 Welcome to the FAA Safety Center, the FAA Production Studio Operation and the National Resource Center. I'm your host, Walt Shammel. Our next presenter is a lifelong aviation enthusiast and currently is the Special Assistant to the Manager for General Aviation and Commercial Division in FAA's Flight Standard Service in Washington. In this capacity, she has developed the FAA's online courses and has guidance documents for flight reviews, instrument proficiency checks, and weather decision making. She has authored numerous articles on risk management decision making and technically advanced aircraft. Our favorite subject today, glass cockpits. She also works with the FAA Aviation News and she edits some of the articles in there. As co-chair of the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee, she's involved with the Personal Aviation Subgroup. She also is closely involved with updates to various FAA handbooks and publications including the Aviation Instructor's Handbook. She holds an ATP certificate as well as ground and flight instructor certificates with instrument, single engine, multi-engine land ratings. She is a master CFI, master ground instructor with the National Association of Flight Instructors and she's worked as an instructor for various flight schools in Northern Virginia. She is presently instructing at the Leesburg-based Flying Club and the Virginia Wing of the Civil Air Patrol where she serves as an instructor check pilot and director of standards and evaluation. She's also a member of the Civil Air Patrol's National Flight Review Board. She's closely involved in the development and delivery of the G-1000, Garmin 1000 transition training program for pilots seeking to fly the G-1000 equipped Cessna 182s. She's a member of the National Association of Flight Instructors, the 99s, the Experimental Aircraft Association and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of North Carolina and she now lives in Northern Virginia. She has a BA in international relations. She's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has a master's degree in education from the University of Phoenix. Her work experience includes serving in the United States Department of States Foreign Affairs as diplomatic service during which she worked at U.S. embassies in Panama City and over in Bangladesh. With that background, her topic today is cloudy skies but clear judgment. Let's welcome Susan Parsons. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here and I've been outside enough to know that down here there are clear skies and it's absolutely wonderful because when my flying club partner and I left Northern Virginia yesterday, we definitely had cloudy skies and we ended up having to sit on the ground for an extra hour and a half and wait until it was time until we had enough visibility and ceiling to safely depart so we could make it out here. I think we all know how to get weather information and we're all really good at getting briefings from various places and I don't know about you but when I first started getting flight weather briefings, I would get these printouts from flight service and it would look sort of like this. I would come home with this big stack of paper or go to the deck and say, okay now where do I start? So it was always a little bit challenging to do it. So I started looking at what the FAA safety team has developed in terms of this particular little 3P process, perceived process and perform and they use it for a lot of different things but I'd like for you to think about it in terms of these three things about weather. We're going to talk about each of these as we go along. Well we've got perceived, what is the weather doing, process which is what can it do to me because that's kind of what counts to me in my airplane and then perform. What do I need to do in order to be safe? Now what is the weather doing? I think like I said at the beginning, we're all pretty good, it gets drilled into us at the very beginning of flight training that we need to get weather information. How many of you remember hearing that early in your flight training? Pretty much everybody. Yep, you hear that you need to know what the weather is doing and so we're good at making phone calls and nowadays we have all sorts of internet resources so we know what the weather is doing and just here are some of the options that you have right now. Anybody recognize that graphic? We have DuWatt and DuWatt's, Sky Vector if anybody has seen that, flightplan.com. There's the ads on the Aviation Weather Center. There's obviously Lockheed Martin Flight Service, there's so many ways that you can go to get weather information but it still comes down to and by the way I'm allowed a blonde moment. What do you do now? And if you have any good blonde jokes after the presentation please come and tell me I have a world class collection and I'm looking to add to it. But now that you get the information what do you do? And it comes back to this great big stack of paper. So what I'd like to do today is to give you a little bit of a framework for the way that you think about weather information. We know how to get it, now we need to know how to think about it and how to put it to use in making good weather decisions. And that's where I think that a lot of us have trouble because we just kind of look at this mountain of paper and say okay now what do I do with it? I did, I had some really good instructors along the way by the way but like way too many people I've had to learn some of my lessons the hard way. How many people here have scared yourself with weather at least once? Me? Yes. And I don't want to do that again. I really don't want to do that ever again. So it's one of the reasons that I decided I needed a better weather education. First thing I want to look at is if you think about it what is it that weather can really do to you? And there you could fine tune it a lot but if you really think about it it comes down to three things. Weather can create turbulence in terms of wind and thunderstorms. So that's one thing it can do. Second thing and this is the one we all tend to think about the most particularly in terms of instrument flying is it can reduce ceiling invisibility. It can create clouds and fog and rain and all of these other things for you. And then finally weather can affect aircraft performance. And that is where you get into things like ice and density altitude. So and by the way I didn't make this up if anybody has read Ralph Buck's weather flying book he had some of this framework in here but particularly these three things and I thought it was very useful because it provides a very nice skeleton or very good framework that you can use to think about what it is or to make your weather decisions and we're going to look at how. Now I know this is weather code and I'm geeky enough that I still like it. I know you can get it in plain English but I still sort of like this one and I just put it up here because it would easily fit on one screen. But if you look at however you get your weather data notice