you're listening to the vsl aviation podcast I'm your host Seth Lake welcome back in today's episode we're diving back into the Private Pilot Airman certification standards and this time we're talking about weather which is an area of operation one task C now since the last episode there has been a major change in the ACs and that is a new version was released in uh May 31st of 2024 is when it went active so because of that I'm going to backtrack just a little bit we're going to talk about uh tasks A and B and the changes that have occurred rather than me doing two new episodes for those two tasks not enough has changed to do a two a new episode but I am going to cover the changes that happened with the new ACS so if you listen to the old episodes this will kind of update those and still keep them relevant under the new ACS that I'll only take a few minutes and then we'll get started on the weather topic for today's main topic all right so uh I'm going to be using a kind of a vers an old version of the ace guide which has highlighted changes here so we're again we're in area of operation one task a and all the stuff that's in red here on the screen and I'll read it for those of you all listening just to the podcast but you're if you're following Along on uh YouTube or patreon uh the the red indicates this is a new item that the FAA has added and the yellow yellow indicates there's just been a wording change um and I'm not even going to discuss the wording changes because they're very minor uh you know I'll discuss one the proficiency versus currency the old verbiage said failure to distinguish proficiency versus currency so all that they did is remove failure to distinguish they remove those three words that's the new version so very minor changes there in the red however these are new references so these are references that occurred up here uh the fa added two references to task a which is pilot qualifications they added an advisory circular that discusses basic Med and they added a reference to the airplane flying handbook which is the FAA handbook 8083 D3 that's the formal title of the afh all right that's all that they did for pre-flight uh or for pilot qualifications very minor changes there next on the air worthiness requirements they added a little bit more they added again a new reference to the airplane flying handbook changed some verbiage on k1a for the knowledge topic nothing big there but they added a new knowledge topic of k1e and that's owner and operator pilot and command responsibilities so I'm going to jump over to the new U 5.6 version of the ace guide and there in this task I've actually added a new link to a handbook called plain sense so this is a new handbook that I integrated into I think I started in version 4.5 maybe uh I put the plain sense manual in the Ace guide so that comes with the download now you can of course download this for free off the fa's website uh but the plain sense manual is essentially a handbook on how to own an airplane so I linked this manual there because a lot of the um you know back to that question here owner and operator piloting command responsibilities man that's a big topic there's a lot of owner operator uh pic responsibilities and that's specific to an owner operator so if you're a renter for instance if you're renting an airplane which I'd say 90% of students are renters then this knowledge topic doesn't really apply to you but I can see why the fa wants to ask that because once you get your pilot certificate you may go out and buy an airplane and you don't get like a new airplane owner's check ride once you buy an airplane so me as an examiner I want to make sure you maybe know the basics of how to own an airplane just in case you go out and buy one next week and then I'm the examiner that signed you off saying hey you're a competent and safe pilot you know that may include you knowing a little bit about something you've never done like own an airplane uh now I don't expect you to be uh an expert airplane owner but for me the reason I put the plane sense manual Link in here is if you said well I don't really know how to own an airplane but I do know about this handbook called the plain sense handbook which has all these great checklists that that I can follow as a potential buyer or new owner uh and that will help me be a safe owner operator man that would be a great answer to that question so that's why I linked it in the document there uh next up we have a new knowledge topic of special or standard and special air withness certificates and Associated operational limitations so there's a new link to this uh believe to the aim the F and you can find information about this in the plain sense manual so how to get a standard versus a special Airness certificate um big picture a standard Airness certificate that's the thing that you have in your airplane right now a special airworthiness certificate would be issued let's say if you're doing some sort of um maintenance Ferry operation and you've been issued a special Aira certificate for a one-time flight to a location uh maybe because you're flying an airplane that doesn't have a current annual that would be an example of that or if you're flying an air aircraft that has some sort of damage or something like that where it's a