The more things change...

One big difference. Technology. Used to be folks just got lost, wound up running out of gas and landing out. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Most of us now have reliable GPS receivers in our phones, not to mention other inexpensive consumer electronics. No excuse to get lost anymore, and I suspect fewer do.
Back in the day it would be hard to blames someone for running afoul the weather. Forecasts sucked, and there wasn't much beyond the radio to figure out what was what, and that only works line of sight. Now, with NEXRAD weather seeming in through ADSB or satellite receivers, we have an unprecedented weather awareness.
 
steingar said:
One big difference. Technology. Used to be folks just got lost, wound up running out of gas and landing out. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Most of us now have reliable GPS receivers in our phones, not to mention other inexpensive consumer electronics. No excuse to get lost anymore, and I suspect fewer do.
Back in the day it would be hard to blames someone for running afoul the weather. Forecasts sucked, and there wasn't much beyond the radio to figure out what was what, and that only works line of sight. Now, with NEXRAD weather seeming in through ADSB or satellite receivers, we have an unprecedented weather awareness.
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Exactly.

Certified planes are sadly nearly identical, 70 years later -- except for the panel.

In my RV, I have a modern electronic ignition that makes the old O-360 run like a car (It even uses automotive spark plugs now.), but the rest of the engine is still genuine 1949 technology. It's funny and pathetic.

But the panel! Synthetic vision, weather and traffic on a big screen, plus two tablets (and our back up cell phones) make flying much safer and navigation nearly effortless. As I always say, I now put less effort into preparing for a 1500 mile flight to Oshkosh than I used to put into preparing for a hamburger flight, back in "the day".

It is a wondrous and welcome change.

Sent from my SM-T700 using Tapatalk
 
Pilots who have all of the modern weather toys at their fingertips still proceeed VFR into IMC in nearly the same numbers as back then, though.

Even the video shows two pilots who availed themselves of the technology of the day, 67 years ago. One landed, and the other perished.
 
denverpilot said:
Pilots who have all of the modern weather toys at their fingertips still proceeed VFR into IMC in nearly the same numbers as back then, though.
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I am genuinely interested if this is indeed true, I am not convinced it is. That said, sadly these inexpensive products that give one an unprecedented view of meteorological phenomena have not penetrated fully into GA cockpits for reasons that escape me.
 
steingar said:
I am genuinely interested if this is indeed true, I am not convinced it is. That said, sadly these inexpensive products that give one an unprecedented view of meteorological phenomena have not penetrated fully into GA cockpits for reasons that escape me.
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Nall Report I believe, has a graph of VFR into IMC accident rates that hasn't changed much for many decades. It hovers around the same number of accidents per flight op every year.

I believe there's also been some speculation as to why, even with on board weather. On board weather has the effect of making the pilot feel like they can push even closer and harder into weather they might have landed 100 miles away from, when they didn't have on board weather.

So it's a double edged sword. People use it to try to "pick their way through", and perish from that, instead of trying to top the storm, as in the video.

Or as anyone who flies with on board radar in bigger aircraft with an IFR ticket seems to know but not quite acknowledge out loud these days... they don't really give thunder storms the suggested 20 mile berth.

They often instead now say, "Don't fly where it's yellow or red."

Then the VFR pilot sees the gee whiz gadget in the panel and thinks they can get away with it, too.

In a way, the technology itself allows a normalization of deviance.

Nobody should be within 20 miles of a thunderstorm, but if you can blow past one at five miles, 100 times, using the tech... you'll eventually hit the hail shaft you couldn't see behind that line of precip up ahead that attenuated your radar so you didn't know what was behind it.

And it just started falling out of the cell, so NEXRAD hasn't seen it yet, and will only show it five minutes after you're dead.

On board weather is great, if you actually use it to avoid weather.
 
steingar said:
I am genuinely interested if this is indeed true, I am not convinced it is. That said, sadly these inexpensive products that give one an unprecedented view of meteorological phenomena have not penetrated fully into GA cockpits for reasons that escape me.
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I suspect the enhanced informational available lead more pilots to test their weather limitations, sometimes without understanding the limits of the information, which ultimately balances it out.
 
We're still using the same notam and pirep format from 67 years ago too.
 
