 Our next presenter is the Executive Director for the AOPA's Air Safety Foundation. Most of us are members of AOPA. We know all of those good things that Air Safety Foundation does, including bringing all those safety programs to our local area. Our next presenter is an active pilot, a flight instructor with over 6,000 hours, and he's going to be talking today about a favorite subject, thunderstorms and ATC. Let's welcome Mr. Bruce Lansberg. Good morning everybody and welcome to Thunderstorms and ATC. I guess my first question is, any of you had the opportunity to deal with some thunderstorms in your flying career? Maybe just a little. We'll be talking about that a bit. George Orwell said, to see what's in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. And I think that's certainly very true. I happen to like that great philosopher, Yogi Berra, who also said, you can observe a lot just by looking. And that is also true, particularly when it comes to dealing with thunderstorms. So we're going to talk a little bit about some of the problem areas. This is the overall fatal accident tally for last year, somewhere in that neighborhood, not all due to thunderstorms, and we don't need to have those problems occur. Little cause for most of these accidents. Look in the mirror. It's us. It's not the hardware. It's not the system. It's us. So that's bad news. It's also good news. It means you have control over your circumstance. You choose to make it as safe or as dangerous as you want to. So we're going to step right in here in terms of the number four pilot killer overall is going to be weather. The warning sign here probably applies very well to thunderstorms. They can take an airplane apart. So how big a problem is it? We've got thunderstorms. We've got VFR into IMC, and we have icing conditions as a problem. The biggest one by far is, got you a trick question. It's not thunderstorms. The biggest one is VFR into IMC. Back in 2004, we had 12 fatal accidents involving IFR airplanes talking to ATC and getting disassembled by thunderstorms, which is sort of the genesis of how this whole project got going. We've cut that to about half, but none of this needs to happen. And so that's why we're here today. The thing is that these accidents are very dangerous. And unlike the overall fatal accident rate, where about one in five accidents will be fatal in general aviation, with thunderstorms, that's not the case. And the NTSB has a technical term here. You're probably toast if you tangle with a thunderstorm. And so it's very important to make sure that that doesn't happen. So our special emphasis topic for this month and next is going to be on thunderstorms. Now somebody up there is keeping track. I don't know who counts thunderstorms. There are up 24-7 sitting on the weather channel watching where these things go out, but there are a lot of them. And there's nothing good you can say about thunderstorms. I had somebody at yesterday's presentation ask me, said, well, what about the various types of thunderstorms? Can you tell me what they are? And I said, there are three types, bad, or excuse me, bad, worse, and impossible. As far as light airplanes are concerned, even a small thunderstorm can be lethal to us. I think this is pretty obvious. And we had a very unfortunate reminder of this about a year ago with the Scott Crossfield accident. I wrote about it in AOPA Pilot Magazine in the April issue. Scott Crossfield, by anybody's measure, was a superb pilot. And everybody asks, well, why? Well, we don't know why. There are some people who said he was too good a pilot for that to happen by accident. Well, I can't answer that point. I can only go with what NTSB said. They also said Scott didn't ask for much weather information, and the controller didn't offer any weather information. In both cases, that's not a strategy for success. So we're going to talk about what's involved here. How many of you have taken one of our online courses? OK, that means those of you who haven't, you have a homework assignment. The courses are offered at www.asf.org. They're free of charge. You don't have to be an AOPA member, but we certainly hope that you would be. And you can sign up and take these courses. And if you're doing any flying in thunderstorm country at all, we would recommend that you do this. So we're going to spend a little bit of time choosing around the course here and giving you the opportunity to see where the problem areas are. I love the sound effects. I'm going to give you some examples of some of the problem areas that we have. Now one thing you'll hear us talk about later in the presentation is the type of thunderstorm. And this is where I got the question, well, are there any thunderstorms you can fly close to or near to? And I said, well, that's an it depends question. But the good idea is maybe the thunderstorm hasn't read what type of weather system it's supposed to be a part of. And therefore, it may change. Different types of thunderstorms, air mass, we're all pretty much familiar with those. Usually can be circumnavigated. But if you look at this example here down in northern Texas and Oklahoma, that's pretty widespread. If we go to frontal thunderstorms, you can see those are pretty well defined. And you're not going to be flying through something like that in a light airplane unless you've got a lot of fuel and a lot of time. And we'll talk a little bit about that. And then, of course, everybody knows about squall lines. Did you have one come through here on Sunday? There's a little bit of rain, I understand, with some sparks in it. But in any event. Now, I need a microphone here from the support team. Has anybody here been inside a thunderstorm, actually gotten into one? Not on purpose. Nobody does it on purpose. Anybody that can tell us? Right down here, sir. What was your experience? Turbulence, ice. Unable to control up and down more than about 1,000 feet. What was the first thing you said when you got into it? No, don't answer that. This is a family program. Oh, shucks, or something to that