How often weather cancel your flight plans in the UK

[JordanCross]

I'm a CFI in Florida in the US, and was having a discussion with another pilot about flight training in the UK. How many days per year of VFR weather do you have? Another way to phrase- how often do you have to cancel a flight due to weather?

[Parson]

Well this year, when flying SEP, I would say that on 3 out 4 occasions I have had to either cancel or change my plans.

[Ronaldsway Radar]

Although on the flip side TA - when I was hours building in Arizona I was suggested not to go flying on one occasion because of the wind was above 5kts and a bit of SCT cloud - conditions which in the U.K. would have been classed as near perfect...!

However, I should caveat that it is always wise to defer to superior local knowledge of weather conditions and patterns as I hear things build pretty quickly in the Phoenix area. Needless to say I didn't over-rule them, the weather did turn out to be marginal and lived to fly another day.

Back at home, the Isle of Man isn't particularly great for flying weather (except for perhaps a few days in June!), and more often than not things are cancelled / delayed due to weather. I hear the north-west is pretty much the same.

[alex90]

Today is as near perfect as I've seen it in some time near London! What a stunning day to go flying! I think last winter was a write off for a lot of places, I only managed to fly about 10 hours during the winter. But generally you get at least 4 days a week that are flyable.

I think it depends a lot on the marginal flying in the UK, and a large number of us do go on to complete the IMC (now known as IR(r) ) rating allowing us to fly through cloud, and reach VFR on top which is often no higher than about 2000' - 2500'.

From the training perspective, I know a few instructors who will take PPL students, and fly through a low layer of cloud before giving controls to the student. This (I am told) works quite well, especially for the small amount of "hood work" (basic instruments flying) required to pass the PPL in the UK. I think the bare minimum is the ability to do a 180 degree turn to get out of cloud - but the syllabus I followed also covered recovery from a spiral dive, and stall under the hood (which was also examined on my GFT).

Do you guys have a minimum requirement of hood work in order to pass your PPL out in the USA?

[Martin_123]

First things first - what counts as flyable weather? Generally in schools across Ireland you go out and fly as long as the cross wind component doesn't exceed 13-15 kt and head wind component has no gusts, so pretty much if it's coming down the runway anywhere up to 20kt, it's flyable. Cloud - ovc at 1800ft is fine as long as the visibility is ok and there's no percipitation. It's very rarely fully ovc, most of the times you can either get a decent vfr on top or large enough breaks to fly at decent altitudes

It's a very tough question to answer - UK/Ireland and Western Europe in general is in the receiving end of the Traveling Low/prevailing Westerly zone. Our climate will be impacted by the amount of energy stored in the Atlantic, and the global events such as El Niño /El Ninja. What it means is that good, dry, sunny summers are interchanged by wet and windy ones. Last summer I flew every weekend from March to October no issues. This summer, albeit warmer, had a lot of foggy, drizzly days and I didn't flew as much as I wanted. Winters can be a bit hit and miss as well - last winter brought storm after storm, rains, floods, full package of never ending misery. No flying from October til February at all.. This year is shaping up very differently, today is definitely flyable, tomorrow promises to be reasonable as well.. who knows what December will bring, some people insist we will see snow. If the high pressure sets in with a nice northerly/easterly flow, we might see very cold, but beautiful days of flying