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Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to get text weather (METARs, TAFs and NOTAMs) for a selected airport from one website?

This can be handy if you are wanting to check weather at an airport before a training flight or perhaps a flight just around the traffic pattern.   Maybe you don’t need a full weather briefing, to file a flight plan, or even weather graphics; all you need is some basic text weather.  Well I finally found a quick and easy way to get METARs, TAFs and NOTAMs for multiple airports using a single webpage AND it works on a mobile phone as well.  Are you ready? The URL is:

http://www.fltplan.com/Cell.htm

Although it is designed to be used primarily to get aviation weather from a mobile phone, I like using this URL from my regular computer and browser.  It just provides for me a good way to check the weather at single or even multiple airports without the fuss of having to sign in.   This in  no way replaces my official and required weather briefing, but if you just need an update on that briefing, I think that fltplan.com/cell offers a neat solution.  No clicking, no selecting radio boxes, just type the airport indentifiers and you’re done!

Again:

http://www.fltplan.com/cell.htm

If you are looking for a good comprehensive flight planning and aviation weather package for the Apple iPhone, I strongly recommend you take a look at the products offered by ForeFlight.

Like most of the pilot’s that I know, I have another interest in addition to aviation, photography.  I love taking pictures, especially of airplanes.  That’s why my ears perked up when I got an email from my a fellow aviation blogger, Plastic Pilot.

In honor of 500th post at PlasticPilot.net, he is holding an aviation photo contest.  All you have to do is send your best aviation photo to plasticpilot@plasticpilot.net and you could get a chance to win a photo book, t-shirt or even a mousepad.  More importantly, if you won, you could now tell your spouse that you won a photo contest which therefore justifies you buying the new Nikon D90 (or better) digital camera.

You can get more information detailing the contest on PlasticPilot.net

Can’t wait to see your pictures!

Did you know you can use Wunderground to find historic information for airports? This can be extremely handy when flight planning a month or two ahead of time and trying to find out if you will be able to meet your performance criteria such as takeoff and landing distance which is temperature dependent.

To try this out go to:

http://www.wunderground.com

On the search bar type in the name of your destination airport:

Once you do that you can scroll down the page till you see “Weather History for This Location” or you can scroll down further till you see “History and Almanac”. Select the day of your proposed flight from the dropdown box; for year, I would pick the most recent (2007). That will then open a new window.

You will then see the the data we are looking for: Mean temperature.

This is great! Now we can know with pretty good certainty what the temperature will be on the day we are proposed to fly. Now we can look up our performance numbers using our POH or AFM, our runway lengths and make sure everything checks out ok.

Fly Safe.

One of the hardest parts about being a professional corporate pilot (at least is the case with my organization) is the demand or expectation that you are aware of the current market prices of many different airplanes.   With a highly volatile aircraft market, I find myself constantly searching for new resources that I can use to stay abreast of general aviation market conditions.

One of the tools that I use is: http://www.airplaneblog.com

I like the fact that mixed in with the news feeds is listings of aircraft that I might be interested in.

I’d encourage you to look at it and let me know your thoughts by replying to this post!

Fly safe.