effect. Anybody else have a little visitation with a thunderstorm? This lady over here. The clouds didn't look quite as black as you would expect them would in the air. They didn't look black. And you got into it. And, yes, it was turbulent, and then it was rain. But when the lightning lit up the cabin, the radio call said, vector me out of here. Got your attention, didn't it? Well, we thought we would try to recreate what the inside of a thunderstorm might be like in a Cessna 172. So we pushed Microsoft Flight Simulator into doing it here, and this might be useful. Notice the flight instruments. Airspeed is varying all over the place. I love the creaking sound of the airframe. You'll hear a very great pilot, Captain Bob Buck, who wrote the book on weather flying. Some of you will remember that. Captain Buck grew up in the Golden Age of Airlines. Sounds kind of funny to talk about the Golden Age of Airlines these days, but he started in DC-2s and went all the way through 747s and flew in a tremendous amount of weather. And he describes a story here that you will hear of one of their aircraft in Kansas City that got into a thunderstorm. We had a DC-3 go out of Kansas City down to Wichita and a guy got in a severe hail in a thunderstorm. And he turned around to come back. The bank was such that on the high side of the airplane, it took out every window of the DC-3. Fourthly, it was a cargo airplane or anybody in it. Took out every window on that side and the elevators on a DC-3 were fabric covered. And it split, had various splits in the elevator from where he had up elevator and the hail was hitting the elevator. And of course, it just about flattened the leading edge and knocked out part of the windshield and landing lights and all that. We jumped the airplane. If it's your airplane, that's probably not a very good thing to have happen. So we try to avoid these kinds of things. Let me jump ahead just a little bit and get into radar and ATC services. Now, anybody tell me about what radar sees when it's looking out at weather? Anybody in standby, FA people? Moisture, right. Does it see clouds? No, it does not see clouds. Does it see turbulence? Some of the Doppler radars that the next rad people have, the National Weather Service, they have the ability to see turbulence. And on some of the very high-end airplanes, such as falcons and citations and Gulf streams, they have a pulse signal that will do all kinds of tremendous calculations. And they're beginning to be able to see turbulence. But for our purposes, you can pretty much say that about the only thing that the radar sees is moisture. That's an important tip to keep in mind. So let's take a look at some of the different kinds of radar. You're used to hearing the levels. They used to talk about a level 6 thunderstorm. That really doesn't exist anymore. We'll talk about extreme thunderstorms and heavy thunderstorms and so forth. This is the display that the controllers will see at a tracon or approach control, tracon terminal radar approach control. So I'll use that terminology. This is what the controller sees. And we'll just highlight this just a little bit. Here are the various levels. And they used to be called level 1 through 6. They now are reported as level 1 is considered light. Level 2 is moderate. And it goes down rapidly from that. For our purposes, anything more than moderate you want to avoid. And the fact that there may be moderate associated with heavy, all we're talking about is precipitation, the turbulence may be significantly more than moderate. If you understand the definition of moderate turbulence, that means that things are moving around inside the airplane. Most of us will not like moderate turbulence at all. It's not dangerous for the aircraft, but it's very uncomfortable for us. Severe turbulence, what is that? The definition? Momentarily out of control. That's not something that I would like to have when we're getting into flying here. We'll highlight a few of the things here. You can see the colors. Here's the light precipitation. Here we're getting into heavy precipitation. And now we're moving into the extreme, which appropriately enough is shown as black. Lots of centers. I'm sorry? The range of a tracon is typically 40 to 60 miles. They will not see much farther out than that. And what's different, we're going to talk quite a bit about the difference between the tracon radars and the center radars. It's important for you to know the difference as you're flying. If you're in a terminal area, these will update about every 40 seconds to a minute. So you're getting near real time updates. When you go to the center radars, that's very much like we're getting on data link. And let me jump ahead and we'll talk a bit about that. Lots of centers around the area and this part of the world, I think we're right on the border between Miami and Jacksonville Center. And they typically will control the airspace. If there's a tracon underneath, the center airspace starts somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 feet. It varies a little bit from area to area. But that's where you will, if you're above Orlando, for example, it's probably around 10,000 feet where the center controls it. And that's where the radar capabilities will start to vary. Out in the hinterlands, away from the large terminal areas, center will be managing the airspace as low as they can see, which might be as low as 2,000 feet. So you can't just depend upon what your flight altitude is as to what kind of radar service you can expect. It all depends on who you're talking to. We talked a little bit about what radar sees. And what is piped into the centers is from the National Weather Service next rad radars. And there are a whole bunch of radars around the country. And in some areas, they have more than others. Now in the southeast, we have a lot of radar coverage. And so you get the picture that's displayed is a mosaic picture that the various radars show. And the center controller scope updates whenever one of those radars sends an update. So if