Hi All
Last weekend I called up my club to discuss the Wx before a private hire slot in a club a/c. Before I had chance to begin a sensible discussion on the winds (240/20G30) I was informed that all private hire of club a/c was "banned" due to senior instructor on duty judging it would be too hard to fly & it was "too bumpy anyway". By 3pm the winds were 240/19 (no gusts & straight down RWY) but the ban still remained. Hence the day was written off. My decision in the morning was nogo. But by 3pm it was definately flyable! As a new member I had not been told of this policy of banning private hire at their discretion.

No contact was attempted to inform me of the ban, I only found out when I called up to discuss the Wx with an instructor.

Curious to hear how others perceive this, and if other clubs operate similar policies.
Cheers!

Sounds like a case of read the pilot order book. I had a very simmilar experience at a certain flying club down south! What made it worse was i had a rather attractive lady in tow and when we arrived at the airfield it was a lovely calm sunset She looked lovely in the photo i took of her next to the plane with her hair gently rustling in the breeze However, the CFI had decreed the forecast not suitable for PPL hire(even with 500hrs on me logg book )Hence no keys were left where they were supposed to be, and no phone call, even though they had mobile, office and home on the books So when i pointed out that if i had flown to L2K for example, the decision on the return trip to go/not go would have been mine and why didnt the same apply in this case? Read the pilot order book was the reply, and sure enough thats what it says!
Mine is not to reason why, mine is but to pay and (not) fly!
Syndicate or outright ownership is one solution!
Suffice to say i cancelled my mebership and now fly from a much more friendly place With my own access code for the hangar and keys etc!!
Just out of interest, it wasn't an airfield to the N.N.W of London sitting just to the north of a Lake was it?

At the end of the day, it's their aeroplane so it's their rules. The only way round it is to go somewhere with different rules (as it sounds like you have done) or buy into your own aircraft, either as a share or as a whole.

HF - couldn't have put it better myself. It's not the renter's right to hire an aircraft, car or even a chainsaw come to that.

If the owner of the equipment decides the item is unavailable then there is little point in getting upset. Just move clubs to somewhere less stringent

Don't you think the club should attempt to contact the member if the item is "unavailable" though and tell them? We are talking about a club which charges almost £300 a year for the honour of flying with them.

Yes, they could have telephoned you and informed you that they were grounding all aircraft due weather.

Remember that your £300 p.a. speaks much more loudly than 300 posts on here ever will; so give it to someone who listens.

Chances are that wherever your current club/school are there is another nearby...

A friend and I regularly hire from a couple of locations.

One has very specific written minima for SFH published in the clubroom, the other has a more relaxed approach based upon the advice of the FI/CFI present.

My friend and I have discussed the pro's and con's of these approaches on various occasion and feel that there is "no right answer".

Agree that it's up to the owner/school to call their minima - they have aircraft, insurance and reputation at stake.

But I'd be very unhappy to turn up and find that they had declared poor wx and gone home without contacting me - terrible customer service

RC.

It is the same with my flying club. For some reason, even if the weather is flyable, VFR, winds not out of the limit etc, they still wont let me go.

They wont even get them out of the hangar.

It can be very annoying because it wastes days which are flyable.

Had a CFI interrogate me about my x-wind calculations prior to hiring an SEP a couple of years back - at the time I had a CPL/IR but he still wanted to know if I knew my stuff. And that was fair enough in my books - it's their aircraft and their airfield!

If they decreed it too bumpy or windy to fly then I'd certainly not ignore their opinion. Chances are they're more experienced in these matters than me anyway... and there's little point being up there wishing you were back down here now is there?!

The part that would bug me is the lack of communication and if you're aggreived you should tell them.

<FI hat on>But the fact you didn't know that this sort of information is contained in the Pilot Order Book suggests to me that you might still be at the stage where you should respect the opinion of those with more experience than yourself.<FI hat off>

VFE.

[/QUOTE]<FI hat on>But the fact you didn't know that this sort of information is contained in the Pilot Order Book suggests to me that you might still be at the stage where you should respect the opinion of those with more experience than yourself.<FI hat off>
VFE.[/QUOTE]

Not sure if you're referring to my (the original) post or later posts, but if its mine I can assure you I have double-checked the entire club FOB again today (its online) and there is no mention of hire conditions. I think I also made it clear I phoned the club to get their view on the weather - thats how I found out all hiring was off! (i.e by chance).

The club in question was still conducting training flights on that day - so I have tried to establish what they perceive to be dangerous conditions for solo hire - this would be useful info to possibly amend my own criteria. I didn't get a conversation with an experienced flyer who had been flown on the day in question anyway - unfortunately. I got "so and so says its a bit too bumpy". That coupled with not being told solo hire was subject to conditions in the first place prompted me to field opinion about the subject here. CabAir, for example, do not operate any solo hire Wx conditions (I called them and asked) - its the pilot's call - they will provide sensible advice though (which as you indicate would be very foolish to ignore).

I think if it's their aeroplane then it's their rules.

However I do think that if they cancel the flight they should phone you to let you know. After all they'd expect you to do likewise if you cancelled it.

I'm curious about this though. Was this soley based on the wind reports?

The reason I say this, is because as I understand it, gusts of less than 10kts are not reported. Therefore the two wind reports actually vary very little.

As I understand it
240/20G30=240 degrees, average windspeed 20kts and peak gust in prior 10 minutes? was 30kts.

While
240/19=240 degrees, average windspeed 19kts, and no gust in prior 10 mintues exceeding 28kts. Because if there was a gust of 29kts it would be reported as 240/19G29. But a 28kt gust wouldn't be reported.