I will assume you don't still have a black and white crt television at your house. Why not?
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
It's inefficient. It is the way it is because that was the technology we had at the time. Nowadays technology has grown exponentially but we're still using a system that was technology-dependent at the time.
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I'm curious. In what way do you feel the system is inefficient?
 
mondtster said:
I'm curious. In what way do you feel the system is inefficient?
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The fact that I have to memorize that BR means mist in 2017 is downright silly we have a whole slew of bandwidth surrounding us at all times.

It makes no sense to add additional variables to decision-making and having to decode stuff adds an extra variable I don't care how good you are at it it is an extra variable and it's a variable that is not necessary at this day and time. You have upgraded everything else around you but this is not been upgraded I can translate it everybody can translate it but it is not as efficient as written text
 
If I were to give you 100 notams and have you read them and explain them and then I were to give you 100 text explanations and have you read them and explain them and time you I guarantee you one would be far faster than the other because you do not have to translate anything
 
Hrs wht I mn.
U cn prbly fgre ths ot bt u dnt typ ths wy.

Thrs u resn u dnt. Its nefshnt.

Plus you saw what happened in the movie Three Amigos when they could only afford the ad with the abbreviated typing the entire opposite of what they wanted to happen happened in the ended up having to battle El Guapo for real
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
It's inefficient. It is the way it is because that was the technology we had at the time. Nowadays technology has grown exponentially but we're still using a system that was technology-dependent at the time.
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And yet it still works. I read more NOTAMs in a week than you read all year, yet I don't mind them the way they are. They're easy to scan to find new stuff, in my opinion.
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
And yet it still works. I read more NOTAMs in a week than you read all year, yet I don't mind them the way they are. They're easy to scan to find new stuff, in my opinion.
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That's a weird thing to say. You don't know how many notams I read. And I'm sure you may be the best notam reader on the planet that doesn't change the fact that it's inefficient. You may be the best at using an inefficient system. that doesn't make the system efficient my point was just that there's no reason it couldn't be made more efficient
 
My great-grandfather lived until I was 22 years old. He was a badass with a slide rule and an abacus. I'm not even making that up the guy played Domino's everyday and he used an abacus to do all of the math. I was 22 just graduated college and I had a really cool calculator. Is an abacus a good system? It works.
 
He sawed off his finger with a circular saw when he was very young and I think they must have glued it back on because it wouldn't bend anymore it just stuck straight out no matter what he did it always looks like he was pointing. It was the best system they had in the time for reattaching a finger though I bet he would like it if the finger bended. I never asked him that though. But when I was a little kid we would always play with his finger we would bend it down and let go and it would fling back out I think he thought it was funny
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
My great-grandfather lived until I was 22 years old. He was a badass with a slide rule and an abacus. I'm not even making that up the guy played Domino's everyday and he used an abacus to do all of the math. I was 22 just graduated college and I had a really cool calculator. Is an abacus a good system? It works.
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When was the last time you changed batteries in an abacus?
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
If I were to give you 100 notams and have you read them and explain them and then I were to give you 100 text explanations and have you read them and explain them and time you I guarantee you one would be far faster than the other because you do not have to translate anything
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I figured that's what you meant. I personally think reading the shorthand is faster and more efficient to quickly scan but I know a lot of people who want to see it in plain English.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
The fact that I have to memorize that BR means mist in 2017 is downright silly we have a whole slew of bandwidth surrounding us at all times.

It makes no sense to add additional variables to decision-making and having to decode stuff adds an extra variable I don't care how good you are at it it is an extra variable and it's a variable that is not necessary at this day and time. You have upgraded everything else around you but this is not been upgraded I can translate it everybody can translate it but it is not as efficient as written text
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Because the French wanted it that way..??
 
I see you are in the Gustav Whitehead camp
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
If I were to give you 100 notams and have you read them and explain them and then I were to give you 100 text explanations and have you read them and explain them and time you I guarantee you one would be far faster than the other because you do not have to translate anything
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Problem is, very few people read the 100 NOTAMS that are on the page as it is...spread them out ver 30 pages and I bet even fewer get read.

Seems to me that abbreviated NOTAMS lend themselves better to the type of scanning you have to do to separate the little bit of wheat from the mounds of chaff in the briefing material.
 
It's much easier for a Spanish speaker, or an Italian, to learn SCT, BKN and OVC, instead of learning what "scattered at x feet" means.
METAR format is international, and a big chunk of aviation in the world happens in non-english speaking areas. Just check out how many "seulement Francais" fields are in France.
 