you have one radar, let's say we're out somewhere in Montana, where there's only one radar that's looking at all the sky, it could be as much as 10 minutes from the time that radar does its update and the next one occurs. In an area where you have a lot of radar coverage with multiple weather service radars, it'll be updating typically every four to five minutes. So that's important for you to know. Here's what the scope looks like on the controller scope. And this is referred to as warp, weather and radar processor. This is warp. They do not show light precipitation. They do show moderate precipitation. That's shown here by the light blue. Heavy precipitation is in this, what would you call that, greenish blue? And then this turquoise color is what they call extreme. So the trachons will show you six levels and the warp will only show three. Now, watch what happens here. This is very important for you to understand. And the reason it's important on the timing is if you are in a dynamic thunderstorm situation and the weather is building rapidly, what the controller sees and what you actually get may be quite different. With the ASR, or Approach Control Radar, it's updating pretty much every minute. With warp, it's going to take quite a bit longer. So we are looking at the same weather system here and watch the updates. ASR is updated at about a minute. Two updates. Warp hasn't changed at all. We're up to four. Still zero over on the warp side. And you can see now there's been one update over that whole period of time. So it's important for you to understand that the center radars are much, much slower in updating. Can somebody tell me the difference between strategic and tactical use of radar? Anybody? Sir? When you're flying. Well, let's say we're in an airplane and we're talking about a strategic approach and a tactical approach. Any idea? No? OK. Anybody else? Strategic is avoiding the whole area. A tactical is picking your way through. One has to be very careful when we get into the tactical mode if you don't have onboard weather radar, because that's giving you real-time updates. There are downsides to onboard radar as well, because we get a nasty little thing called attenuation. Radar sees rain. And the harder it rains, the more the signal is reflected back. And on airborne radar courses, they'll tell you, be careful, because when you get heavy rain, you create a shadow. And you can't see what's on the other side. With these radars, they're powerful enough. You won't get attenuation. But you're also not getting the real time, particularly in the case of the war. OK. Here again, we'll just make a comparison of the same storm system. Here's the same cloud looked at by ASR. This is warp depiction. This is the ASR depiction. And if it's an older radar set, that's what the controller will see. If a controller tells you that their system doesn't show weather, that's not quite right. They do show weather. Now, it may be that the controller's uncomfortable talking to you about it. The NTSB and the FAA have been pushing the controllers to say, if you see something, say it. And the controllers are a little uneasy because of the timing differences here that we talked about. So you just need to ask. And we're going to talk about that. What you see here is a recreation of an accident that occurred in the upper Midwest a few years ago. And it's very important to follow along with what transpired. Oops, let me go back. This is the tragic story of a real life pilot controller misunderstanding. What you will hear is actual ATC audio tapes of a pilot who was on an IFR flight plan being vectored around thunderstorms. We will pick up just as the first controller is handing him off to the second controller. He's maintaining tennis quite bumpy out there right now. See him up there, so I'm up at 10-3. Pilot was headed towards Milwaukee. Notice that the first controller makes it a point to tell the second controller that she's been providing vectors for thunderstorm avoidance. But also notice that the pilot does not confirm with the second controller that those vectors will continue. So he's getting bounced around pretty good at 10-1-8-12. I got him at a 2-7 heading to go around the south side of the weather than I'm showing the southwest of Lansing. All right. Can I start him up? Head center, golf course, right at 10-6. We wasn't at our Lansing, but I'll handle him. You got 10-10. Roger climbing, 10-1-2, 12,000. 12,000, same. She checked to Milwaukee, of course. The controller's phrase, when able, is key to what happened next. The controller apparently assumed the pilot could avoid the weather himself, but the pilot assumed he was still receiving thunderstorm avoidance vectors. This is part of Lansing deviations, but use your control for left or right deviations with me at Lansing, OK? Air traffic controllers may not know that a pilot's flight conditions could keep him from visually avoiding weather. And watch him. He was having a hard time holding out due to 10. He went up to 10-8 at one point. So if I want to watch that, experimental aircraft. OK, I keep an eye on things for the heads up easy. Don't change his code too, OK? Can I take out your center? 128.5. 