that the order that the information is presented really kind of fits in with that turbulent ceiling invisibility and performance. They're not all nice neat categories. I recognize that some of them bleed into others but work with me here. I like to put things in boxes if I can because it makes it a little bit simpler to think about. So if you look at what your your standard metars says it starts off with what's the turbulence what's the what are the winds doing. And the second piece of information gives you information on ceiling invisibility and the third part when you're talking about temperature or dew point obviously that does include instrument conditions but temperature has a lot to do to tell you things like ice you know or you're going to need to or you need to get going to need to think about that. And if you look at the terminal air drone forecast the TAF it's got the same kinds of information in it. So if you can mentally start looking at your weather briefing data in terms of those three categories and just realize that this is how it's presented that goes a long way toward helping you identify what the problems are for you. All right what can weather do we're going to talk about the turbulence part gusty winds thunderstorms. By the way I had no animals were harmed in the making of this slide not even humiliated this was a Photoshop thing. So I do know how to erase people from photos so if you need that done come and see me. Photoshop is a wonderful thing. Creating turbulence gusty winds and turbulence now one of the things that I'd also like for you to keep in mind as we talk through these things is the fact that when you're dealing when you're talking about weather you need to think about the pilot and the airplane as a team. And if you fly the same airplane all the time you've got a team that you know pretty well but if you fly different airplanes and I get in and out of a lot of different kinds of airplanes. So I have to think about what my other team member can do as well as what I can do but I want you to think about that as we go along because there is never going to be necessarily a single correct answer it's going to vary according to what you're doing right now and what airplane that you're working with right now. Now when you think about turbulence so we're looking at that first we're looking at two different things we're looking at really primarily because yesterday when my flying club friend and I flew down here we went through some areas where we were getting kind of bounced around quite a bit those aerial potholes that we're all familiar with but we were at 8,000 feet so it doesn't really make that much of a difference except it was a little uncomfortable where turbulence really makes a difference is if obviously if you're in something very severe but when you get close to the ground and you're trying to land the airplane and it feels like a bucking Bronco. So I would argue to you that when it comes to turbulence you need to look at it as both a pilot issue and an airplane issue that's pilot proficiency you know how good are you at winds how good are you at turbulence how good are you at crosswind landings how how long ago did you practice because the fact that you may have you may have been really good at an almost direct crosswind I hope you don't do that at one point doesn't mean that you were you're good at it if you haven't done it in six or eight months or even six or eight weeks so pilot proficiency is definitely an issue in thinking about your weather decision making if turbulence is out there now the other thing and here's where I pilots we all have egos we really do and we hate to admit that there's something that we can't do so here's your out right here the airplane is at fault because you have a it's a it's not a limitation we know that it's it's just the maximum demonstrated crosswind component of the airplane but I don't know about you but when I look at the book numbers for things like maximum demonstrated crosswind component I always think about in terms of okay this was a test pilot who was as they say simulating average pilot skills now I'm guessing that most test pilots are who are even simulating average pilot skills are still going to be better than I am so I'm not going to I don't really want to go to the point that they demonstrated so your airplane has again it's not a limitation but when you look at the maximum demonstrated crosswind component there really are things that the airplane can and can't do and is anybody besides me ever run out of rudder you know that saying I did this years ago in a Cessna 150 I was learning to fly from the right seat and my instructor we were in a pretty rocking crosswind and my instructor kept saying more right rudder that's one of those things you have to say to be a flight instructor and finally I said Warren I don't have any more right rudder and he kind of put his foot down there and okay so let's go around again so we go around again and that time he says let me take it have at it he drifted worse than I did for the record we did get back in and and we when we landed the that time he said I think we should park it now I think we should so so we did but I have experienced the fact that the airplane can you actually no matter how good you are you may be at the point where the airplane just doesn't have enough rudder authority to counteract the crosswind so again you want to think about this one in terms of what can I do and what can the airplane do so let's look at these questions can the pilot and aircraft team handle the current and forecast wind conditions that forecast parts kind of important too because I can tell you about a time or two when I have departed dead calm conditions and it hadn't been dead calm when I got there and I've heard people say to me before sometimes well I'm not planning on flying this well maybe you're not but we don't always get what we plan in aviation and we don't always get the weather that we were promised by the forecasters either so you want to think about what what is it going to be what is it likely to be now this is more for the altitude do you know the power setting for maneuvering speed at the expected weight for your airplane I mean do you know how to configure it so that you can be at or below maneuvering speed when you go into into turbulent weather and because thunderstorms always have turbulence associated with them you also want to make sure that if you're going to be this is more the altitude than obviously the the landing unless you're trying to land really quickly in front of a thunderstorm do I have the conditions in equipment to avoid thunderstorm encounters and let me say a word about data link here I love data link I absolutely love it having on my GPS 496 and it's it's kind of getting to be like some other technologies I have no idea how I lived without it the only thing is I guess I just didn't know it was there and once you get it it's great remember that data link is not real time and I have flown there was one time coming back from a friend and a trip and we were