I have two aircraft, each of which carries an Iridium GSR56 Garmin unit. I have just discovered that all the METARs and TAFs for anything other than the major city airports in Australia have disappeared. In contacting Garmin, they have told me:
The Australian BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) does not include the information for the smaller Airports as from 16th October 2012, as part of the information we purchase from Air Services Australia. The reply we have received:
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According to the contractual arrangements relating to aviation funded data held by the Bureau of Meteorology, these data must not be provided by the Bureau of Meteorology to external clients. All operational data for aviation should be received through Australia’s Aviation Information Service (AIS), Airservices Australia at Flight Briefing | Airservices
I should point out that until 2012 all of the smaller airports were transmitted by the Iridium GSR56 unit.
This seems extraordinary! Does anyone have any information on this issue? Can you imagine – you pay a huge amount of money for the service and then they drop 95% of the information and don’t even inform anyone!
I also cannot understand why Garmin should be charged some huge amount of money when anyone can go onto NAIPs and get the TAFs and METARs free! This is, of course, a safety issue – more and more aircraft will have this GSR56 Iridium download weather information fitted to their aircraft, but if most of the airports do not appear it is a complete disaster.
I look forward to advice from anyone who has any expertise on this. Possibly someone from Airservices can advise what the charge would be for Garmin to get this extra information, if there is any charge.