I'm not staying people can't do it. Courtroom stenography is still a thing. Have you ever looked at one of those machines? They were invented because a typewriter couldn't keep up with the pace of typing. They're still being used. I'm sure with training you can be extremely proficient at it but it is an inefficient machine giving what technology we have.
 
mtuomi said:
It's much easier for a Spanish speaker, or an Italian, to learn SCT, BKN and OVC, instead of learning what "scattered at x feet" means.
METAR format is international, and a big chunk of aviation in the world happens in non-english speaking areas. Just check out how many "seulement Francais" fields are in France.
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I'm sure you are right. But the system was not developed because of people who couldn't speak English. It was developed due to the technology we had at the time. My only statement ever it was that it is inefficient in this day and age
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I'm sure you are right. But the system was not developed because of people who couldn't speak English. It was developed due to the technology we had at the time. My only statement ever it was that it is inefficient in this day and age
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It's a widely accepted universal shorthand language, and they are always compromises. There's never a perfect way to communicate messages between language barriers, best way actually is an universally accepted shorthand, such as METAR.
So no, I don't think it is inefficient. It works really well (and it can easily be translated to plain text by a computer too). Hard to think of a better way.
 
We can argue all day about this. But if it was really more efficient, our Nightly News would be delivered in that format. The reason it's not it's because translation is required. Two steps is rarely more efficient than one.

I am in no way implying that people can't do it quickly and haven't mastered translating it. But the fact that translation is required means there is an intermediary step. At the time it was created the intermediary step was necessary because technology wouldn't allow for what technology will allow today.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
We can argue all day about this. But if it was really more efficient, our Nightly News would be delivered in that format. The reason it's not it's because translation is required. Two steps is rarely more efficient than one.

I am in no way implying that people can't do it quickly and haven't mastered translating it. But the fact that translation is required means there is an intermediary step. At the time it was created the intermediary step was necessary because technology wouldn't allow for what technology will allow today.
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Nightly News is highly inefficient, because before Lester gets his papers, they might have been translated at least twice. First from a foreign agency to english, then english to Lester Holt.
Difference is, Lester has much larger vocabulary he has to manage, weather messages can be truncated into a relatively small amount of "words". The only inefficiency METARs have is for something that's completely out of the ordinary. There is no METAR shorthand for a zombie apocalypse, or example.

What I like about METARs is the lack of ambiguity. I know what OVC003 means, whereas when Al Roker tells me "looks like it's a foggy morning here but we hope it will improve a little bit eventually", I have no clue if I can fly or not.
Not wanting to argue with you, just trying to give another perspective to it.
 
mtuomi said:
I know what OVC003 means.
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Would it bother you if the meter actually said "overcast at 300 feet"?

I made the mistake of comparing aviation weather 2 News weather I get that's apples and oranges. If you were to get the same information in a format that did not require any sort of translation would it be bothersome?

I'd like to point out that I feel like we are actually having a fairly cordial conversation here so I think we can stop saying I don't mean to argue. I think I said that nine times in this thread but this seems to be going very well lol
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Would it bother you if the meter actually said "overcast at 300 feet"?

I made the mistake of comparing aviation weather 2 News weather I get that's apples and oranges. If you were to get the same information in a format that did not require any sort of translation would it be bothersome?
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I have to agree with you. Outdated. Doesn't even make sense to me that it's still used.

But what do I know? I think a pilot should just study to pass the written and learn all the other stuff in actual training (inside joke for another poster in this thread :D).
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Would it bother you if the meter actually said "overcast at 300 feet"?

I made the mistake of comparing aviation weather 2 News weather I get that's apples and oranges. If you were to get the same information in a format that did not require any sort of translation would it be bothersome?

I'd like to point out that I feel like we are actually having a fairly cordial conversation here so I think we can stop saying I don't mean to argue. I think I said that nine times in this thread but this seems to be going very well lol
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It would probably bother a few hundred million non-english-speaking METAR readers around the world. The more complicated the message is, the more time it takes for a non-english speaker to translate it into swahili or whatever he might speak as his first language.