128.5, thank you. Moments later, the pilot transmitted. Center, what do you show us in up here? Followed by a report of control problems. The accident was fatal. OK, so there are a lot of things going on here in terms of assumptions, misunderstandings, and so forth. Not unlike many of the other accidents that we've seen in a course where somebody is talking to ATC and they think that they're getting thunderstorm avoidance vectors. And the controllers, many of whom are not pilots. And as you've been reading in the news, some of the controllers are pretty new to their jobs. They're kind of learning how all of this works. They don't understand that you can't see sometimes. It's not the big clouds that we see out in the Midwest, well-defined, no problem, nobody's going in there. They can't see what's, they assume that you can see where you're going, and it's going to be no problem. You'll just tell them. So here, it's very simple. ATC assumes that the pilot can detect bad weather visually. Oftentimes, when we're flying around thunderstorms and so forth, there'll be a lot of much lower-level clouds, and we can't climb high enough to get above that. Now, if you're operating in the flight levels, it's not too hard, because the big clouds, they stand up, you're up above all of the lower-level junk, it's pretty easy to avoid it visually. But for us, most of us are flying airplanes that don't get above without oxygen 10,000, 12,000 feet, and it's going to be much tougher. The controllers are used to dealing predominantly with air carriers in this type of environment, and they're used to having the pilots tell them what they're going to do. If you don't have onboard weather equipment, and they don't, and they're assuming that you do, obviously we have a little disconnect here. Here are some examples of how the system might work. So let's take a listen to some of these. This pilot did the right thing by monitoring the frequency and getting information from other pilots. He should also recognize that other aircraft might be over-flying the precipitation. If this is the case, those pirates will do little to forecast what his ride will be like. Few GA airplanes can fly over precipitation and convective activity. Remember, you have five choices. Continue on your current flight path, fly over, deviate right or left, do a 180-degree turn, or land before reaching the precipitation. Interesting thing going on here. We have an airliner going over the top of the weather, and we have a GA airplane that's approaching it much lower. So Delta reports no problem up at 24,000 feet or higher. Now 24,000 feet is not tall for a thunderstorm, all right? And I have to be a little amused in some of the marketing campaigns that the people were using years ago on some of the high-performance airplanes, which you'll go name, and they said, you're above the weather at 25,000 feet. Don't you bet on it. A good thunderstorm will get up to 45,000 feet in the blink of an eye. But anyway, this is where some of the controllers are having a little difficulty in understanding because they're looking at something on the scope, and they're saying, well, gosh, I've got airliners going over. I'm looking at all this weather down there, and nobody's deviating. They're not having any problems with ride whatsoever. The thing is that the airplanes are going over the top of this weather. For us, it could turn out to be a very rough ride or more so. So you have to kind of get into that discussion. Here's another interesting example. This pilot elected to land and reevaluate from the ground. When aircraft larger than your own are being vectored around the weather, it's probably very nasty weather. In some cases, accepting a deviation around the weather may put pressure on your fuel situation. This is not the time to be running low on fuel. Let me give you one more example out of this part of the program. The lesson here, ATC can be helpful. In this case, ATC relayed the location of hazardous weather to the pilot, and the pilot chose to ignore it until the weather had started to deteriorate. Luckily, the pilot was able to accept a vector to another airport that was not in the path of precipitation. The pilot did a few things right. She knew which direction to fly to get out of trouble. She verified the location of the weather with ATC, and then accepted help. Okay, we'll jump out of the course now. This is available online to you. So you can go back and look at the entire course at your leisure, and you don't have to complete it all at one sitting. So it's well worth your time. I'll make a push here for Bob Buck's book, Weather Flying. If you don't have it in your library, I would encourage you to do so because he really does know what he's talking about so that's really worthwhile. We talked about being able to see it. Nobody flies into anything that looks like that. When I was flying for Cessna Aircraft Company, and I was from the East Coast, and I went out and had heard about all big thunderstorms and everything out in Kansas, and I asked one of the senior pilots out there, I said, well, how does it work? And he says, you won't have any problem. It's either flyable or it isn't. Unlike the East Coast, where we get all of this marginal kind of stuff and we can't see it so well. In the Midwest, it's pretty clear as to what's gonna happen. So our options obviously go around. How close should we get? Well, the conventional wisdom says 20 miles from a severe storm. But suppose it's not a severe storm. Could we get closer? Well, maybe. How good is your Mark 8 eyeball for calibrating mileage and distance? Anybody any good at that? Would you like to get better at it? There's a way you can. Anybody know? If you have a GPS on board, and now I'm not talking about thunderstorm weather now, let me be perfectly clear, but if you're flying and you've got a cloud out a certain distance, write the number down that way you can't cheat. Write the number down as to how far away you think that cloud is, and note what your GPS says, and then see where the cloud is, what the GPS reading is when you actually get to the cloud. And that can help a little bit in getting close. I think you'll be surprised at how close 20 miles might see. How far around is it? Well, we don't know sometimes. And which direction would be the best way to go around? And I'm assuming we're not just talking about one little cell, which makes it pretty obvious as to how we do it. Climbing above? Not the kind of airplanes we're flying. And in fact, some of the big airplanes won't go over the top either. So, this is a great story of land and weight. Years ago as a young pilot, I was flying a Cessna P210 and I had my family on board. And I had a presentation to do somewhere down in the Carolinas, coming out of the DC area. And a strong front had gone through early in the morning. So, I'm flying along behind the front. I had onboard weather radar and was feeling