looking at some bad weather possibly convective weather in the area and it was very hard even though I knew that data link was not real time it was very hard to look at that screen picture and not think that it was right in that place so you have to mentally try to transpose it and please please do not use data link as a tactical pick my way through the weather tool it is strategic and it's all about avoiding the stuff in the first place and not you know finding a way through the hole so because that's a good way to return to mother earth under conditions that you don't want to come down in second thing reduce ceiling invisibility that's the second big thing that weather can do and this is the one we all think about this is the reason to get an instrument rating how many people have instrument ratings instrument flying okay now notice that I've got two things here that are significant one is that there's nothing here on the airplane now yeah the you'll see a lot of airplanes out here on these show grounds today that are not intended for instrument flight so in that sense it is an airplane issue but a lot of the things that were likely to go rent and fly and if you own an airplane that you travel in at all you're going to uh it's very likely to be an instrument equipped airplane so so that's kind of a given but the point i'm trying to make here is that the airplane doesn't really care if there are clouds out there or not the airplane doesn't see it the airplane doesn't notice if it's upside down or right side up but you do so i i think of the clouds the ceiling visibility part is being primarily a pilot issue and there are several questions that you need to be able to ask yourself here first of all am i instrument rated if you're not don't go mess with it because it the amount of instrument training that you get in private pilot training it's it's intended to help you get out of conditions that you accidentally get into it's not intended to give you a a short and cheap instrument rating the second thing is legally current now we all know what those numbers are but being legally current and there's the third part being proficient those are not all the same thing so i there are there are many times when i in fact i can't think of any time when i haven't been legally current but i can sure think of times when i haven't done enough and i haven't done enough thought enough practice enough to feel like i was really proficient and even now i mean when i when i get more practice at it the first few seconds when you go into a cloud from that nice blue sky you're really having to think about and concentrate on on what you're doing so all of these three things are very important so let's look at some of the questions to ask yourself when you're looking at that forecast and you see the little box and if you mentally transpose that ceiling of visibility on the top um here are some of the questions can i safely fly at the plan to altitudes uh do i have some kind of terrain avoidance plan and here i commend to you all kinds of things the aop or safety foundation they have on their website a lot of information about terrain avoidance and they they have some some specific terrain avoidance kind of information very very worthwhile or the ceiling of visibility good for an approach that is if you're going to be making an instrument approach and by the way you know it's an amazing thing that you can get an instrument rating and you're legal to shoot an approach to absolute minimums two hundred and a half that doesn't mean it's a good idea it really doesn't and uh i have i did that once and i didn't mean to it was one of those cases where the weather went uh let's put it this way when i left north carolina the uh ceiling of visibility were supposed to be a thousand and three and by the time i got to virginia two and a half hours later the dullest terminal forecast was up to amendment five so that was a case where um but but i ended up flying two minimums and i made it obviously but it's not something that i would deliberately have put myself in had i known that that was going to be the case uh do i need an alternate that's the one two three rule um and anytime you need an alternate um you want to uh you want to make sure that it's an alternate that you can actually get to not just one that fills the box and and fulfills the legal requirements because remember there is a category that i think of as legal but stupid and there are a lot of things like that but legal but dumb and uh still dumb stupid pick pick your term um but uh just because it's legal doesn't mean that it's a good idea now here's a big one for any time you've got ceiling and visibility type issues where is the nearest good weather uh which direction would i go that's the first question is it north south east or west and then the last thing is a question or the conditions within my personal minimums and we're going to talk about that in a few slides too um sky vector i love the site uh it's non-official weather source we all know that but here's why i love it um anybody has anybody looked at it before um the reason i like this is because you can put up a sectional chart or now an instrument chart and you can use the little slider at the bottom to see the entire chart on one page and that's useful for flight planning but the other useful thing look at those little circles see the little green circles on there you can put up um what it will do is superimpose on top weather information for all the airports now all the the the various manufacturers are still trying to uh they still kind of go between blue means one thing in one place in green and another and another but basically yellow red and green magenta those are not colors that you really want to play with a lot blues and greens are pretty good magentas and reds not so much yellow you gotta think about it is is one way to uh to look at it but if you look at this you'll see a lot of circles in their green and in this particular scheme green means good vfr so i can look at this sectional chart and i can tell in one glance what the weather is in the entire and the entire sectional chart now here's here's another tip that i use this is for my this is my personal you know planning but um but but let me offer it to you for what for what it's worth one of the places that i start when i'm doing flight planning for vfr or for ifr is i have a look at this and i scale out the chart that i'm going to use so that i can see the entire sectional chart on a single screen and i have a look at it to see what the colors are on the weather now i think of this sectional chart is for most light general aviation aircraft and for most human physiology if you know what i'm saying uh think of the sectional chart as your box this is your operating box your airplane now granted if you start on the edge of a chart you can go off to another chart but if you think of this as as the box that you can operate in comfortably both aeronautically and physiologically uh it's useful now if i see like on this particular one most of these little circles