GA Flying on the weekend
 

Dear All,
I am interested in knowing at which point last weekend (11th-12th Jan)the most private aircraft were in the sky over England. I would be grateful for any information as to which hour slot you feel was the busiest (and which aerodrome/area you get the info from).

The reason? I am going to be looking at some radar data, and I am particularly interested in light aircraft.

Thanks in advance

You're the one who's going to be looking at the radar data - you tell us!

True, but I have to order it in advance and then process it - trawling through an entire weekend of data is not my idea of fun.

This site

libhomeradar - easy collect aircraft information - libhomeradar - easy collect aircraft information

is quite interesting, but will lnvolve lots of trawling through data.

Basically, if an aircraft is mode-s equiped, this site seems to show it's flights. Slightly pointless data gathering, but it might go some way to answering your question.

Is there any reason you are picking last weekend.

From my viewpoints there were very few VFR flying opportunities over the entire weekend.

I was on instructor duty on Saturday, but the forecast improvement to marginal VFR conditions (6K vis 1000' ceiling) never arrived.
Sunday was also low cloud, poor vis and a howling cross-wind, so I got some overdue gardening done.

A look at the Metar records would probably identify if there were any worthwhile periods or places for VFR flying.

Typically very little goes on without 8-10k vis, 2000' ceiling and winds below 20 knots.

If you'd picked the previous weekend, you would likely have found a lot of activity.

Thanks, the choice of weekends is unfortunately out of my hands - the reason I'm on this forum is to try to get the best information out of it.

Unless the weather is below VFR conditions (like last weekend, as suggested above) I would guess that the busiest periods, in general, are roughly 11-15.

If you have budget to buy one hour only, I would probably go for 13.30 to 14.30.

But... I would look at the METARs first to determine when the weather was below VFR conditions. This site allows you to view historical METARs:

Formulario para peticion de mensajes aeronauticos

Looking at the runway utilisation stats, 1100-1300 on both Saturday and Sunday were the busiest periods at Gloucestershire Airport but it wasn't a spectacularly busy day by any stretch of the imagination, with arond 200 movements all weekend.