pretty proud of myself. I think I was about 12 or 14,000 feet. Well, remember what I said about attenuation? Radar works really good until you need it. And then the screen gets all fuzzy and so on and so forth. So, I'm driving along and so forth. And the screen's got this wonderful band of green. This was before the days of color radar. So, I asked the controller. I said, you had any ride reports up ahead? And he says, no, you'll be the first one through. So, I thought, well, that doesn't sound like a good idea. Being a pathfinder is not really the best thing for us to be doing. So, I said, okay, I think I'll divert to Rocky Mount and we went ahead on in and landed and waited for about three hours and everything worked out just fine. One of the very sad stories that happens with these kinds of situations is you're almost guaranteed that if you fly into a thunderstorm, they will be cleaning up the wreckage in sunny skies. It frequently is just a matter of an hour or less to deal with this. So, just something to keep in mind. Now, I said it's a long way around. Improper fuel management may lead to reduced undergarment service life. I can't speak about this with a personal experience, but I'd like to talk a little bit about fuel management. So, let's take a look here. The flight deck, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Looks like our flight time to Hawaii will be about five hours and 20 minutes, give or take. We're trying to save a little gas by keeping the fuel load pretty light today. So, just a heads up, not to panic if you hear the engine shut down a little later in the flight. Because you might have to glide that last little bit not a little. Not to worry though, we almost always make it. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Here's the kicker. Almost three accidents a week due to improper fuel management. Some of them involve airplanes trying to work their way around weather. Some of them involve airplanes coming to sun and fine. And they think, well, you know, I've always made it before. As the captain said, we almost always make it. So, this is what we call a pilot safety announcement. It's just kind of a quick hit. And you'll see more of these as we go forward in the year. I've got one more I want to share with you that is kind of fun. We all know that dependence on foreign oil is a problem. And a lot of us are doing something about it. We've cut our energy consumption and traded our gas guzzlers for hybrid cars. But isn't there more we could be doing? All across the country, pilots are joining the fight to end our addiction to foreign oil. They're carrying just enough fuel to get within gliding range of their destinations. Some are even conserving by walking those last few miles. After all, why waste fuel when your airplane can glide to the ground using gravity and the power of the wind? Hybrid power. It's not just for cars anymore. I love the music. We're trying to get the people who are running out of fuel are not the people that are sitting in this audience. They're not the people who go to our online courses or to our Air Safety Foundation seminars, participate in the wings program, or something like that. They're pretty sure that they know exactly what they're doing and not one of them. If you asked them ahead of time, said, you know, I'm going to run out of fuel today just to see what it's like. So we're going to try something a little different here and see if we can ambush them in places where they don't expect to see something like this just to get them thinking a little bit. OK, so we're talking about fuel. That's important. We need to have enough. Who's got data link? Yeah, a lot of people. How do you like it? Love it? Why do you love it? Shows you everything. Everybody agree? Mostly? Mostly. It's a lot easier than just going barefoot, isn't it? You kind of get that strategic picture of where the big area is. I thought what I'd do is we're into Bruce's family photos now. We're going to show you a little bit of a trip. You won't see any pictures of me in my bathing suit. I apologize. But we're going to take a look at some trips that I've made here in the last year or two in the Florida, South Carolina area and we'll analyze what was on the data link versus what you could see out the windshield. So here we have, we're down in Florida here, and I think this is Lake Okeechobee. I do that right. And you can see a pretty good area of weather right here and another little bit here and then some really scattered stuff right in there. And looking out the window, that's where it is. And you can see the rain underneath looks kind of fuzzy. You see that right there? That will not give you a dangerous ride if you go underneath that or through it. It will give you an uncomfortable ride. So you would be very much entitled to tell a controller. Thanks very much, but I'd like a 10 or 15 degree deviation to get around that. Can anybody explain to me what gradient is? Gradient when we talk about radar pictures? Any ideas? OK, gradient is a very simple concept and it's very important that you understand. Gradient is the distance between where there is no weather return and where it goes to the highest weather return, which is red. If the gradient is shallow, that is, it takes a, you've got a big area of green and then there's another blob of yellow and then there's another blob of red and it takes quite a bit of distance on your scope, that's a shallow gradient. That is not a convective signature. Thunderstorms tend to go straight up and straight down and so the gradient is going to be very steep. You're going to go from no rain to heavy rain in a very short period of time. So if you look here, you can see this is shallow over on this side. Hey, no problem. Whoops. If you keep flying this way, you're going to get into an area where there's a steep gradient and that's not going to be so good. So this is all pretty much convective. Not much convective in here and these guys are convective. It goes from no rain to moderate rain to heavy rain in a pretty short distance. So