t0r0nad0
Pattern Altitude
(Cross-posted from HoustonPilots.net)
Last night, I arranged for my Intro to Air Navigation class to take a tour of Universal Weather, near Hobby Airport. I didn't realize before how huge this place was or how much they did! Unfortunately, I have no pictures as cameras were not allowed, but here's a recap of what we did.
Around 7:00p, all of my students finally got there. We met up with Haley (who is actually the daughter of one of my fiancee's coworkers, which is how I got this set up) and she took us inside. As we signed in, she gave us the spiel on no cameras, confidential client info, etc. She did mention that the front building was all corporate offices - chairwoman of the board, CEO, VP's, etc. As we walked down the hallway towards the operations center, we saw a bunch of pictures of famous people whose flights they've served. I was delighted to see a shot of Barrington Irving in front of the museum from his round-the-world trip.
We got back to the operations area, which is essentially a giant cubicle farm. The first section is where all of the 'teams' sit. They have 6 teams of people who will take a call from a client who wants to make a trip, then they start to divvy out the tasks and tackle the logistics. What do they do for a trip, you ask? The simple answer - everything except fly it for you. Let's say, for example, you want to fly your Citation X from Hobby to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, arriving there at noon tomorrow and staying for three days. You'd like 4-star accommodations for you and your crew while there. They will find a hotel for you and your crew, and arrange for ground transportation while you're there, either limo or rental car or anything in-between. Then, they will make arrangements for all of your aircraft's ground handling - hangar space, cleaning, lav service, catering, fuel, oxygen, etc. In addition to the network of Universal Aviation FBO's that they own around the world, they have partner FBO's at the airports where they don't own one. The team will also take care of getting any landing permits, overflight permits if they are not going to land at an official 'airport of entry', and making arrangements for customs, including having the customs agent come out to the plane to process them if the client does not want to have to unboard the plane.
Next, the 'team' will send the trip over to the flight planning and weather department, which is actually where Haley works (she's an FAA certificated Dispatcher as well as a meteorologist), and that was our next stop on the tour. There, the flight planners will punch your departure and destination airports into their system, and that will pull up any routes that they have built between those airports previously. They will then go pull the current Jeppesen IFR Hi-Altitude Charts for the selected route, to make sure that the route and all fixes are still valid. Sometimes routes are only one-way, or become one-way since the last time it was used, or a fix gets updated. They will do a quick check with the weather people to see if there is any significant weather along the route that they may need to reroute around, then they will pre-file the flight plan for the client.
Now, the weather people go to work. At each of the weather desks, there are four computer monitors. Two belonged to a Windows machine and two belonged to a Unix machine, which can process the weather data and give the weather models quicker. These people are amazing, the guy we spoke with was able to look at a series of Skew-T charts and basically tell me whether there would or would not be precipitation, and where the cloud layers would be. Here's a Skew-T for those who are not familiar with them (don't ask me how to read them, I have no clue):
It basically shows the temperature/dewpoint spread. The weather people will put together a full route weather briefing, specific to a two-hour window around the time of flight, which includes winds aloft at each fix, visibility, turbulence predictions, temperatures, and more. It also gives what the weather is doing at each of the two flight-levels below the proposed one, so the crew can see the difference. The amount of weather data given is amazing.
When all is said and done, the crew will receive about a 30+ page packet of information, which includes:
-hotel reservation info
-FBO info
-ground transportation info
-Detailed flight plan info, with weather along the route
-if the flight goes over water, it will give the Equal Time Points (the point at which it's quicker for you to continue on to the other side than to turn around and head back)
-Government weather forecasts
-Local observations
-The Universal Weather forecast if there is not one available for the area
-A complete security briefing, including information on scheduled protests, civil unrest, riots, earthquakes, volcanoes, and anything else that could affect the client's safety in the air or on the ground
-Maps of the route of flight showing the winds aloft
-Map of the route of flight showing the details of each waypoint
And I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting. I was just amazed at how much really went in to planning a long, high altitude, IFR flight, especially when compared to the short, low-level, VFR flights that I normally plan. The complexity just compounds when flying internationally as you then have to worry about landing permits, overflight permits, and border crossing permits for every country's airspace you cross over. It just makes for a lot more work. A lot of their US-based clientele (they do have offices around the world) will just handle planning their domestic flights internally, then have Universal do the international legs.
The last stop on our little tour was to the online section. They actually have an online portal where their customers can go online and submit their trip requests instead of calling. They can also do their own flight planning and get their own weather briefing online, if they want. BTW, their online tools are waaaay more advanced than the AOPA Internet Flight Planner, the FlightAware planner, or anything else that is available for us bug-smashers. Also on this online portal? The ability to send Datalink messages to their planes if it is so equipped. Lots of cool stuff available.
I have no idea what their service costs, but I imagine it isn't cheap. However, if you do a lot of international flying, I can see how it would be well worth it to outsource of the logistics planning so that your crew can just worry about getting the information and flying the airplane. Big kudos to Universal Weather for letting us come out and to Haley for being an excellent tour guide.
