Your guess is as good as mine.

Not quite the weather briefing I got from flight services today but close enough. The weather and hence the forecast have been severely screwed recently. All week it was looking like Saturday was going to be an OK day for flying. My resident meteorologist at work reckoned that there would be some light showers but the winds were looking to be nicely down the runway.  Sunday was looking sunnier but with stronger winds.

That all changed on Friday, The mist lowered, the air was still and the airport was MVFR all day. Saturday’s forecast was for much the same. I held out a small glimmer of hope; remember the cloud base was forecast to be 800ft on the day I did my first solo. Alas it wasn’t to be. Saturday arrived with mist, rain and IFR conditions. I sulked for a while and then fired off a text to Bob enquiring as to his availability on the Sunday. He replied with a “definitely maybe” pointing out the winds were forecast to be 15 gusting 25 and not at a great angle either. On top of that it didn’t appear that there was a plane available anyways. We agreed to touch base on the Sunday morning to see if there were any cancellations.

Sunday morning came with almost non-existent winds, A plane was suddenly available, so I pootled off down to the airport dragging RTH with me*.  It became apparent that the conditions predicted on the TAF bore no resemblance to what was actually happening (the winds switched 180 degrees while I was waiting for Bob to arrive). So I was dispatched to phone flight services to get a weather brief and see what their take on it was.

I could almost hear the guy shrugging his shoulders over the phone.  Basically the surface winds were not doing the same as the upper winds. There had been some PIREPS of severe turbulence over areas to the south and some windshear at Pearson.  So basically after stalking the METAR and TAF and phoning flight services. I was still left with “let’s get up there and see what its like.” And people wonder why I have no time for Met. It’s a black art at best!



* RTH wanted to talk to Bob about getting his night rating, very cool!