What do you do when faced with a reasonable looking TAF which ends with PROB30 TSRA?
That's the situation that I found myself in yesterday, and I'm not sure that I made a good call. I was planning a solo landaway at Shoreham, and while the weather at Goodwood quickly picked up from a rather grotty start, Shoreham kept reporting 3000 SCT005 BKN009 until mid-morning. It gradually improved, and by lunchtime the METARs were reporting 9999 FEW012 SCT018, and I started to think about going. I was aware that by that point we were into the bit of the TAF which included PROB30 TSRA, and Shoreham ATIS was reporting a Thunderstorm warning. However the METARs seemed fine, PROB30 wasn't much, and, after all, I could always turn back. I went.
I made it to Shoreham, landed, put on my high-vis jacket and headed off to the terminal. After the novelty of looking at the 'Arrivals' monitor wore off I headed back to my aeroplane, thinking that I'd better get a move on because it was looking a bit grim to the east. With perfect timing a bl**dy great bolt of lightning hit the hills to the north-east, and within minutes Lancing college disappeared in the mist and the rain started. It took me rather a long time to get back home....
Was I dumb to head off in the first place, or was I just unlucky in getting the PROB30's 1-in-3 chance of bad weather? What would you have done? I'm not worried about safety, as getting rained in was probably the worst that could have happened - if the weather had been bad before arrival I would have just turned around and headed back west. However, it's the first go/no-go decision that I've had to make and it didn't turn out quite as planned...
