I was listening to ATC while at my desk*, CYYZ tower to be exact
and heard pilots giving icing reports. Ah, its winter now and while I have
theoretical knowledge of the different types of icing, how it forms and what it
means**. I’m not sure it really occurred to me that it was something I needed
to check for before flying. I mean I’m used to pulling up the METAR/TAF on my phone
and giving the wind speed and direction a quick once over and maybe checking
out the cloud base to make the fly or no fly decision. Although to be honest I’m
more likely just to take a peek outside and see if there are any other light
aircraft taking off.
Right, well I recognize the need to do something about this and I
have vague recollections of RTH showing me charts with weather type information
stuff on them. So let us see what we can find.A quick Google search led me to NavCanada’s weather services. I played around with a few options and eventually discovered a chart which looked like this.
I can’t understand this chart/map. At all!
No it isn’t a case of needing to look at the key to ascertain what the symbols mean. I mean that geographically I have no idea where I am meant to be looking. Yep, thats right I'm suffering from a failure to locate where I live.
This is an immigrant problem, the stuff you grew up with as kids
(like recognizing the outline of your own country/province) never made it into
my brain. Give me a map of the UK any size, any scale and I can quickly locate
my home town and most major cities. But Canada hasn’t imprinted itself on me in
the same way. I can’t see a single reference point on that chart which makes
any sense to me. My brain can’t unclutter the image enough for me to work out
what is land and what is water, let alone where Toronto might be.
I love Canada. I love my life here but being an immigrant makes me
feel really really stupid at times L
*yes Mega-geek, I know
** BAD thing, VERY BAD thing
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