Aviation Weather Safety

General aviation weather safety is nothing to take lightly. Our pilot weather articles are designed to help you maintain your skills for flying in tough conditions and improve your overall aviation safety.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013 Weather Avoidance Techniques Staying Out of Trouble When it isn’t CAVU Today, a wide range of tools are available to help avoid those dangers, but each has limitations that must be understood in order to use them safely.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013 10 Tips For VFR Flying In Marginal Weather A few simple suggestions to help keep VFR pilots safe in marginal weather It was the classic example of baby- bird stupidity.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 Combating Crosswinds Ten Things The Textbooks Don’t Tell You Neither the wind given to you by the tower, nor that shown on a mid-field wind sock, is likely to be what you actually experience when landing.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 Weather Avoidance: Back To Basics Ten simple steps to enhance your weather planning and avoid Mother Nature’s worst It's one of the great paradoxes in aviation that one of the biggest killers of pilots —weather—is one of the least understood and least taught subjects in primary flight instruction.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 Winter Flying Tips Twenty Things You Can Do To Stay Safe and Have Fun Winter is as inevitable as aging, and for pilots who live in or fly to the northern latitudes, every winter will present significant challenges.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010 Beware The Downburst An insidious risk that can undercut airspeed and drive you into the ground Contrary to the advice that aviation usually allows you to make most mistakes only once, I’ve been fortunate in 50 years of flying to make virtually all the bad mistakes, in some cases more than once.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 The Box Is Yours Competition aerobatics can make you a more precise and confident pilot I was circling at 4,500 feet in the designated contest holding area for the Borrego Springs Akrofest while another competitor finished his routine in the aerobatic box.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010 Managing Risk: VFR Versus VMC Are you prepared for when the weather deteriorates? It has been a long day on a long cross-country flight. The weather forecasts have not been very accurate—you’re reminded of a quote from an anonymous wag: "Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers."

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 Dealing With Convective Weather Some pilots simply lock their airplanes in the hangar when convective weather is about. Others learn to cope. Shortly after returning from a recent Grand Caravan delivery from Long Beach, Calif., to Seoul, Korea, I spoke at a LoPresti First Saturday event in Sebastian, Fla.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 The Myth (Almost) Of Tailwinds Logic suggests you should have tailwinds roughly 50% of the time. Logic is wrong. It was late March 1994, and I was waiting for wind—again. Mooney Aircraft had loaned me a new TLS in January so I could set several world records flying between Los Angeles and Jacksonville, Fla.

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