are open green circles so that's basically telling me it's clear vfr all over this region so i don't really have a whole lot to worry about but on the other hand take a look at this one uh see the reds and magenta's red is ifr and magenta is low ifr uh this one uses blue for marginal vfr and by the way another thing you can do is move your mouse over the station model and it will tell you it'll give you the forecast or the mithar whichever or it gives you both if it provides it for that particular station so what i do you know i look at this and i say okay um this is pretty ugly and if i were to launch in this where you know i remember a second ago i said where's the nearest good weather well on this particular chart and i blew it up a little bit so that you could see instead of looking at the whole thing but in this particular section of the chart that we're looking at there isn't there's one little spot there that's blue and that's marginal vfr but uh if you're looking at everything else that's red and magenta come on i mean we're all optimists but how long do you really think that that blue that blue circle is going to stay a blue circle before it gets to be a red circle or a magenta circle and by the way the filled circles that means overcast um so if it's open it's clear and if it's oh if it's filled it's overcast and then they have the the fractions in between so so this is a great tool to look at and see right from the very beginning do i need to go any further give you another example a couple years ago um the friend who flew down with me yesterday he and i were going to go flying around on new year's day we were going to start the new year outright and it was it had rained overnight and it was supposed to get better emphasis on supposed to but as is so often the case it kind of didn't so i was i pulled up this and i started looking at it and through the entire norther uh the baltimore washington um or the washington sectional which i was looking at it was all red and magenta there were no signs of blue or green anywhere and i forget who called whom but we signed said uh i don't think we're doing this today no because there was really no easy place that we could get to so you want to know first of all is there good weather second of all which direction it is and then here's the big one can i get to it because fuel is always an issue and if there's good weather or i mean if you look out and there's good weather or you know 500 miles away okay but can you get that far so those are just kind of some of the things that you want to keep in mind as you go through this third is what can weather do reduce aircraft performance and here we're talking about ice and density altitude now here is the ultimate golden out for pilots and egos this is definitely the airplane's fault because uh there are certain if you look at the performance charts in your airplane and again please bear in mind that these are done under the under controlled and really best possible conditions not necessarily the kind that we fly in and they're usually done with new airplanes and i don't know about y'all but i don't get to fly new airplanes all that often some of the ones that i've been in have been beaten up pretty hard by student pilots just like i was i did not always do excellent landings and in fact unfortunately i still don't i try but uh it can reduce aircraft performance so if you if you're looking at issues where you have either thunderstorms with a lot of turbulence implied in them or if you're looking at a situation where you have um density altitude issues high altitude high temperatures high humidity any of those things this there may be conditions in which the airplane simply cannot do what you need it to do and this is where you can tell those passengers or anybody that you need to tell including yourself i can do it but the airplane can't sorry the airplane just cannot climb it can't carry what we're asking it to carry it can't go where we need it to go and so an aircraft capability is an enormous issue for us here now i fly in what some folks out west would consider to be flat lands i don't consider it to be perfectly flat the apple etchings are quite lovely thank you very much but you know it's not really high altitudes range so our density altitudes for us a high density altitude means about two or three thousand feet in the summertime but out west we're talking about that's that's field elevation and then you get a little bit higher than that and starts moving up so anyway there there i know that there are airports where you can only go in one direction and out the other and there are certain times of the day that you're not going to fly but here's where you really need to be familiar with your aircraft and its performance characteristics and what it can do and can't do because we've all heard the stories and occasionally even seen videos and pictures of people who've tried to take off in high density altitude conditions and just simply you know didn't didn't have the aircraft performance to do it so here are some of the questions to ask yourself and it's all part of basic good preflight planning okay what's the aircraft performance what what can i expect from it what are the takeoff and landing distances because remember that if you have high density altitude it's going to affect your takeoff distance and your landing distance and i occasionally have people i'm flying with or doing check flights for i'll have them take do an intersection takeoff now i know full well i'm not going to ask them to do it until unless i'm absolutely sure that the airplane can do it but there's one particular place i like to go and it's a shorter runway it's still way long by by a lot of standards but it's shorter than they're used to and they they're looking and seeing some trees at the end and that's where you start thinking no maybe i really do need to do these performance calculations um and then what about climb and cruise performance uh cruise you know that let's assume you're at altitude now you need to know that because that obviously gets into fuel burn and other issues but climb if you're looking to out climb to rain or obstacles you need to care and you need to know and so that's that's those sort of the things that you need to look at another thing is the forecast freezing level um there is not a general aviation airplane i know there are a lot of uh of airplanes nowadays that are coming out that are certificated for flight into known icing and there are other airplanes that have uh ice protection but for many of us we're still flying airplanes that don't have those capabilities and frankly there are some icing capabilities that no airplane no matter what its system is they just can't do it and ice is uh ice belongs in drinks like uh margaritas for example uh ice does not belong on airplanes because it's a very surefire recipe for one of those quick returns to mother earth and you don't want to do that so so when you're looking at your um now when i was talking about the um i showed you the earlier slide where we looked