maintenance Ferry uh don't confuse that with just a normal Ferry flight of like hey I bought an airplane at Point uh a over here and I'm fing that airplane to point B that's a colloquial term doesn't mean the same thing as a true Ferry flight where you're operating on a ferry permit so those were the only changes to those two tasks again I said I'd keep that brief again you know you can see that's not really valid or a valid reason to do two whole new episodes so those are the only things uh Associated there some other stuff that I'll show you again if you're watching on the video you can see I've got this is the default format of the ACs now everything doesn't have its own page on the FAA version it kind of bleeds over so you can see air Withers requirements it kind of ends halfway through the knowledge topics then we have to go to the next page to find the rest of the knowledge topics risk management skill items weather extends across two pages as well I really didn't like that there was one version of the guide that had this new format I got tired of it and reformatted it so let's get started on our next topic and you'll see this new ace guide format hopefully you'll find it as helpful as I do so starting um with the Private Pilot area of operation one pre-flight preparation task C which is weather information this is my new format of what I think is maybe easier to use format easier to read than the FAA default format what I've essentially did is I edited PDF and crammed everything on one page it doesn't have the nice table format I really love the table format of the old style from 2018 uh I hate that the fa decided to get rid of the table it was a lot of work for me to Rize everything uh if that's a word but put everything back into a table format was very time intensive so I decided not to do that it was much easier for me to edit it kind of squeeze the text together the text is so close that I decided to add those gray bars to make it easier to follow one topic to the next to see that hey I'm on that topic uh so you kind of get the feel of a table without having to add all the lines so hopefully you find that helpful but let's get started on this task here so this is Task C it lists are references and objectives the references on the ace guide are all hyperlink now so you can just click on the reference and it'll take you directly to what handbook that's discussing so I think that's a neat uh good good feature the objective here is just for you as the applicant to demonstrate satisfactory knowledge risk management and skills associated with weather information for flight under VFR that's a really important point there I don't expect you as a in the ACs doesn't expect you to have the level of weather theory that a instrument pilot has because you just need to avoid the weather right I'm not asking you to fly into the weather I expect you to avoid it so I need you to be able to look at a surface analysis chart and tell me hey where do you think VFR would be located there I need you to be able to look at a mear and say is that weather that this Metar discusses here does that conducive to VFR flight is this Taff for these airports along your route of flight are they conducive to VFR flight what is VFR flight when it comes to avoiding clouds that's the type of knowledge that we expect to have as examiners you don't have to sit in front of us and and give us this you know diet tribe of weather Theory uh like you're some sort of meteorologist don't expect that uh level of knowledge now if you're like some of my applicants and an actual meteorologist I'm looking at you Carmen then yeah I might expect you to have a little bit more knowledge there but anyway let's look at the knowledge topics here the knowledge topics have expanded quite a bit the the new version of the ACs actually added about eight knowledge topics and they're all a subcategory of knowledge topic 2 so let's look at knowledge topic one first let's go in order here so knowledge topic one is sources of weather data uh example the National Weather Service and flight service for flight planning purposes I didn't put links on here because they're they're pretty self-explanatory that's the National Weather Service is what feeds four flights weather briefing so if you followed my other uh videos on how to conduct a four-light weather briefing and I'll be doing an update to that here soon but that four-light weather briefing is using the National Weather Service so there's no link there flight service is 1800 web.com so if you're going to 1800wxbrief.com that's the the flight service it's pulling all of its data again from the National Weather Service as well uh and then that's for flight planning purposes so next up we have knowledge topic two this is acceptable weather products and resources required for pre-flight planning current and forecast weather for departure in route and arrival phases of flight such as and it goes into a b c d e f and g are the subcategories they are in order airport observations such as Metar and special and pilot observations B surface analysis charts ceiling visibility charts C terminal Aerodrome forecasts Taps D graphical forecast for Aviation GFA e wind and temperature Loft forecast F convective Outlook and G inflight Aviation weather advisories