View Full Version : "Approved" weather sources, etc
IO540
31st Dec 2005, 10:45
For a long time, some people have been claiming that only Met Office weather data is "approved" for preflight briefing. The usual list given is TAFs, METARs, F214, F215.
However, UK ANO (2005 version) Article 52(a) states "the latest information available as to the route and aerodrome to be used, the weather reports and forecasts available".
It's reasonable to assume that a TAF, where available for the destination, meets the "latest" requirement but I have not found any regulation which lays down what is or isn't "official" and other weather data should meet the requirement too if reasonably current.
This is for both CAA and FAA.
So, using GFS for example, should be 100% legal.
Any views?
However, there is a process in motion which will require weather providers to be somehow "certified". I don't know any more about this; presumably the UK MO and 3rd party firms like Avbrief will get this certification.
What concerns me is what will happen to all the other weather sources, e.g. GFS with its many other web presentations e.g.
http://ows.public.sembach.af.mil/
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ready/cmet.html
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsavneur.html
etc. Obviously the non-EU sites, or the military sites like Sembach, will carry on regardless of what cartel the EU sets up, but will there be a parallel "pincer movement" to amend the ANO to mandate a briefing from one of these certified sources?
If that was done, foreign-reg aircraft might or might not be exempt. Will the crew of a B747 flying between Heathrow and New York get its weather briefing from its "certified" European weather sources?
GFS is important. The free UK MO data is very bare, and there isn't anything past 24 hours, other than the MSLP charts. With GFS one can get a huge selection of data, days ahead.
As with most things in aviation it matters little until something happens. You could go your whole career flying locally and never getting a forecast and somehow manage to remain safe. However, as soon as you have an incident or accident, the investigation will check where you got your weather briefing from.
Again if the weather briefing you obtained is exactly the same as what the Met Ofice was providing, you are in the clear. But if the met office changed their forecast and you got an out of date one then you are in deep do do. That is where the risk is.
At the present time, the UK metoffice is the only "official" source of information regarding flight within the UK, The Fench Meteo is the only official source for a flight within France. If you want to fly say Farnborough to Nantes and have a 2 hour stop followed by Nantes - Nice, when you contact the Met Office at 0600 for a briefing, they will only provide the briefing for the leg to Nantes, ask for the Nantes - Nice enroute forecast and they will simply say that the French Authorities are responsible for providing the service covering that route so contact them!
It is a target of Eurocontrol to have the AIS and Met briefing services integrated and get rid of the current fragmented system. Under their proposal, you would access a briefing that would give you NOTAM and weather in one brief.
Countries like Austria have already the systems in place for integrated NOTAM and met briefings as well as internet flight plan filing. These service providers are limited by organisations such as the UK Met Office preventing them from providing forecast services over the UK unless they pay the UK Met office for the service.
What would be unsafe is for people to set themselves up in a free market as Met Forecasters or Met service providers unless there was some system in place to licence such people or organisations. To not do that could have a detrimental efect on safety due to inaccurate briefings.
Yes we probably will have to pay but we already pay for the Met Office and look at what we get in the UK never mind when we want to travel beyond Le Manche.
Many airlines use independent briefing service providers such as Jeppesen but the costs are prohibitive for the average PPL. The European proposal would bring the same integrated full briefing service available to all while at the same time ensuring quality of service.
Ring Exeter from your hotel on Nice and ask for a briefing for a flight from Nice - Calais - Biggin and wait for the "we can't do that you have to contact the French". Hopefully this situation will be improved by Eurocontrol's proposal
Regards,
DFC
bookworm
31st Dec 2005, 12:29
Again if the weather briefing you obtained is exactly the same as what the Met Ofice was providing, you are in the clear. But if the met office changed their forecast and you got an out of date one then you are in deep do do. That is where the risk is.
At the present time, the UK metoffice is the only "official" source of information regarding flight within the UK, The Fench Meteo is the only official source for a flight within France.
This is fiction DFC.
The Met Office is contractually required to provide briefings for flights originating in the UK, and to undertake the duties required of a meteorological authority by Annex 3.
Neither Annex 6 nor the ANO requires a crew to use a particular means of obtaining meteorological information, and there is no concept of an "official source".
If you want to fly say Farnborough to Nantes and have a 2 hour stop followed by Nantes - Nice, when you contact the Met Office at 0600 for a briefing, they will only provide the briefing for the leg to Nantes, ask for the Nantes - Nice enroute forecast and they will simply say that the French Authorities are responsible for providing the service covering that route so contact them!
There is nothing to prevent provision of a service extraterritorially, and if you are prepared to pay the Met Office they are free to advise you as they see fit.
(Edited to say: actually, you are correct in one respect, DFC: there is a restriction on using that aviation data shared under the provisions of Annex 3 extraterritorially contrary to the wishes of the national meteorological authority i.e. the French can object to the Met Office giving out French METARs and TAFs for your Nantes - Nice leg. However, I'm not aware of such an objection having been rasied in practice, particularly in the case of the Austrocontrol system you mention. It's just impossible to police -- try telling the NWS that they must ensure their METARs and TAFs on the Internet are not available from France! This will all change under the ANSP legislation, which will provide for Europe-wide competition.)