that's important to understand. Now let's take an altogether different situation here. In the first case, not much weather going on and so on and so forth. This one isn't nearly so friendly, is it? You can see the gradients are steep. No rain to heavy rain and it's covering a large area. This is not a good place to be. If I were going to be flying along in this area, well, I wouldn't really want to, but if I had to get some place and there's no place I have to be, I want to be perfectly clear, I might try to go through here. But I'd also want to be looking at what ATC is telling me, what other pilots are telling me, particularly if they have onboard radar. You can ask for that. And looking at what the clouds look like. And sometimes, like our lady over here said, you can't judge a cloud by its color, I guess would be the way I would put that. Here you can see how some of this looks. This looks decidedly more robust. That's a technical term for thunderstorms than what we saw in the previous picture where there was just a little shower. Air Safety Foundation did a study a number of years ago, in fact, last year, on technologically advanced aircraft. If you're flying one of the new airplanes, you're using that airplane for a lot of cross-country flight more than the rest of the fleet. And in that situation, we're crossing weather systems. And you get exposed to a lot more weather. We are seeing a lot more accidents in the technologically advanced aircraft, particularly in the Cirruses and the Columbia type airplanes. That's no fault of the airplane. It's how pilots are choosing to use them. But I can't tell you if that's necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know how many trips were attempted. They could be doing four times the trips and only having twice the accidents. So, net, they're better than the rest of the fleet. We get into this whole statistical thing. I had a college professor once who said, if you take all the statisticians in the world and lay them end to end, this might be a good thing. You can prove anything with numbers. Taking a look at this, you can see there's a low pressure here. You can kind of see the swirl around it. These are Cirrus aircraft picked off of a flight planning software. How many do you think are up there flying around in that system? This is just Cirrus alone. The correct number is 13. I heard somebody in the back say it. But some of them are doing a very good job. These guys over here are not getting into too much trouble. This guy, I'm sort of wondering why he's doing what he's doing. This guy is headed into a bit of a nasty area right here. And they're using their data link to tactically pick their way through. You better be sure about what you're doing because life could get real interesting. Here's one other thing that I had happen to me. Anybody ever had the blue screen of death on your computer at home? Absolutely. Thank you, Microsoft. It also happens in our technologically advanced aircraft. You may get something like this. And it says, sorry, I'm taking a little time out here. I'll be back in about five minutes, not to worry. Five minutes, I'm looking at cumulus clouds all over the place with some nimbus in there as well. I need you right now. Something to think about. Now here's another example of a thunderstorm situation. How many of you fly up and down the coast along from south to north or north to south, up to New England, and so on? Do you ever find that there are a lot of thunderstorms right along the northern Florida-Georgia border? I mean, you could almost predict that that's where it's going to happen. Well, this is no different. This is Jacksonville right here. And there's the border right there. Guess which line is my course line? Anybody have to think too long about that? It's the white line, which takes me right through the edge of this. This is convective. And there's two tip-offs. One is the little yellow lightning bolt symbol. And the other is tight gradient. So that tells me that's a convective signature. And I've got some other stuff here that's starting to develop and build up. And on some of our systems, you have the ability to slew so you can move your map around so you can get a closer look at what's going on. So I'm quite a distance away. One other thing I'd like to point out to you. Remember we talked about the timing of situations on warp and how long it takes? Over here is when my next rad signal was sent to me. And here's the actual time right now. So there's a 10-minute gap at this point. That's a long time when you're dealing with a tactical situation. We need to be careful with this. What's your typical update? Update time? Anybody? Four or five minutes. What that means is that's the time that XM or whoever's providing the signal sent it up to you. You don't know how long it took them to process that signal. The actual cloud situation and so forth maybe a couple of minutes longer than that. So here's a picture. Everybody's got that square in their head. And this is what the clouds looked like. And I'm still about 80 miles away on this. And over here is the east side of the weather. And here's the west side. Now which way should I go around? East. Why should I go east? Because that's where the prevailing winds are. There was a little low pressure, again, off the coast. We're on the backside of that low. And the low is sitting out here. And it's blowing in this way. And the cloud tops are blowing that way. And you can see some other cells starting to develop in there. I'm now about 40 miles away. And you can see it started to develop quite nicely. You can also see that the lower level clouds are starting to build up. In the previous picture, I believe I was about 8,000 feet. And I've worked my way up to about 11,000 feet, which is about as high as I really want to go without oxygen. So yes, you can go higher and so forth. But my processor is starting to slow down at that point. Anybody here got a pulse oximeter, by the way? It's kind of a handy-dandy little device that you can clip on your finger. And it