Winds Aloft

Bill Str8tail said:
https://www.gleim.com/public/pdf/av/private/online/links/faexample6_5.pdf

I have a question about section 3-B, that reads: "If the wind direction is between 51 and 86, the wind speed will be 100 kt. or more."

Not to sound really dumb, but is this a mechanical rule based on wind direction at that altitude?
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It's based on you only have 2 digits for wind speed and 2 digits for the direction so they come up with a stupid way of coding the information. Directions can only between 0 and 36 since you take the degrees and divide by 10 to fit it into the 2 digit direction field. So, if the wind speed is more than 99, it can't fit into two digits, so they "carry the one" by adding 50 to the wind direction.

God forbid that they would just give you the information in plain English using the actual numbers.
 
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Bill Str8tail said:
"If the wind direction is between 51 and 86, the wind speed will be 100 kt. or more."
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That is a very poor explanation on Gleim's part.

If the wind speed is over 100 knots, a "special code" is used in which 50 is added to the two wind direction digits, to signal you to add 100 to the wind speed.

For example, 350° at 99 knots would be coded 3599. If the wind were 350° at 100 knots, the wind forecast code would be 8500. And 8599 would mean 350° at 199 knots. Etc.
 
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Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Plus, as a private pilot, if the wind is above 100 knots, you ain't gonna be likely to be flying in it so the whole question is moot.
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While I agree with everything else you wrote (especially the "stupid way" and similar comments), we are talking winds aloft here, and there are lots of Private Pilots out there that have seen 100 kt winds aloft. Private pilots can easily be flying around in Cessna 300/400 series airplanes, PA-46's and others that get up into the lower FL's and can regularly see that type of wind.
 
It’s stupid today, and was stupid yesterday, but yesteryear there was a decent reason similar to why all the METAR and TAF abbreviations. Don’t ask me to remember or look up the reason though, ima go to bed...
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
It’s stupid today, and was stupid yesterday, but yesteryear there was a decent reason similar to why all the METAR and TAF abbreviations. Don’t ask me to remember or look up the reason though, ima go to bed...
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The reasons for all the asinine coding in METARs, TAFs, wind forecasts, etc, is because "back in the day" before this newfangled interwebs, all of these reports were sent to and fro via Teletype. Each and every character would cost money to transmit, so they chopped and butchered every single corner they could to keep the costs down. It's kinda cool from a technological history perspective, but otherwise infuriating that it hasn't been adapted to plain decoded language in the last 30 years the general public's had access to the internet.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
And, it was painfully slow.
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Lol go figure. Nowadays I get impatient when ForeFlight takes an extra 8 seconds to deliver my full flight brief complete with graphics, profile views, charts, and forecasts. I hated digging through and interpolating the old paper wind charts when I was doing PPL. Easy, yes, but tedious.
 
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