I might have the 10 minutes wrong, but the basic principle is the same. No report of gusts only means that gusts did not exceed 10kts above the mean wind speed. As the wind direction did not change, and the speed barely changed, then it's likely the gusts didn't change much either. Not much difference between the two wind reports at all, even if one 'looks' much better than the other.

The other way of looking at it, is if the earlier weather had a maximum gust of just one knot lower it wouldn't have been reported. Would you have considered 240/20 as being "definatably flyable"?

This is not intended to be a critisim, but rather simply a way of showing how metars can be misleading unless you understand what is and isn't reported.

dp

There are a couple of things worth considering.

1. Clubs usually have wx minima for flying, but at the same time pilots are of differing standards. I have on occassions allowed some flights to go ahead and not others, even though the pilots hold the same licence.
2. Maybe an aircraft went tech (hardly unusual), and they blamed the weather to get out of the hole.

Either way you should get a call though. If you don't like it follow the advice already given.

I would expect any club to call a member who has an aircraft booked if the club needs to cancelling the booking, irrespective of the reason and regardless of the membership fee.

In this case, you called the club before they had had chance to call you. I would ask them whether they would have called you or would they have let you travel to the club without calling you? If the weather is so bad that they know your hire will not be allowed, I'd expect them to call you.(My club normally calls me, if they have time). But if the weather is iffy, I normally call them before they call me. And I cancel the booking if they say it is not flyable.

The fact that the day way flyable after 3pm is a seperate issue. It is quite likely that the club had other members who had booked to fly at 3pm, and who possibly did fly that day. But that was their slot, they got lucky, you didn't. If an improvement in weather was expected, I think they would have allowed you to have booked a slot had one been free. If no improvement was expected, I'd expect them to be trying to contact the other members to cancel their slots. What was the forecast? Did you ask about a later slot?

(I'm hireing at the moment and getting heartily fed up with the weather. I've just had my sixth night trip cancelled in four weeks! So I know how frustrating it is when you can't fly when you want to!)

Good luck

tp

Agreed with the consensus.

Should have a phone call (pet peeve of mine also if there isn't one, particularly as A/C go tech earlier in the day meaning you turn up to find none available, which could have been told to you before you travelled.)

FOB rules is rules so to speak. It can be a bit annoying though, as the original poster said:

Which does beg the question as to whether schools/clubs have one weather minima for instructors and one for anybody else. Won't knock this, somebody will have a reason for it.

Generally though, decisions made by CFIs etc. are made based on their experience and judgment. If you're at a club where you trust the senior staff, then you have to accept that if they make a decision it's because they feel that anything else would present unacceptable risk. Remember the adage about OLD/BOLD pilots. I guess a lot of accidents would have been prevented if an experienced hand was placed on the shoulder of the pilot as he walked out to the aircraft.

Alternatively, if you don't like/trust them, leave - but just beware that if you find somewhere that leaves the decision making to you, not unreasonable for a licence holder to make go/no go decisions, you're far more likely to end up 'up there, wishing you were down here.'

This is correct. The ones I have worked at do. Teaching crosswinds would be an example. Also, general handling if the student is in early stages and not doing take-off/landing. Instrument appreciation, IMC, etc, etc...

That was my first suspicion however, if that were the case they'd be more likely to phone to put the hirer off in order to remove the possibility of them showing up at the club only to see people flying.

So based on this, I would say it was a produent decision not to fly based on actual conditions prevalent at that particular airfield not METARS from the nearest two majors, which as we all know (or should know) can be very misleading at times, especially at this time of year when one minute the wx is fine and the next it's bad.

Also worth mentioning is the affect of the surrounding airfield topography. This can make an enourmous impact on the take off and landing in windy conditions alone but if it's gusting more than 8kts (IMHO) it can present a hidden danger to some flyers. I have taken off in strong wind (but not reported as gusting) on a runway boardering upwind tree's before and the stall was jibbering at 10kts above normal initial climb speed due to the displacement of wind caused by the tree's.

Meterology is not an exact science - and when it's 'dodgy' it's always better to bin it IMHO.

VFE.

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!

Many CFI's care more about covering their arses from "theoretical" insurance company non payment in case of an incident / accident. As clubs become larger they think more about this aspect of liability.

From my experience this leads to flying of the lowest denominator. The insurance company become the "bad guys" who can be blamed for a number of the CFI's decisions not to permit something or other......"well it's only because the insurance company won't pay out if we had an incident".

Unfortunately at some !clubs" the insurance company becomes the INVISIBLE CFI.

Sadly this reminds me of a gliding course I went on some years ago. We had perfect weather and 100% aircraft serviceability. Despite this I did not get to fly until the third day of the 5 day course and on the Friday the instructor did a "lead and follow" excercise. He went first, the winch went bang and took 30minutes to fix. By the time we got up there he was WELL gone. Me and another er sucker landed back on the ridge, had a brew, gave it up as a dead loss and went home.
It's called customer care in other businesses. I worked out later the flying costs per minute were greater than fast jets!
Amazingly they rang me up next year to see if I wanted another course!

Bandit
In response to your most recent post, I sympathise. For a long time, I had the same curiosity, conditions often being deemed unsuitable. Let loose with a PPL, one tends to want to seek ones own experience rather than seek out an instructor, especially if based away from the school environment. All the combined wisdom about getting the odd hour in dual is great and worthy advice and I don't disagree, but in real life it didn't happen like that.
However, it dawned on me slowly that what was deemed unsuitable for some types of aircraft and people was usable for others. When I acquired my own aircraft it then became a much greater responsibility than simply looking at the weather and forecasts: balancing those against the views of other, more experienced heads, not to mention the flyitis with which I'm afflicted.
If you don't have that option, or even if you do, then flying with other pilots is invaluable. I learned a great deal on some sorties in company with others. Simply flying in stronger winds than I would have used previously, for example.
I hope you can find a way...