tells you how brain-deprived you're being at that point. And you'd be surprised. So anyway, now we get a little bit closer. And now we're right off the end of this thing. And I'm estimating I'm about 20 miles away from this. The tops of this were reported at about 35,000 feet. And they had a sigmet out. And I don't want to get any closer. I got a few humps and bumps going through the clouds. But I'm on top of most of it at this point. I'm depending on three things to help me stay out of the weather here. Number one, my eyes. If you can see it, don't go there. Number two, onboard data link. And number three is air traffic control. And between gathering all of those bits and pieces of information, I can then make a good decision. And if I start getting conflicting information from what I see and what I'm seeing on my scope and what air traffic is telling me and possibly what other pilots are telling me, if it's good information, OK, then I'll sort through that. If it's bad information, now I'm starting to think about plan B. Here's another scenario. Zig or zag. You can see where my course line is, as usual. It's the magenta line from God taking me right up through convective weather. This is down in Naples here. And the controller said, no problem. Fly heading of about 330, which would take you this way. Well, that would probably clear me out of the convective area. And you'll notice that the gradients now are pretty shallow over here. It's steep here. It's steep here. And so on. Here's where being PIC and having a different view of things, I was looking out the window and I could see sunlight very clearly over here. I had a cell here and a cell here. And I said, you know, I could pop right through there and probably not have too much problem. Controller said moderate to heavy precipitation in front of you. I said, very good, thank you. I'm going to go 090. This is what I saw out the window. I could see the tops of the two cells. And I said, these are not real high. I can work my way through this. I went through. Slow the airplane down just a little bit in case I'm going to encounter some heavy turbulence. There wasn't any. There was no rain. Went right through the other side. And now I'm east of the whole thing and not having to deal with it. Southwest Airlines was on the frequency at the same time. Controller gave the same routing to Southwest. And the captain said, let me think about that for a minute. Of course, they've got onboard radar. And they're taking a look. And he said, no, I think I want to do this. And the controller said, well, I can get you right into wherever. And the captain said, no, no, no, no. We're going to add some quality flying time to my logbook this afternoon. Take a look at how quickly that developed. Those are air mass thunderstorms. This is the southeast. And I was looking at this on one of our weather monitors at the foundation. And the whole southeast just exploded with weather. That's over the course of about a two-hour period. So you look at temperatures. You look at dew points. You look at the instability in the atmosphere. That's not a place I want to be in a light airplane right now. OK, we're going to summarize here quickly. Warp and ASR, the two different systems. Weather is not ATC's number one priority. Their number one priority is separating traffic. However, they do have a responsibility to let you know about weather. You can help them with that responsibility if you remind them that you're very interested. Hey, center, if you see anything out there, I'd sure like to hear about it. Are you painting any weather? Whatever terminology you'd like to use, just be sure that they understand. I don't have any onboard weather detection equipment and so forth. If I have onboard detection equipment, I probably won't say anything about it. Let them assume that I don't have anything and we'll go from there. That's like when I frequently will fly into a busy airport. I'll just say I'm a student pilot. You'd be amazed at the great service you get. Don't quote me on that. You'll give away my secret. Assume nothing. You have to ask ATC if you want some help. So a few tips here for you. Let them know that you don't have onboard weather equipment. Confirm your services with each sector. So as you get handed off, just let them know, hey, I'm interested in the weather ahead. Let me know if you see anything. Sometimes you'll hear pilots wait to the very last minute. They'll drive right up to some weather and then they want a 45 degree turn. Well, you saw in my situation, I was looking at the stuff 80 miles out. There was no percentage in continuing right up to the thing. It complicates the controller's life tremendously in having to deal with this. Ask for a 10 or 15 degree heading deviation when you're much farther out. That's a strategic avoidance rather than getting into messing around on the tactical side. We learned this from the previous accident. When able doesn't mean now, all right? So if somebody says proceed wherever when able, you do it when you're sure that it's safe to go. If the weather, if they've got a convective sigmet out and you have the misfortune to be flying around in that area, add a few extra miles to whatever it is that you think is gonna be perfectly safe, all right? The consequences for screwing up in this are very severe. This is another important point. If you listen to the airline people, if you fly in this kind of environment very often, they will frequently tell the controller they can't go where ATC wants to send them. And the controller's saying, well, you know, I'm up to my armpits in traffic here. You know, I gotta do something else. The captain says, no, I'm not putting this airplane into weather. You're the captain of your airplane. Don't let them put you into anything that you don't feel is safe to do, all right? Guess who's first to the scene of the accident? You know that, all right? If you can't do it, you say unable. Sometimes a controller will say, are you declaring an emergency? And the response is, if that's what I have to do to stay