Weather displays in Ops rooms

[WincoDinco]

Just wondering how flight ops departments go about getting weather maps and displays on the big screens in their operations centres. I've seen plenty of examples of large wall mounted monitors with live feeds of weather satellite and radars and representations of the locations of their aircraft on maps etc. Are they simply off-the-shelf software packages, inhouse products, or are they linked to freely available websites?

Any insight would be pretty helpful!

[swedish]

Flight Explorer (http://Www.flightexplorer.com)

[Agaricus bisporus]

It would be a damn sight more useful if the Ops bods deemed this vital info worthy of sharing with mere pilots...

No no no. Of course I don't mean that. Why the hell would anyone think pilots would need clearly displayed weather info on a big screen when a few scraps of badly printed A4 does a much better job. (if the printers is actually working)

How silly of me.

[xtypeman]

AB because ops have to look at the bigger picture not just one flight......

[JDanielz]

Yeah, ops just have to connect Xbox360 to something and have fun!
What weather radars are you talking about lol?! FIFA2013 oooh yeaah!

[mad_jock]

You can get flight trackers with wx radar/satalite derived data on the plot so you can have a guess if a front is going to hit before the aircraft gets in.

Pretty usefull as far as I can tell. The only time I saw it anger diverts were getting picked up and organised before any phone calls came in. Basically as soon as the aircraft pointed away from the hold the buses were arranged and ground handling informed.

And an Xbox plugged into the large screen in ops on a winters sunday afternoon with a couple of aircraft in the air in CAVOK isn't unheard of.

Last time I saw it LMC was getting a right kicking off crewing in mortal combat. Although to be fair crewing was cheating by destracting LMC wearing a vesty top and jiggling.

[plans123]

Back to the OP... Depends what you want, how you want it etc. I've seen one set up display Hi-Sigs animated via the weather manager on Jetplan.com on a wall mounted TV. I've also seen a certain high end BizJet company, pay for the direct UKMO feed and displayed on a wall mounted TV. Horses for courses.

[desertopsguy]

Various wx info can be found on-line easily enough.

The more difficult part is the overlay of the aircraft. It typically requires a data feed, usually either ACARS or Iridium. You can go with one of those free ATC websites but you get everyone else's flights thrown in there too, not good if you have a big fleet. They also have a tendency to look like crap too with annoying adverts and banners plus a time-lag.

This is a good example of one covering Malaysia / Sing Flightradar24.com - Live flight tracker! (http://www.flightradar24.com/) ..relatively uncluttered display too.

There are lots of options out there but they don't come cheap as the aircraft hardware is where the cash gets burned up. A basic set-up with STC's, hardware and install will set you back at least 30k USD / tail and then throw in the monthly data service.

D.O.G