including airman's meteorological information aets and segments and convective segments so those are the subcategories now if you look up at the top of the page it says note that if K2 is selected so that's the one that we just read off all the subcategories if that one is selected the evaluator must assess the applicant's knowledge of at least three subelements so if meia is the examiner I select K2 or when you go and take your knowledge test you miss a knowledge topic that is in the K2 criteria then I have to evaluate K2 which means I have to ask you three questions so remember typically a knowledge topic the examiner just has to select at least one knowledge topic well in this case if you select the one knowledge topic that expands to you have to evaluate three different questions there right so if you're following along there there's also this caveat is in there for K3 as well which is what we're going to cover next so on the weather criteria here the The Examiner may have to ask six knowledge topic questions if they select K2 and K3 you're looking at six questions instead of just one and of course that also depends on your knowledge test if on your Knowledge Test you missed you know four different questions uh then and two of those are K2 K3 then that's six questions and then two more eight qu you know you could have eight questions that I have to ask for wether uh now that sounds a little daunting but not really because a lot of these questions are are build upon one another right if you're talking about you know if I ask a simple question of I show you a mear and I say hey this this mear how long is this valid for well it's only valid for an hour right and it's a current observation I said well that's not very useful for our cross country so how would you know um how the you know what the weather is going to be when we get to the airport we're going to well I would do that by um looking at a Taff okay well what's a Taff and you tell me about it so I've already asked about two different things they're in the scenario right in our scenario based questioning and if I cover just a couple of you know let's say low ceilings or uh I also throw in an airet there we can quickly get to these six questions pretty quickly they happen pretty naturally in scenario based questioning so don't lose a lot of sleep on man I have to memorize everything that's on this page I want you to have a working knowledge of it now the subcategories for K2 they can all be found in the uh FAA weather handbook chapter 24 which is our observations chapter so most of the stuff that we're covering is covered here in chapter 24 aviation weather handbook there's also stuff covered in the pack you can find links for that here uh but I haven't gone like I have in the in topic three which we're going to get into and its subcategories I have a link for every single line I haven't done that yet for the forecasts I just decided to link to the the chapter 24 and you can find that information for yourself it's really easy to scroll through chapter 24 and find all the answers for those and as far as finding an answer for a Taff there's no there's not necessarily answer for a Taff it's just knowing what a Taff is uh where to find it and then how to read one right I'm I'm probably have you tap on an airport on for flight or uh I'll I'll show you a tap pull up a tap online and just ask you hey what does this what this line of the Taff what does that mean uh I'm not going to try to go out and find a really complicated Taff and have you decipher everything but I will have you look at a basic Taff and be able to tell me you know what is this trying to tell me as a pilot uh if you are super reliant on the Easy Button Buton on the Taff of being able to tap on there and see the translated version of the Taff put a little bit of time understanding how to read an untranslated tff I'm not saying you have to know every single code by heart but do your best to to know the basic information as far as the valid time um the the expected ceiling and bz that basic sort of stuff and it's the same as mear both the mear and Taff know how to read those in in a basic you know format uh their graphical uh forecast the GFA uh that's a relatively new product out by the the National Weather Service that you can find on aviationweather.gov maybe ask some questions about that b basically know how to find it and that um that's one of the things that that's included in forf Flight too you can find that on the the forf flight observations or the the weather tab of foreflight I need to do a whole another episode on foreflight uh weather I think I have a YouTube video on that anyway that's that uh and then our convective Outlook air mats wind winds and temperatures Loft remember this is all scenario based formatting so we're going to cover a lot of these because you would have shown up to the check ride with a with a flight plan uh for your route of flight and for that route of flight you needed to know the winds and temperatures aoft so you probably have already done the winds and temperatures Loft it right it's on your navigation log uh so we we can integrate that questioning into this and cover that topic um okay so on to K3 this is our meteorological uh meteorology applicable to departure and Route