at metars and taffs and if the surface temperatures are pretty close to freezing what happens to the temperature as you as you climb it goes down generally speaking so if it's already freezing at or close to freezing when you're on the ground and you're going to be climbing and particularly if you're going to be climbing into a cloud here's where you really need to start thinking about what the freezing level is and am i equipped for it and what is my escape route gets back to that where's the good weather where are there are no clouds where where can i go um there are a lot of advisory and please let me emphasize advisory tools nowadays if you don't know about ads aviation digital data service weather on noah's website it's a great site to look at they have a lot of useful information including there is an icing tool and again it's advisory the idea is to start giving you a place to start it's not something that you can take and write into stone is is this is what i can absolutely do um but but there you can specify the altitude and the place that you are and it will show you where the forecast or the potential for icing is greatest so part of what i want to get across to you is use all the tools at your disposal we have an unprecedented more than any other generation of pilots has ever had probably an unprecedented amount of information available to us and so part of it is what i'd like you to carry away with you is there's a lot of stuff out there to look at but the second piece is what we've been talking about try to look at it in terms of these three boxes that we're talking about and the pilot aircraft team and that will allow you to make the most and the best use of the information that's available to us now okay uh personal minimums what are they um because i mentioned that in an earlier slide and i do want to spend some time talking about this because this is one of those things that i heard about from the get go uh and i had no idea what to do with that personal minimums oh yeah yeah it sounds like a good idea but what do i do how do i do that and so i'm going to offer you a little you know i actually do a whole seminar on personal minimums and we're not going to do that today but i want to give you some ideas to start with here here is an official definition of and by official i mean i googled it like everybody else i if you google personal minimums it's amazing what will come up so i uh googled it and then i distilled it into this it's an individual set a pilot set of procedures rules criteria and guidelines for deciding whether and under what conditions to operate or continue operating nothing wrong with that perfectly good definition but it sounds kind of abstract at least it did to me and i don't do abstraction very well i'm a concrete kind of person so i i thought about it for a while and i came up with another one and remember this image uh this is a guy fueling an airplane uh we're all familiar with fuel reserve requirements yes uh what are they yep 30 minutes 45 minutes now uh just a quick uh word on that 30 and 45 minutes for fuel that or those are the rock bottom bare minimums i don't like to do that an hour is is as low as i would ever care to go but anyway the idea of a fuel reserve is this is the fuel that you're not ever supposed to have to use that this is the buffer that if you really really really really got in a pinch you've got it but you're not ever supposed to plan to use that reserve fuel okay now personal minimums if you think about it it's kind of the same thing it's the same concept i think of it as a safety reserve between the skills and remember pilot aircraft team here between the skill skills and the aircraft performance that are required for the specific flight you want to make and the skills and aircraft performance available to you through training experience currency and proficiency and of course aircraft performance capability and by the way i apologize i was about to go into my north carolina twang there for a second i have real problems with words that have i l l i go eel i tend to make them skills um but anyway uh skills and aircraft performance so think keep keep this definition in mind this is part part of what you're trying to do with personal minimums you want to develop something that's going to give you that that performance equivalent of a fuel reserve now criteria prefab versus custom built now if you go look up there there are a lot of charts out there they'll tell you how to develop personal minimums and i i just came up with the prefab versus custom built because i like this idea but there there are a lot of things they'll say okay if you have and and this is something that we pilots are very vulnerable to we like numbers and we like precision and we like charts and we like being able to go okay this this this and this okay there there is the answer well this how it requires actually a little bit more thinking and uh we're actually pretty good at that too but we don't do it as easily as we do looking at at charts and graphs but but there is often a temptation to look at things in terms of okay i have five thousand hours i don't i wish i did uh but i have this many hours and i have this many approaches and so therefore i should be able to do x y and z but really that's not the issue what what you what you have done in the past you know however distant that was it's useful in terms of a foundation but what's really more important is what have you done it's that proficiency thing we were talking about with instrument flying what have you done recently and comfortably not what's the scariest thing i ever survived without bending an airplane um i've done those two okay so custom built personal minimums tailored to individual training experience currency and proficiency with all the things that we've just been talking about the the weather buckets the categories ceiling of visibility winds performance and all the characteristics of the pilot aircraft team because you always have to consider what not just what i can do but what the airplane can do too um okay and if you're going to think about building your personal minimums like i said i do a seminar on this i'm going to run you through a some of the steps really quickly but the first one is to look at what your experience and currency actually are now the reason it doesn't i'm not trying to denigrate the idea that if you've got a lot of experience it's worthless because that's not the case it's like at one point um walt mentioned that uh i i lived in Bangladesh for two years and the state department taught me to speak Bengali and at one point i was actually pretty good at it and somewhere buried back in my brain it's still there and i could scrape off the rust and probably get to be reasonably good at it again but right now uh and so what if you have a lot of training and experience in aircraft you've got a lot of basic and good foundation to work with but you might have to to scrape some rust off and part of this exercise this part of the exercise and looking at your training your current training total