clear of the weather, yes. Then they can work it out. Are you gonna get a violation? I doubt it. Be good to be a member of the AOPA Legal Services Plan, but we don't have to get into that right here. If you don't see what you want, you're uncertain about something, be sure and ask. Okay, let's talk a little bit about decision-making. This is decision-making 101. It's not complicated. One, anticipate what could go wrong. This applies to anything relative to decision-making, not just thunderstorms. Recognize it when it's going wrong, and then finally do something about it. In many cases, pilots will say, yeah, they're gonna be thunderstorms, all right, they're anticipating. Recognize, yeah, there's a big cloud ahead, and then they don't do anything about this. The last part of it is to evaluate. Did I make the right choice? Do I need to do something different? Very, very simple. Anticipate, recognize, do something, and then go back and say, how did I do? By the way, this applies to remembering your wife's birthday or whatever it happens to be. It's a good mantra to remember. If everything else fails and you can't get out and you've exhausted all your possibilities, first off, you didn't do things right, but that's okay, you don't have to die. Air Safety Foundation did a study a number of years ago, and we found out that if pilots made the decision, they said, okay, this applies to VFR and to IMC as well as thunderstorms. Got into a circumstance, I can't get out, there's no airport that I can get to between me and the weather. I'm gonna go ahead and land. Precautionary landings, minor injuries at worst, never a fatality. Let me say that again, minor injuries. Airplane, maybe got busted up pretty good, but never a fatality. It's your ace in the hole if nothing else works. As we wrap up here, there are registration forms, which we hope you will fill out here, these little tan cards. That will help you get credit for Wings Program and also on ASF's website. Drop these back at the AOPA tent, that's the yellow tent over there, you can't miss it, yellow and blue, and we're giving away, you will be entered for a drawing for a one gigabyte thumb drive, which is a pretty nice gift. If you will do that. I'd like to leave you with one particular thought here. Air Safety Foundation is affiliated with AOPA, but we only get 10% of our funding from AOPA. The other 90%, 90% of our funding comes from pilots like you. It's a tax deductible contribution if you make it, and we hope that if you like what you see here, either in the online courses, one of the 200 or more live seminars that we do are the numerous safety studies that we offer that you will support us. And if you have any problems, I'm the guy that needs the phone call or the letter or the email to tell me otherwise. So we'll stop here, and if we have any questions, we'll take it. Thank you very much. And now you're here with the people under the photo. I saw somewhere that there are five mistakes up there. What were the others? You'll have to come for the presentation on five mistakes pilots make to find out Captain JJ Greenway, Retired of American Airlines will be doing that right here in this forum here. So yeah, he'll have a very good program for you. So thank you for asking. Anybody else? Yes, sir. On the avoidance, what's the, like storm scope and strike finders in lieu of radar? Oh, very good point. Storm scopes, strike finders, and the technical term I believe is sphericals. Say that three times after you've had a glass of wine. They're measuring lightning and they do a pretty good job of letting you know the general area where these things are. And the early strike finders and storm scopes were perhaps not that accurate. They had a problem of ranging and so forth, but it'll give you a general idea and a pretty good bearing as to where the weather is. Again, to be used as a strategic avoidance device as opposed to tactical. Now, the people who sell them and perhaps the newer ones are better, but I would, in my experience in using them, I found it a little difficult to sort of identify, okay, this is exactly where the clouds are. If there's lightning, as my friend over here was pointed out, that's a bad thing, okay? Ask the questions, use all of the information. If you've got one of these devices on your airplane, by all means, take advantage of it, but also you may have to learn how to interpret it because it's not something that just intuitively is understandable. Any other questions? Yes, sir. Information on data link. We have a course online, which you can do, and I'm sure that some of the vendors here at the show would be only too happy to tell you about it. We will be updating our course on data link. In fact, you'll probably see some of Bruce's private stock of pictures that I shared with you this afternoon on how to interpret data link and so forth. The data link? Well, it comes down through the satellite and it will be a multi-function display, so. Yeah, what's the basic difference in thunderstorm weather when you have cloud to cloud lightning versus cloud to ground lightning? It's all a matter of potential, okay? And that's, when we get into that, I guess I'm gonna say that the cloud to ground type of lightning may indicate a more severe storm, but as far as we are concerned, thunderstorms come in three flavors, bad, worse, and impossible. And if you've got lightning, that's a place you do not want to be, period done, end of sentence. And Bob Buck, who's my mentor has said on many occasions, he said, these things are treacherous. We could have a long discussion about nasty little things called vortex tubes and so forth that go between the clouds and so on. That gets pretty esoteric, but suffice to say, there's a lot of energy in the atmosphere when you're working around this kind of weather and you wanna give it the respect that it deserves. If you're seeing lightning, you wanna be going the other way. Do you normally find one without the other? Cloud to cloud without cloud to ground? Yeah, I suppose that's possible. I don't know for sure.