Winds Aloft

Used to be the reports were fairly accurate. Balloons were sent up and tracked. Now it seems like they are doing them on the cheap, by computer modeling and I find them several orders of magnitudes off. Today I flew a 200 mile leg over and back. In both cases, the winds at 6000' forecast showed anywhere from "light and variable" to NE at 12 knots. What I found was the winds at 5500' were 350/28 to 020/47! They were calculated both using the AHARS on my Aspen 1000 and with my E6B on my iPad. Both agreed. (Does not take a rocket scientist to know something is wrong when you are east bound holding a 25 degree correction to course.)

Yes I called FSS and did a PIREP, nobody corrected anything for the trip back. Now I find in the upper altitudes they are fairly accurate and that makes sense because the airlines need them. However, airliners pump out wind data about every 5 minutes via ACARS, so even down low, even the commuter jets are giving good and useful data, it just seems no one wants to go get it and believe me it is there for the taking. It boggles my mind. Thankfully I was heading west and east today so a strong north wind had little effect on the flight planning, but if I was going north, with an 85 knot airplane with winds off by 4 orders of magnitude, that would have a big effect on your plan especially if you were going all out on range. Anybody else seeing this?

Actually the wind reports are constant in the airlines now. We have a TAPs system that pulls up a live map of aircraft and we can look at altitude, winds, and g (ride) on the aircraft if its a TAPs reporting aircraft. It can be set to show us adverse rides (they change colors) and we can also put wind barbs on the displayed aircraft to visually see the winds. It is an amazing help to predict rides and to verify the winds aloft. You have to have wifi (we will have a 100% wifi enabled fleet when our 737-300s are parked this fall at Southwest) to get the data through an app on our iPad.

I was hoping that we could get some wind reporting with ADS-B but it looks like the tag will only have speed and altitude like the ATC tag. With all of the GPS and glass out there I was hoping the datalink would be able to upload some winds. I am a float plane guy so a GS over 100 in my 180 makes me happy.

PJJ

Yah, the winds aloft data I get from Garmin Pilot are frequently WAY wrong.

GeeBee, You need a TAS-1000. http://www.insightavionics.com/tas1000.htm It is an air data computer for small planes that will tell you every thing you want to know about the wind.

Unfortunately, I agree, down low they are often way wrong and that seems to be more of a recent thing. Anyone seen a weather ballon in awhile?

I don't need a TAS-1000, most of those functions are built into my Aspen 1000. I agree the TAPS systems is constant and that is my point. It works not only at high altitude, but at low as well. Good data is out there but for some reason the NWS does not want to "fetch it". It would be cheaper than their present system which is highly unreliable, orders of magnitude wrong and quite frankly could be dangerous.

I never found winds aloft accurate even 40 years ago and my first instructor told me so. He said plan your flight, hold heading and make correction as you MISSED your first checkpoint8)

I love my Aspen in the 180 and it's very accurate, but the real question is how does that air-data
EMS actually work...

OLDCROWE said:

I love my Aspen in the 180 and it's very accurate, but the real question is how does that air-data
EMS actually work...

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Uses crab angle (aircraft heading vs ground track) and diff in TAS and GS.

Just what GeeBee needs, more data.

Eddie Foy said:

Uses crab angle (aircraft heading vs ground track) and diff in TAS and GS.

Click to expand...

and here I thought it was Electrical Magical Stuff..

n40ff said:

I never found winds aloft accurate even 40 years ago and my first instructor told me so. He said plan your flight, hold heading and make correction as you MISSED your first checkpoint8)

Click to expand...

I would agree with you, but in the past they might be off 25%. Now we are talking 300%. There is something desperately wrong with the methodology now being used now.