, while you could fly all over Iowa with 1,000', I
couldn't get out of the pattern. I'm exaggerating just slightly, but a
1.000' ceiling above ELM isn't very comfortable for flying out of the
vicinity of the airport.

Matt

I think that is somewhat unique to your location.

Absolutely. If I were still living on the shores of Lake Michigan, I
certainly would have obtained the IR by now, just to get up and
through the scuddy crud that often seems to lay 10 miles inland from
the lakeshore.

The vast majority of the country, however, is not on a large body of
water, nor mountainous, which is what makes the IR a low priority for
many pilots.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:08:46 -0800, Jay Honeck wrote:

Now, of course, there were an unknown number of marginal VFR conditions in
the data set, but these results pretty well confirm my (non-scientific)
observation that showed us canceling just a handful of flights each year
due to weather, and a truly tiny set that were canceled due to "soft IFR"
conditions that we would feel safe flying Atlas in.

In fact, this does no such thing. That soft IFR could be 94% given the
data you've provided.

Can/would your friend provide the raw data? It would be very interesting
to actually determine the percentages of MVFR, SIFR, IFR, and LIFR. I'm
tempted to see if I can access that same data at the local ASOS.

This would be a fun little analysis, and I don't think the program to do
this would be more than a few minutes of work (the hardest part
possibly being parsing the data, depending upon the format in which it is
provided).

It would also be terrific if he could provide the means whereby he
acquired the data. That might be reusable at other airports.

This could be fun, and we've enough people here that we could get the data
for a lot of different airports.

- Andrew

This could be fun, and we've enough people here that we could get the data
for a lot of different airports.

Whew! Clearly your idea of "fun" differs from mine, Andrew -- but
I'll see what I can find out...

;-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

I agree with Andrew, I'd love to be able to download historic ASOS
observations for any airport. Even for non-computer programers, a few
minutes parsing with a spread sheet program could yield all kinds of
interesting things!

Jay, please let us know how your friend obtained the data.
Thanks
Jim

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
oups.com...
This could be fun, and we've enough people here that we could get the
data
for a lot of different airports.

Whew! Clearly your idea of "fun" differs from mine, Andrew -- but
I'll see what I can find out...

;-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On 2/28/2007 1:40:04 PM, "Jim B" wrote:

I agree with Andrew, I'd love to be able to download historic ASOS
observations for any airport. Even for non-computer programers, a few
minutes parsing with a spread sheet program could yield all kinds of
interesting things!

You might be able to get some information from the METAR archive websites.
Here's one that includes all stations within a US state going back to 1998:

http://vortex.plymouth.edu/sa_parse-u.html

Or, by individual airport:

http://www.uswx.com/us/stn/?code=c&n=1440&stn=kdpa

--
Peter

Thanks Peter!
I've used some of the historic weather websites in the past to "predict"
what the weather may be like during a specific week or month that I had
planned on visiting. Of course, this all has to be taken with a grain of
salt or a voluminous amount of additional weather data!

Interesting side note: My last long cross country trip departed Feb 10 KSTE
(Wisconsin) -KEYW (Key West, FL) Depart KEYW Feb 16 - KSTE 19 hours
hobbs, 1 hour actual IFR = 5.26% IFR. However there were IFR days before,
during, and after.
Jim

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:57:15 -0500, Peter R. wrote:


You might be able to get some information from the METAR archive websites.
Here's one that includes all stations within a US state going back to
1998:

http://vortex.plymouth.edu/sa_parse-u.html

Can anyone see a way to get a range of reports from this? I suppose I
could write a little script to query this for each observation over a
block of time, but that seems impolite.

Or, by individual airport:

http://www.uswx.com/us/stn/?code=c&n=1440&stn=kdpa

This gives a maximum of a few days (1440 observations), as far as I can
see. Can anyone see a way to get past that?

Thanks...
- Andrew

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:03:14 -0800, Jay Honeck wrote:

This could be fun, and we've enough people here that we could get the
data for a lot of different airports.

Whew! Clearly your idea of "fun" differs from mine, Andrew

Probably. But then, I'm IRed and current laugh.

-- but I'll
see what I can find out...

Thanks...

Andrew