The Annex 3 provisions mean that wherever you are, there exists at least the state meteorological authority from whom you can receive meteorological info for a flight. It does not restrict the choice of provider.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no intention to change the law regarding the source of met and aeronautical information used in pre-flight briefing in the light of the ANSP legislation. But the providers of that information will need to be certified.
"there is a restriction on using that aviation data shared under the provisions of Annex 3 extraterritorially contrary to the wishes of the national meteorological authority i.e. the French can object to the Met Office giving out French METARs and TAFs for your Nantes - Nice leg. However, I'm not aware of such an objection having been rasied in practice, particularly in the case of the Austrocontrol system you mention. "
I've just logged into homebriefing.com (the Austrocontrol flight plan filing / flight briefing service) to which I have a paid subscription and they provide MET data for UK airfields.
The provision must be impossible to police because once a TAF appears on one website, every other weather provider can get it too.
However, reputable organisations don't usually lift data off others' websites. Isn't there a system (AFTN?) used for distributing TAFs and METARs worldwide? How is the addressing on this done? I know flight plans have to be addressed to specific ATSUs, so perhaps MET data has to be similarly distributed to specific subscribers, and could thus be selectively witheld. I was once reading something on the AFTN operating in Africa, and the traffic was carried by shortwave broadcast!
I believe the French do implement some control on the distribution of their domestic-only airfield Notams (by witholding them from non-Schengen member states) but isn't that using a different distribution network?
I think there are quite a few instances of weather data, NOT made available free in the UK by the MO, being available openly from organisations abroad, particularly the USA.
Yes, TAFs and METARS are available worldwide and anyone anywhere with the appropriate links can obtain them and that can broadcast them openly. However, as I said previously, you can not get a forecast from the UK met office for a flight from Nantes to Nice.
The way round that little one is of course to trell the UK Meteo that you are flying Farnborough to Nice via the Nantes overhead and the overal time to get from Farnborough to Nice is going to be whatever.
Again, most of that the UK and many other providers provide is available free on the internet if one searches.
However, set yourself up in the UK as a private fee charging met service using your own charts etc and you will have to put in so many disclaimers that the lawyers will eat your first 3 years profits and if an AOC holder says they are going to use your service, the CAA will want to know just exactly who is doing what and what quality controls are in place......a kind of local licensing system. The Euopean proposal is that such an organisation will have a clear approval process permitting them to operate Europe wide.
Organisations like Avbrief would not require a licence as I currently understand the situation because Avbrief does nothing more than shuffle papers provided by the Met Office i.e. it is the Met Office providing the service. However, with better competition, Avbrief would be in a position to decide where is got it's information from and thus free itself from a monopoly service provider's fees.
Regarding the NOTAMS - use the Eurocontrol briefing service and you can get the National as well as International NOTAMs. Their thinking is that there is no requirement to distribute the NOTAMS to pilots who do not require them. i.e. When arriving into France from outside the Schengen member states, one must land at a Customs Airfield where you can then check on National notams while you brief for your next flight. Of course someone forget to tell us what to do when Customs allow a direct flight to the National airfield!
Regards,
DFC
DFC
The reason people use the ais.org.uk site for notams is because it is free and provides a multi-waypoint narrow route briefing. Is there another one that's free? I've found quite a few, including some that are paid for, but none provide a multi-leg briefing.
It doesn't matter where you get weather from. Not many pilots that go places phone up the MO for a weather briefing, much as the CAA would suggest in their "get met" booklets. That's pre-internet era.
Mike Cross
2nd Jan 2006, 08:49
Regarding the NOTAMS - use the Eurocontrol briefing service and you can get the National as well as International NOTAMs.
Which you do with the UK AIS service as well. The difference that I suspect you allude to is regarding the French Series D NOTAM. As the French AIP (http://www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr/aip/enligne/METROPOLE/AIP/GEN/3/AIP%20FRANCE%20GEN%203.1.pdf) says Series D: containing information on aerodromes used for general aviation.
Publication are restricted to the countries involved within the scope
of SCHENGEN agreements (Germany, Austria, Belgium,Denmark,
Finland, Greece, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden,
Iceland and Norway). This is a decision by the French, not a decision of the AIS of the country from whom you obtain your briefing.
ICAO's SARPS (Standards and Recommended Practices) are predicated on the State within whose airspace the flight originates being responsible for briefing. If you take your briefing from a different State you should not be surprised if it does not work in the designed manner.
Mike
The reality, Mike, is that the notam data from ais.org.uk should be exactly the same as from any national notam briefing service.
Except for the French local notams you give an example of, but that's fair game (so long as one knows about it - it isn't exactly well publicised!).
