Some interesting and useful remarks here - thanks all. The point made about local topography is certainly something I'll become more aware of in future and so too how misleading METARS can be. To answer one of the earlier posts, the club specifcally told me they do not call hirers to inform them a slot is grounded as "they dont have the time to call everyone". Anyway, I have raised the issue of communication and policy awareness (just to re-iterate, no mention of wx criteria in FOB) in an email at the weekend but haven't received a reply yet (I'm probably blacklisted now as some sort of difficult customer!)
Reading the posts has lead me to consider risk perception vs. experience once again. The problem is that if I am not permitted to fly every time the sfc wind is >15kts or whatever, what happens the day I really have to land asap and the wind over the location has become 240/20G30?...I suspect the anxiety of thinking "oh the club thinks thats suicidal weather" is more dangerous than the Wx itself. I would prefer to develop experience of those conditions and know what to watch out for and how to handle the a/c differently rather than sitting in the clubhouse sipping tea and eating cake. This comes down to flying with experienced flyers I guess, and I have to say they seem to be in short supply at a lot of clubs these days
. The two instructors I have flown with recently at this club have only 50 and 70hrs more than myself (integrated ATPL grads) they are very capable guys but after flying with an examiner recently with in well over 20k hours I know the training experience is simply in a different league.
Ideally, I would have liked to have heard "yes, its difficult conditions...but not dangerous for my experience..lets go up and I'll demonstrate the kind of issues lurking in these conditions and what you can do to handle them". What I actually heard was "sorry, all the instructors are busy" (not busy flying though obviously).
Perhaps my expectations are too high of FTO's these days and I should seek out an highly experience instructors for private tuition or something. I know for a fact I will never pick up valuable experience chatting in the club house and daring to venture out only on CAVOK days
particularly as I'm progressing towards professional flying.
Its a difficult area. If you come across as willing to fly in "dodgy" conditions you sort of immediately put yourself in the dangerous pilot bucket in the eyes of instructors which is fair enough - but how are you supposed to progress post PPL? To be honest, its the main reason for me doing a CPL/IR ... I want to take my flying to the next level.
I looking forward to hearing views on this!