Flying smarter

The more I fly, the more useful, or at least interesting, the NOAA‘s AviationWeather.gov service becomes. At any given moment it has dozens of different reports on weather at altitude, across North America. The one above is among the many that show potential or reported turbulence.

I also just discovered TurbulenceForecast.com, with the TurbulenceForecast Blog. There’s a lot of overlap with AviationWeather.gov, since it uses a lot of maps and data from there.

Here’s the FAA’s page on flight delays. Plus FlightAware, the best of a bad bunch — too much flash and other stuff that doesn’t work on too many browsers, especially ones in handhelds. Speaking of which, I’ve lately been appreciating FlightTrack. The list could go on, but I need to move on. See ya in Boston. (At IAD now. The last two paragraphs were written at SFO, where connectivity was minimal.)

Oh, click on the map above and check out the current maximum turbulence potential between here (Washington) and Boston. So far there’s just one pilot report, of moderate turbulence, over Connecticut.



5 responses to “Flying smarter”

  1. I use filghtstats.com. You can check security checkpoint wait times and the delay map works well on my blackberry.

    You can configure it to alert someone by sms or email when you take off or land. I’ve been using that to track time-in-air to clients. Works pretty well.

  2. I got interested in pilot-focused weather watching when I met a guy who was studying to get his pilot’s license. He did and bought a couple of planes and was a real student of weather.

    By the way, that turbulence over Connecticut that you felt was undoubtedly caused by the gasps of horror released when this year’s bonus checks arrived in Fairfield County. It really caused a disturbance in The Force.

    Happy New Year.

  3. Lost My Cookies (or Maddad, it says at the link), flightstats dot com appears to be a spam site: one that exists only to point to “sponsored links”.

  4. Caroline Root '70 Avatar
    Caroline Root ’70

    Thanks for turbulence info! I use flytecomm.com to track flights.
    On a Cape Air Flight (Cessna) from RKD to BOS on Jan 1 all 7 of us hit our heads on the fuselage even though we had our seat belts on! Happy New Year.

  5. Lost My Cookies transposed the “i” and “l” in the link. Try flightstats.com. Works like a charm and is about much more than sponsored links – global flight status, flight tracking, flight alerts, etc.

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