experience and recent experience is to try to give you an idea of where you are and how much how much of that scraping off the rust work might you have to do at some point or when you when you actually want to work with personal minimums second part um this uh i have this on a worksheet and you can download it from the library at faiafety.gov if you want to it's actually a worksheet that you can use to develop your personal minimums and to record it but it includes this little graphics so um and this is useful in kind of defining what are the conditions of vfr marginal vfr ifr and low ifr and remember what i said earlier about the the conventions on what blue is and what green is or shifting uh some of the online weather data link use uh the blue for vfr and green for marginal vfr and other places it's reversed so just make sure that you understand when you're looking at weather data information what the definitions are look at the legend that's what i'm saying um so now this the next uh step that you would take in doing your personal minimums is to look at what it is what is your experience and comfort level and when i'm doing this with people i'm doing flight reviews for and other things i always say look you don't have to fill out every square in fact you probably shouldn't under that low ifr piece will i deliberately go into low instrument conditions absolutely not and and personal minimums are about making some of your decisions in advance of when you actually have to think about doing something so would i so i don't have any personal minimums for low ifr because i'm not going to deliberately go there uh the same thing is true from the marginal vfr in my part of the country i i live in northern virginia and in northern virginia in the summer it gets pretty hazy and if you're not comfortable flying in what are legally defined as marginal vfr conditions you're probably not going to be flying a whole lot so but but the nice thing is that i've been flying in that particular air space for a long time i know where all the rocks are and i know where all the airplane stickers are too you know where what airplane stickers are all those radio towers and cell phone towers i call them airplane stickers so i know where they all are and i i do keep an eye out because they keep popping up all over the place but if you know where the rocks are and you know you kind of get used to this is being somewhat normal in certain circumstances if you can do that because i'm i've got recency proficiency and a certain comfort level with that would i do marginal vfr at night even in my home airspace thank you no i don't want to do that i would rather go ifar so i don't when i fill this out for myself i have some stuff in the vfr i have some stuff in day marginal vfr and then day and night ifar but i don't have anything in the low ifar and the night marginal vfr boxes so again this this is a little bit of that thinking exercise what is it that you are comfortable and proficient in doing and yours is going to be different from everybody else's in the room second thing is remember we talked about winds and turbulence okay what are you know what's the what's the most that you have done comfortably and recently and again this does not mean what's the strongest crosswind i've ever landed in without bending the airplane uh or what's the most white knuckle thing i've ever done and i i had one like this there was one time i was coming back from north carolina after a cold front had passed and i was getting hammered over the ridges and there was a lot of mountain wave turbulence and i was thinking this landing is going to be kind of interesting albeit and i got a little closer to leesburg and uh i'm listening and not too many people are flying okay um i guess i'm going to have the airport mostly to myself and so i called out a few miles out to the unicom and and the guy who was working at the time he had one of these big booming wonderful radio announcers voices oh seven one romeo welcome home you want the winds i said yeah and leesburg has runway one seven and three five the run the winds were two eight zero at sixteen gusting to twenty six oh so here's where i start channeling my instructor's voice you know he starts telling me i start hearing this guy's voice just like i hope all the people i fly with i hope they hear my voice in their heads i really do uh with all the the good stuff that i've told him but i was hearing his voice telling me how to think about it and how to work the crosswind and do this so so i had already decided i'd mentally done a catalog of all the other airports in the area so i knew where uh where i could go as an alternate so i did okay i'm not going to use flaps and because this is going to be pretty gusty and i'm going to do this and i've got a long runway so i'm not going to worry about how long it's going to take me to get down i'm just going to use every foot of it if i need to and i'm going to try it once and if i don't make it once i'm going to go to this other airport because it's more lined with the wind blah blah blah so all the way down i was hearing you know my knuckles were white i'll tell you i i'll admit to that and i was really fiercely concentrating on making this happen and i did get it down and i have to tell you this little story because uh one of the instructors kind of a tough guy he came out after he says great landing great landing 9.5 all right i'll take that but i want to know why you docked me 0.5 you smoked a tire well yeah but i didn't bend anything and i didn't break the airplane so anyway 9.5 is the best i've ever done on a graded landing from the the tough crowd out there uh the other piece of this story is that i had come back from uh i had had an expedition to clear out some things from my childhood bedroom and in the right seat of the airplane was a giant teddy bear and i had to wait until all those guys at the airport kind of dissipated from discussing my landing before i could go retrieve my teddy bear and carry it across the ramp because i wasn't going to do that after that you know i had done this cool pilot landing and i was not going to mess that up by carrying a teddy bear across the ramp i remember that day um but i want you when you're thinking about these things um i could so i could tell you yeah i landed successfully too in in pretty much a gusty almost direct crosswind would i have done that deliberately you know if i had known in advance that those winds were going to come up to that no that was another one of those amended forecast things um so so this is not what you have been you you've survived it's what you have thrived on what you've done comfortably and then the last thing uh you want to look at performance and comfort level shortest runway highest terrain highest density altitude i already told you that in my part of the country it's actually fairly uh fairly tame in a lot of ways we have uh visibility issues but we don't have particularly high mountains we don't have particularly nasty density altitudes but uh i've acquired a great liking for arizona and