alternate destination under VFR and vmc including expected climate and hazardous conditions such as and then it goes into a laundry list of just weather phenomenon starts at a goes all the way to L so a through l each one of these lines on the ace guide has a link so if you click on the green button it takes you to atmospheric pressure and altimetry chapter of the aviation weather handbook it's that easy to study if you want to know what wind shear is click on the green button it takes you to the winde chapter or the temperature and heat exchange the Heat and chapter temperature uh or the yeah the heat and temperature chapter five of the aviation weather handbook so each of these green buttons takes you to a different Link in the aviation weather handbook and then in addition to that we have information over here on the right which has discussions that'll come up like a weather briefing personal minimums uh an aopa weather uh course that's free I think that's a good course for you to take the weather chapter of the pack and then of course to the the main weather handbook which is the new again relatively new fa handbook that covers all things weather so let's just go by line by line I could maybe spend two hours on this so we're not going to have just a incredibly long time on each one of these but let's at least discuss them so 3A is atmospheric composition and stability know what a stable atmosphere is know what an unstable atmosphere is know which one like if you hear that as a Private Pilot hey we have an unstable atmosphere what does that mean well it probably means in the summertime that you might have relatively good flying conditions but it might be bump and you might have some isolated thunderstorms because a stable atmosphere it sounds nice right as a as a pilot I want the airplane to be stable when I fly right so a stable atmosphere must be good well actually a stable atmosphere might exist with IMC conditions because a stable atmosphere means the air is happy where it's at and it's not going anywhere and if that air is full of moisture then that could be lowline fog it could be really low viz it could be showery pre BP that's a stable atmosphere an unstable atmosphere I kind of the analogy I use is imagine if you had pingpong balls scattered across the top of a trampoline and then you put a tent pole in the middle of the trampoline to raise it up just a little bit all those ping pong balls would fall away down the slope away from that tent pole the the the trampoline would be clear then but if those pingpong balls represent air molecules they're unstable they went away they're clear now we have clear air like a clear trampoline because of that high pressure system that's moved the air away so the the air is unstable because it's not happy where it's at and it's going somewhere else now I've oversimplified that right if you're a meteorologist don't be picking me apart saying Seth you're wrong the basic of it the basic gist of that is an unstable atmosphere might actually be a good place for you to fly but it is going to be bumpier right uh a super stable atmosphere might be IMC conditions there's always exceptions to these but this is a good rule of thumb all right our wind we have uh several different factors here wind shear Mountain Wave factors affecting wind so I might bring up okay what if you see an air met um Tango an air met Tango includes low-level wind shear right Tango for turbulence we can have high and low turbulence and lowle wind here so that might be uh K k3b knowledge topic might actually be related to knowledge topic k2g because there's a the airat there that talks to us about wind that would be a good thing to know about wind you know how how's that forecast wi she how's that forecast and then factors affecting wind um so if we have a frontal passage well that's probably going to check affect our wind if we have a low pressure versus a high pressure press system which way does the wind spend around each of those pressure systems that's a great thing to know right that low pressure system approaches I'm going to see a wind shift of about 90° so if I'm flying at an airport that doesn't have a 90° Crossing Runway and there's a system approaching I might think I might take off and say oh the winds are right down the pipe they're a little strong but right down the pipe I probably have a good hour before that system gets here and you take off and go for a flight you come back and now the winds are out of limits for your crosswind because that clonic force that pressure has gotten closer and you saw a 90° windshift so that's a good topic that you could bring up here uh temperature and heat exchange so knowing that okay the the heat exchange can affect a lot of things it can affect turbulence it can affect uh that fog that Coastal fog that inter Coastal fog that's all about um heat exchange with the surface of the ocean uh heating at a different rate and holding temperature differently than the land uh it could mean you know as I approach different changes of terrain I'm going to have different updrafts there all right knowledge topic 3D that's moisture and precipitation this link takes you chapter 14 which is all about precipitation in the aviation weather handbook uh you can read all about moisture and pre prip there 