If you fly locally in France you need to speak French anyway. For EN ROUTE purposes, the AIS database should generate the data just fine (obviously, because the aircraft could have flown that very same route from the UK :O ); it is only AIRFIELD data that can be witheld in this way, and since you have to be able to speak French, you can just phone up the airfield. (a good idea anyway, anywhere)
Disclaimers or ICAO notwithstanding, the world has changed, and smart pilots do their preflight stuff via the internet. For VFR flight, en route Notams are crucial but as I say the data from AIS has to be the same.
The only theoretical problem I can see is e.g. the old trouble with the French power station TRAs not appearing reliably in the notam data, back in 2003. One might suppose, just suppose, that if one got a briefing from France one may have a leg to stand on, and this legal defence is the usually trotted out justification for using a local briefing service. The reality is entirely different. "Due diligence" might work in the UK, but the French couldn't give a toss about silly irrelevant details like notams or no notams, even to the point of providing the pilot (me) with a radar service at the time but saying nothing, and asked the CAA to pursue the matter. Very French.
Mike Cross
2nd Jan 2006, 10:14
The reality, Mike, is that the notam data from ais.org.uk should be exactly the same as from any national notam briefing service. Not "exactly". ICAO requires States to provide a briefing service in the form of "Plain Language" pre-flight information bulletins (PIB) and each State will have its own view on what that means. As an example, up until recently UK AIS did not include the "Q" line of the original NOTAM.
Can't comment on your specifics but here's an example from my own experience.
The AIP is the definitive source for info. It's amended on a 56 day cycle, 28 days for the relevant AIS to produce the amended AIP, and a further 28 days for it to come into effect. If a change takes effect prior to completion of the 56 day cycle a NOTAM is issued. Once the 56 day cycle is complete and the AIP holds the new info the NOTAM is cancelled.
In my case I was flying to Sandown with a brand new ICAO Half Mil and an up to date Pooleys. The freqs on the new chart and in Pooleys were both wrong and there was no NOTAM so I ended up calling on the old freq. Why?
Sandown's freq was changed after the new chart went to press but before it was printed. A NOTAM was issued, the AIP was updated, and the NOTAM was cancelled once the AIP was up to date. So when I flew there was no NOTAM in my brief. (a bit like your problem?) Unlike the AIP, Pooleys is not updated every 28 days, if you subscribe to updates they are quarterly, so my Pooleys was not updated. Chart amendments do appear on the CAA site (http://www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?categoryid=64&pagetype=65&applicationid=8&mode=500map) but of course I hadn't checked.
Mike
Mike
Sure I can see plenty of scope for info on changes going missing, if one is doing a flight more than 28 days after the change has been notified, but one has not yet obtained up to date AIP-based info.
This is why, doing it all nice and proper, one should subscribe to the 28-day Jepp updates for one's GNS430 or whatever. If you had done that, you would have had the right frequency in there :O
I fail to see, however, what this has to do with Notams, comparing a French notam website with a UK notam website, for EN ROUTE data. What mechanism is there for the two to differ?
Mike Cross
2nd Jan 2006, 14:16
None in reality, if the system is being adhered to properly.
(I would also have had the correct freq if I'd been using the freq printout from Navbox which does have a monthly update:O I just included it in case it was a similar issue with the French ZIT's you mentioned, the UK kept theirs as NOTAM for a long long time, others may have cancelled them as soon as they were in the AIP.)
Here you are touching onto the much wider issue that a typical PPL flies with a chart and a copy of Pooleys or whatever, both up to 1 year old, while the notamed changes could remain in the notam database for as little as 28 days.
Very very few pilots, VFR or IFR, dive into the national AIPs. Those that fly a lot, typically these are IFR pilots, buy Jeppview and Flitestar and get the updates - at a helluva price, of the order of £2000. And nobody is going to buy a new set of Bottlang guides every 28 days; apart from anything else you'd need to rent a skip to dispose of the old ones.
So, the national CAAs sit there pretending to all that the info is in the AIP (while a lot of them don't publish an AIP except in heavy printed format), while everybody knows that most people never look at the stuff, while Jepp / Aerad make a packet on paying somebody to read the AIPs, republish the data, and make a packet.
If EASA is to do something actually useful, it will be to force everybody to publish the data for free, in a standard format, online. Easily printable in A5 size, too, like the Jepp stuff and UNLIKE the online AIPs which when printed A5 are barely readable.
Navbox is a brilliant product, as accurate as anything from Jepp. Should be mandatory for a PPL :O
nobody is going to buy a new set of Bottlang guides every 28 days
Indeed. But I've had my Bottlangs for about 15 years, and update them every 28 days. It takes ten minutes or so to change the relevant pages.
There are occasional errors in Bottlang, but they've never caused me a problem (yet, anyway).
They are also responsive to customers: I asked how I am supposed to know the transition level for different airfields etc in France; they added a page with the information.
How much do you pay for the 28 day Bottlang update (for all of Europe I assume)?
Jepp "plan" to have the Bottlangs on a CD "soon" - a really big omission which they could rectify anytime because the stuff is obviously produced on some DTP package.
Bottlang updates - not the whole of Europe, just UK, Ireland, Benelux, France. If I go further, I get a trip kit for that event.
Updates: as I recall, a bit under £100 a year for the full set.