it's a little different out there so i'm going to have to learn a few extra lessons about density altitude and and uh and operating in different circumstances so so these are the the things that you want to look at and again you don't feel like you have to fill out all the squares sometimes we do but i i i put it down in different ways like single engine multi-engine and make and model so that you have a different uh you have uh a different ways to look at it and think about it because it all it still gets back to the pilot aircraft team and here's one way to think about that you may be super pilot but if you're flying a super cub you still got some limits and you may be flying the latest g whiz bang technology and i love flying the g 1000 stuff but just because it looks like an airliner up front it's still bolted into a general aviation aircraft a general aviation airframe so there are still things that you can't do and and here's where that team thing comes into you can be the greatest pilot in the world but you can't make up for what the airplane can't do and you can be flying the greatest airplane in the world but believe me the airplane can't make up for what you can't do either so you got to be working together here okay the next step is you put it all together and uh i call these baseline personal minimums you put it together and okay what what all these numbers and and these personal minimums look like together and uh then you want to adjust for other conditions now these are or these came out of my head so you should be suspicious immediately um but but these are just some of the things that you want to adjust for if you as a pilot you have uh you're tired you've had a stressful day you're flying an airplane that you don't know uh you are going to a place that you're not familiar with uh or you've got some kind of external pressures like your boss is upset with you or you've got to be someplace here's where you're going to want to adjust your personal minimums to in a more conservative direction and i just came up with some ideas so you can see this pretty quickly where this is going because if you had two of these conditions uh or three let's say that i'm i'm getting a cold and i'm trying to make a trip but i want to go after work and the airplane that i usually fly isn't available you can see pretty quickly that my baseline personal minimums are going to have to be adjusted pretty considerably if i follow these rules and it may mean that i don't go but that's the point you have this is a way to give yourself a framework to make the decisions in advance so that if it's not appropriate to go you don't go now i i did this seminar once and i had a gentleman stick up he said hey yeah i i do that and he said here's here's how i think about it he said i had a thousand feet uh for each for my children and five hundred feet for my wife really does she know that we all took a vow of silence um and i said okay um whatever works for you pick it you know whatever whatever makes a difference for you but that gentleman shall remain nameless because i don't think his wife knew that she somehow got a few fewer points on the personal minimums than these kids um but just pick something and pick something that you can work with and that's easy for you i have another theory about flight instruction you know baskin robins they have 31 flavors pick one they're all good so i call it the baskin robins theory of risk management decision making there are at least 31 ways to do it maybe a lot really lots more pick one and you don't even have to stick with a single one although i happen to have a favor if you need to bribe me it's pistachio almond personal minimums are they carved in stone once you do it and yes i know that's a wood chisel that has been pointed out to me multiple times but i took some poetic license here and photoshop is a wonderful thing so i used a wood chisel on stone um so are they carved in stone can you can you change your personal minimums uh sometimes yes and sometimes no remember the idea is the safety buffer between the skills and performance required and the skills and performance that you have available and if you want to stretch here's what i like to think about first of all you want to gain experience with what you already know how to do i'm used to flying in you know marginal vfr in my area something under five miles visibility okay one day it's four miles well you know i don't have anything else going on particularly so yeah i maybe i can stretch it a little bit because i don't have anything else reassess in review okay what did i learn from this be reflective it sounds like one of those squishy academic words but it's actually useful uh modify with care you always want to uh to to be careful and thoughtful about what you do now here are some rules to live by no matter how much you and your passengers moon scream and cry and groan i look uh i wouldn't want this kid in the back of my airplane by the way he would be he would definitely not be in my personal minimums okay never ever lower your personal minimums in order to make a specific flight you have just if you do that you've just defeated the purpose of having him in the first place you don't if you're gonna if you're gonna think about stretching which is a different store a different idea you need to think about that in advance and say okay you know this is what i've got in you know this is what i think i can do the second is keep all the other variables constant um you don't want to be you don't want to be trying to stretch yourself in terms of ceiling visibility and turbulence and uh for aircraft performance and your capabilities all at the same time think about this in a scientific way we're good at this um do one thing at a time just work on one thing at a time and if you got two or three out there now that's already below your personal minimums so don't do it third is and here's where we instructors come in handy talk through your plans you know call somebody up and say hey here's what i'm thinking about doing and one of the things that i do when i'm doing flight reviews is what are your goals and your goals don't have to be to get another certificate or rate and your goals might be i want to get more comfortable flying in certain conditions and uh most every instructor i know would be most happy to help you do that um because that's that's after all what we're here for and you don't get to be an instructor unless you love flying and you want to do it okay don't cut into your skill reserve don't get it just like we don't cut into the fuel reserve you don't cut into your skill reserve um i can't remember where this airport is but i thought this was a really cool picture and what it says to me is yeah this is not something that i would really go doing for the first time all by myself and a lot of people have talked to me because they know that i'm interested in Arizona oh you ought to try Sedona well they call it the uss Sedona for a reason it's an airport on top of a mesa and you look at it going there's an end and there's an end