Last night, I arranged for my Intro to Air Navigation class to take a tour of Universal Weather, near Hobby Airport. I didn't realize before how huge this place was or how much they did! Unfortunately, I have no pictures as cameras were not allowed, but here's a recap of what we did.
Around 7:00p, all of my students finally got there. We met up with Haley (who is actually the daughter of one of my fiancee's coworkers, which is how I got this set up) and she took us inside. As we signed in, she gave us the spiel on no cameras, confidential client info, etc. She did mention that the front building was all corporate offices - chairwoman of the board, CEO, VP's, etc. As we walked down the hallway towards the operations center, we saw a bunch of pictures of famous people whose flights they've served. I was delighted to see a shot of Barrington Irving in front of the museum from his round-the-world trip.
We got back to the operations area, which is essentially a giant cubicle farm. The first section is where all of the 'teams' sit. They have 6 teams of people who will take a call from a client who wants to make a trip, then they start to divvy out the tasks and tackle the logistics. What do they do for a trip, you ask? The simple answer - everything except fly it for you. Let's say, for example, you want to fly your Citation X from Hobby to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, arriving there at noon tomorrow and staying for three days. You'd like 4-star accommodations for you and your crew while there. They will find a hotel for you and your crew, and arrange for ground transportation while you're there, either limo or rental car or anything in-between. Then, they will make arrangements for all of your aircraft's ground handling - hangar space, cleaning, lav service, catering, fuel, oxygen, etc. In addition to the network of Universal Aviation FBO's that they own around the world, they have partner FBO's at the airports where they don't own one. The team will also take care of getting any landing permits, overflight permits if they are not going to land at an official 'airport of entry', and making arrangements for customs, including having the customs agent come out to the plane to process them if the client does not want to have to unboard the plane.
Next, the 'team' will send the trip over to the flight planning and weather department, which is actually where Haley works (she's an FAA certificated Dispatcher as well as a meteorologist), and that was our next stop on the tour. There, the flight planners will punch your departure and destination airports into their system, and that will pull up any routes that they have built between those airports previously. They will then go pull the current Jeppesen IFR Hi-Altitude Charts for the selected route, to make sure that the route and all fixes are still valid. Sometimes routes are only one-way, or become one-way since the last time it was used, or a fix gets updated. They will do a quick check with the weather people to see if there is any significant weather along the route that they may need to reroute around, then they will pre-file the flight plan for the client.
Now, the weather people go to work. At each of the weather desks, there are four computer monitors. Two belonged to a Windows machine and two belonged to a Unix machine, which can process the weather data and give the weather models quicker. These people are amazing, the guy we spoke with was able to look at a series of Skew-T charts and basically tell me whether there would or would not be precipitation, and where the cloud layers would be. Here's a Skew-T for those who are not familiar with them (don't ask me how to read them, I have no clue):
It basically shows the temperature/dewpoint spread. The weather people will put together a full route weather briefing, specific to a two-hour window around the time of flight, which includes winds aloft at each fix, visibility, turbulence predictions, temperatures, and more. It also gives what the weather is doing at each of the two flight-levels below the proposed one, so the crew can see the difference. The amount of weather data given is amazing.
When all is said and done, the crew will receive about a 30+ page packet of information, which includes:
-hotel reservation info
-FBO info
-ground transportation info
-Detailed flight plan info, with weather along the route
-if the flight goes over water, it will give the Equal Time Points (the point at which it's quicker for you to continue on to the other side than to turn around and head back)
-Government weather forecasts
-Local observations
-The Universal Weather forecast if there is not one available for the area
-A complete security briefing, including information on scheduled protests, civil unrest, riots, earthquakes, volcanoes, and anything else that could affect the client's safety in the air or on the ground
-Maps of the route of flight showing the winds aloft
-Map of the route of flight showing the details of each waypoint
And I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting. I was just amazed at how much really went in to planning a long, high altitude, IFR flight, especially when compared to the short, low-level, VFR flights that I normally plan. The complexity just compounds when flying internationally as you then have to worry about landing permits, overflight permits, and border crossing permits for every country's airspace you cross over. It just makes for a lot more work. A lot of their US-based clientele (they do have offices around the world) will just handle planning their domestic flights internally, then have Universal do the international legs.
The last stop on our little tour was to the online section. They actually have an online portal where their customers can go online and submit their trip requests instead of calling. They can also do their own flight planning and get their own weather briefing online, if they want. BTW, their online tools are waaaay more advanced than the AOPA Internet Flight Planner, the FlightAware planner, or anything else that is available for us bug-smashers. Also on this online portal? The ability to send Datalink messages to their planes if it is so equipped. Lots of cool stuff available.
I have no idea what their service costs, but I imagine it isn't cheap. However, if you do a lot of international flying, I can see how it would be well worth it to outsource of the logistics planning so that your crew can just worry about getting the information and flying the airplane. Big kudos to Universal Weather for letting us come out and to Haley for being an excellent tour guide.