Besides, doesn't Cirrus have a button you push to translate it into plain text? :D

I think we should start arguing about something, I feel like we're letting POA down!
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I'm sure you are right. But the system was not developed because of people who couldn't speak English. It was developed due to the technology we had at the time. My only statement ever it was that it is inefficient in this day and age
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But as someone pointed out, it's not inefficient on a global scale. It is a global system after all. The shorthand translation issues affect everyone equally.

Your two assertions as I see them are :
1. It's inefficient.
2. There's better technology.

The inefficiency thing is covered above. Switching it to "all English" isn't exactly efficient. Using a universally known shorthand format for an international standard actually IS the most efficient.

Secondly, to the technology point -- what specific technology would you find better?

We already have the ability to translate it from shorthand to English and if you've used say, for example, ForeFlight's briefing system -- it turns what's at most a couple of pages of single spaced typewritten shorthand into a long series of iPad pages broken down by category and type of information that needs to be scrolled three pages worth of space down on each one (and way more than that on FDC NOTAMs if you're looking to see if one affects a NAVAID for an IFR flight) and they even automatically generate little summary charts of pages like Obstacle NOTAMs into something useful -- "within 500' of filed altitude", "within 1000' of filed altitude" -- so that's handled.

Not being too critical here, but scanning down a page of the "traditional format" most humans can spot the things they need to know very quickly and without all that much effort and it's FAST to do it that way. I'd much rather do that than flip through ten pages of screens with multiple scroll pages of "English translation" in ForeFlight, so I just hit the left button and go straight to traditional format. I can get crap done WAY faster that way.

But besides that, what tech would make this better? Read it in Siri or Alexa's voice to you? Or interpret it for you? You do know that's *exactly* what 1-800-WX-BRIEF is *supposed* to be for, right? If you can multitask enough to listen and drive at the same time you can get a complete weather briefing with help sorting out the unnecessary stuff on your car stereo via Bluetooth on the drive to the airport.

Charts and graphics: Those do have better tech by far than the old charts. We can all access a better radar map on our phones than I could get walking into a manned FSS in 1991. I don't see a lack of tech there.

About the only tech I could think of that could be "better" is if you want to sit down in a chair with VR glasses and be shown the entire route of flight from a simulated POV view, and that seems a bit overkill.

So what "tech" are you saying could be implemented? The shorthand is an international language that all pilots understand, and can be translated by your cell phone into a massive pile of English and charts and graphs if you want, these days, but expecting a basic knowledge of the language underlying the tech doesn't seem to be that difficult or too much to ask.

Most examiners aren't going to harp on METARs all that hard anyway, as long as you know the most common stuff and where to look up other oddballs, and they're not failing anyone who uses a translation on their iPad for the actual weather briefing for the flight.

So, what problem is this undefined "more tech" solving? I can't figure it out. And what "tech"?

I used to have to record "AM Weather" off of my VCR every morning at 5:30 AM to even see an aviation relevant Prog chart style map, or drive my butt over to the FSS and walk inside. I'd say pulling five days worth of charts in color up on my phone and reading METARs downloaded automatically for my entire route of flight, is pretty darn easy.

Interestingly also, I could just as easily read that 60 year old weather map as if it were published today. Wind barbs, Sky condition, all the ceiling info ... it was all there just like it's always been. Do I LIKE a pretty color chart better? Sure. But there's a "lingua franca" underneath that everyone can read if handed a paper METAR printout and weather depiction chart. Warm fronts are scalloped, cold fronts are flagged, etc etc etc.

Once learned, it's like handing someone the sheet music. They can play the song. Yeah, they have to learn to read sheet music. But every musician knows how.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
We can argue all day about this. But if it was really more efficient, our Nightly News would be delivered in that format. The reason it's not it's because translation is required. Two steps is rarely more efficient than one.

I am in no way implying that people can't do it quickly and haven't mastered translating it. But the fact that translation is required means there is an intermediary step. At the time it was created the intermediary step was necessary because technology wouldn't allow for what technology will allow today.
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I find it hard to take anything serious you post on here, given the style you have. You appear to not really take this flying business serious and it's people like you that keep me out of Indian Territory as long as I can.
 
I've never taken anything you've ever posted serious ever since you told me I deserve to end up on an NTSB report.

I also don't care what you think about me or what I am keeping you from doing. All I stated was that the system is inefficient but go ahead make it personal
 
To borrow a phrase from diving, 'equipment solutions to skills problems'. :rolleyes:

Nauga,
who doesn't trust something more because it lights up
 
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