Power pilots as a group seem less interested in the meteorological
situation. Give them the ceiling and visibility numbers from the TAF
and
METAR and they go on that. Nobody seems to ask WHY does the TAF
lower the
ceiling after 2100Z... If the ceiling should lower two hours early at
1900Z
instead of 2100Z, many are totally lost and simply consider this a
"bad
forecast".

I think it's less a matter of disinterest and more a matter of
ignorance. Knowledge of meteorology isn't something that can
effectively be tested using a government-issue multiple choice test,
and it's not particularly easy to test in an oral exam either. For
that matter, it's not easy to teach, and it sure isn't easy to learn
from a textbook. I would have to say that of all the important
aviation topics, meteorology is the most poorly taught and the most
poorly understood. Power pilots as a group are simply not qualified to
speculate WHY the TAF lowers the ceiling after 2100Z. Quite a few
don't even understand that they should be asking why.

One thing I've noticed is this - when an inexperienced pilot cancels a
trip based on a forecast, very rarely is it a matter of good judgment -
meaning the weather is likely to be beyond the pilot's capabilities for
the reasons he believes to be true. Usually it's a matter of poor
understanding - he cancels because he doesn't understand what the
weather is actually doing, and this state of ignorance (quite properly)
scares him. Even when the weather is beyond his capabilities, very
rarely is it for the reasons he thinks it is.

By the same token, the decision by an inexperienced pilot to make the
trip in something other than good weather forecast to stay that way is
rarely a matter of properly understanding that the weather, while not
really good, is within the pilot's capability - it's usually more a
matter of rolling the dice. Even when the weather is within his
capabilities, his logic for coming to that conclusion is generally very
flawed.

This isn't a good situation, but I have to say that in power flying
that's basically the way it is - and that goes double for instrument
flying. I find it amazing that anyone can believe he is making
intelligent decisions with regard to his safety margins against
encountering icing and T-storms in IMC in any but the most clearcut
cases without an understnading of what lapse rates mean, yet here we
have quite a few instrument pilots and instrument instructors still
hashing out the topic. And I'm going to be honest - had I not had my
glider rating long before my instrument rating, and my CFI-G long
before my CFII, I would likely have been just as ignorant.

While I admit it's possible in theory to learn enough about meteorology
from books and classes to make competent go/no-go decisions, I have to
say that I've never actually seen it happen in practice. In reality,
the only people I know who have actually learned to understand what the
weather is doing sufficiently to realistically asess the flight risks
are those who have flown in the weather. Unfortunately, every one of
these people has scared himself more than once by having misunderstood
or ignored some seemingly minor but actually very important factor.
And lest you think that it's somehow different for gliders, every one
of those glider pilots who has become pretty good at knowing what the
weather is doing has stories of guessing wrong and making an
off-airport landing or escaping one only by the skin of one's teeth.

Michael