GA Flying on the weekend

[Andrew P]

Dear All,
I am interested in knowing at which point last weekend (11th-12th Jan)the most private aircraft were in the sky over England. I would be grateful for any information as to which hour slot you feel was the busiest (and which aerodrome/area you get the info from).

The reason? I am going to be looking at some radar data, and I am particularly interested in light aircraft.

Thanks in advance

[Chilli Monster]

You're the one who's going to be looking at the radar data - you tell us!

[Andrew P]

True, but I have to order it in advance and then process it - trawling through an entire weekend of data is not my idea of fun.

[wsmempson]

This site

libhomeradar - easy collect aircraft information - libhomeradar - easy collect aircraft information (http://www.libhomeradar.org)

is quite interesting, but will lnvolve lots of trawling through data.

Basically, if an aircraft is mode-s equiped, this site seems to show it's flights. Slightly pointless data gathering, but it might go some way to answering your question.

[Mark 1]

Is there any reason you are picking last weekend.

From my viewpoints there were very few VFR flying opportunities over the entire weekend.

I was on instructor duty on Saturday, but the forecast improvement to marginal VFR conditions (6K vis 1000' ceiling) never arrived.
Sunday was also low cloud, poor vis and a howling cross-wind, so I got some overdue gardening done.

A look at the Metar records would probably identify if there were any worthwhile periods or places for VFR flying.

Typically very little goes on without 8-10k vis, 2000' ceiling and winds below 20 knots.

If you'd picked the previous weekend, you would likely have found a lot of activity.

[Andrew P]

Thanks, the choice of weekends is unfortunately out of my hands - the reason I'm on this forum is to try to get the best information out of it.

[BackPacker]

Unless the weather is below VFR conditions (like last weekend, as suggested above) I would guess that the busiest periods, in general, are roughly 11-15.

If you have budget to buy one hour only, I would probably go for 13.30 to 14.30.

But... I would look at the METARs first to determine when the weather was below VFR conditions. This site allows you to view historical METARs:

Formulario para peticion de mensajes aeronauticos (http://www.ogimet.com/metars.phtml.en)

[matspart3]

Looking at the runway utilisation stats, 1100-1300 on both Saturday and Sunday were the busiest periods at Gloucestershire Airport but it wasn't a spectacularly busy day by any stretch of the imagination, with arond 200 movements all weekend.