and gosh i would love to do it but for the first time by myself not so much that's something that i would want to do with somebody who knew what they were doing and could could help me learn how to do it so you know don't cut into your skill reserve particularly when there's something that you're not familiar with or comfortable with doing do not go to the unusable fuel level of your aircraft performance or piloting ability you know that's scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're on empty and desperately hoping that the engine will not die and i'll tell you a little story yesterday in in departing from leesburg i forgot to hit the button to reset we have one of these jpi engine analyzers and if you don't reset it it doesn't you know it doesn't know where to start calculating on fuel now we knew full well that we had full tanks and a lot of range and everything else but it is a creepy thing when your machine starts yelling at you about you've got five minutes of fuel left i hate that and every time i i've done it a couple of times and i swear every time i'm never going to forget that again because i know i've got a lot of fuel but i keep looking back there to see if i'm leaving a contrail no you know did i leave a fuel cap off or something no i just that was operator error but anyway don't don't take yourself to that white knuckle i survived this level of your ability in whatever you're doing aircraft performance or weather or anything else and the last thing is stick to the plan absolutely stick to the plan this is where you have to have discipline i remember reading something many years ago to the effect that you you become pilot in command the day that you say no to a flight that you or somebody else really wanted you to make and that's true because it's real easy it's really hard to say no when you're sitting on the ground it's really easy to say yes but that reverses really quickly if you decide to take off and you're up there wishing that you were down there and that you had made that tough decision while you still were in a better condition to do it so if you do it show your show people your your personal minimums until i'm about keeping you safe and this is what i do and uh this is how i do it now another thing and i i probably shouldn't tell you this but i have a dirty little trick that i play or not play but i use when i'm doing uh occasionally i do uh right seat pilot seminars for people who fly with pilots but don't fly themselves i'm talking to them about personal minimums and encourage them to tell talk to the pilot about what what are your personal minimums and if you're nervous about flying and you're in the right seat and you're not a pilot yourself well for goodness sakes you know tell tell the pilot okay i want to see what your personal minimums are and i want you to tell me how these conditions are within your personal minimums then i'll get in the airplane and go with you so so this is you know it's partly about bringing your your passengers and everybody else into the safety decision with you don't let anybody do this uh this business with you about well you just spent so many thousand dollars on an instrument rating and you mean we can't go into a simple little cloud don't fall for that this is why you need to get people in with your personal minimums and the last thing i'm just going to put these up here and you can think about it would you go uh there are people who would say yes and there are people who would say no it's mostly marginal vfr but and you can see if you look up toward the northwestern corner of this particular slide that you starting to get some ifr and marginal vfr coming in but around here you've got a lake to think about you've got marginal conditions in a lot of places a lot depends on what are you flying why are you flying what are you comfortable with what have you done recently you know whether or not you can actually do it um and here's what you know i i blew this one up a little bit if you can't see it it says two and a half miles light snow few at one thousand two hundred overcast at twenty seven et cetera um and look at how much uh red and magenta there is would you go i wouldn't this is not something i want to play with because first of all there's a big body of water there called one of the great lakes and there is clearly some bad weather and i don't see too much good now if i were working off that northwest corner and headed in a different direction that's a different story but if i were trying to fly somewhere around the lakes not really this one yeah that's pretty obvious and then i just want to show you right before i close here once again think about this turbulence ceiling invisibility and performance if you can try when you're looking at all that mountain of weather data that you get from so many different sources now and just try to ask yourself the questions that we talked about in these boxes i think it will give you a much more um a much more workable and practical way to think about it and then to make a good weather decision so that you can all we can all turn up at events like this and enjoy aviation because as i was saying to my friend this morning as we were driving out here i get crabby if i don't fly often i really do um between that and my coffee i mean there are just certain things that i have to have in life and flying is one of them and uh so i want to be around to do it for a long time and i want you to be around to do it for a long time too if you have any questions or would like to get in touch with you there's my email address please do not pluralize me it scares people a lot of people want to put an s on the end of my last name it is singular and uh it's it's better if we keep it that way and uh thank you for coming and i hope you enjoy the rest of the show how about some questions from the group i can do that are there any questions well thank you very much susan very interesting thank you a lot of that good review stuff and uh we used to laugh about i don't know what you're checking the weather for we're going anyway and we've known a lot of accidents from exactly that absolutely we have so it's very important to check it and to know what you're looking for and what you're doing and and to know how to think about it and unlike the coast guard when we go out we want to come back we absolutely want to come back i think they do too they sure do now but that's the plaque that was in the headquarters building that said you don't have to come back but you do have to go out but you do have to go out well another way to think about it is there are no emergency takeoffs um there are emergency landings but we don't unless somebody's shooting at you and in most of for most of us that's really not the case there aren't any emergency takeoffs well i don't care any congressman in the airplane anymore why not they were shooting at them oh yeah you must have been going to some very interesting parts of the world then well y'all come back in another hour we have dan sealy have a question for you oh we have a question go ahead