3E is weather system formation including air masses and fronts this is one that I like to talk about because I I like to pull up a uh surface analysis chart or Prague chart and I like to see you as a Private Pilot be able to point at a prag chart and say based on that prag chart I think I have good chance of flying VFR here and I have a good chance of not being able to fly VFR over here and that ability to kind of analyze big picture weather I think that's a good skill to have as a pilot so that's a question that I might ask there uh on being able to identify that big frontal system and a front so definitely know the difference between warm front cold front stationary front uded front read about all of those at least be able to kind of have that working knowledge speak intelligently on those and then if you don't know like if you just you run into a brain block right there during the check ride know that okay I can read about that in chapter 11 of the aviation weather handbook can I look that up real quick and you can navigate there very quickly using the ace guide uh all right next up we have clouds there's a appendix in the aviation weather handbook on clouds so I just link that there feel free to read about all the different kinds of clouds turbulence remember air met Tango was warning us about turbulence and we have three different kinds subcategories of air met Tango we have lowlevel wind shear low turbulence and high turbulence typically in the training environment you're going to be worried about low-level wind shear and low turbulence cuz High turbulence is up above 18,000 ft so know that that's an air met that warns us of turbulence and that if we have a a lot of turbulence reported we want to look at the type of aircraft reporting it right if you see a 737 reporting moderate turbulence that might be severe turbulence for you in a 172 know that turbulence can be discussed in a pyate next we have thunderstorms and microbursts this is one that I ask pretty much everybody about if I see a thunderstorm out there how close can I come to that thunderstorm what's the distance I must avoid it by that's actually in the aeronautical information manual it has a little blurb in there about suggesting that you avoid thunderstorms by 20 nautical miles so throw out you know have a number there of hey I'm going to avoid any thunderstorms by 20 nautical miles micro bursts might be associated with thunderstorms right if you're flying into a near convective activity let's say and you have a thunderstorm with active prip so there's active rain coming out of the bottom of this thunderstorm but there's a cloud right next to it that doesn't have any rain well there might be a lot of rain on top of that cloud fixing to come out and it might come out via that microburst that downdraft that you could get that severe downdraft that's one of the reasons why we want to avoid thunderstorms is because of those microb bursts uh icing freezing level information where do we find it I don't you know I expect you to know hey I can't fly in icing obviously as a Private Pilot uh but how do I look up icing information where do I find the freezing level chart that's all in four flight there of course uh you can find it on aviationweather.gov as well f F and Mist I might ask you know if sometimes there's a local mear that will pull up usually during the check right I'll try to find a meard in the country that's showing me that pink dot indicates low IFR and I'll tap on that because generally low IFR I want you as a Private Pilot to be able to read a mear and say yeah that's that's definitely below uh my minimums as a VFR pilot and one of the codes on there might be for fog missed so I expect you to be able to see that uh there's also a link here that takes you to the uh chapter 18 of the aviation weather handbook that has fog and low cealing Mountain obscuration that fog and Mist also could relate back to an advisory circular of uh not an advisory circular I'm sorry a airat of airat uh Sierra so airat Sierra if I see that as a VFR pilot and airat Sierra tells me that there's large areas of IFR conditions it might be Mountain obscuration it might be due to fog but in general it just means a widespread area of of IMC conditions so obviously if I'm a VFR pilot I would want to avoid all Air met sieras for sure uh that doesn't mean that I can't fly through maybe a corner of the air met Sierra if I've you know I've got VFR conditions elsewhere that brings up a good point and that you know let's go ahead and talk about this in the scenario I might say okay well let's say you're flying from here in Arkansas to someplace in Texas and I say okay 50 miles south of here you start you start flying over a layer of clouds and the layer of clouds is below you about 3,000 ft and they appear to be kind of right kind of blanketing the ground really pretty by the way if you've ever seen this but you've got this layer of clouds that are just blanketing the area and you see that the extends out another 40 Mi right about as far as you can see on the horizon but just beyond that you can see that it starts to open up so are you legal to fly over this low IFR kind of cloud layer below you are you able to do that as a VFR pilot the answer is yes you don't have to see the ground to be legal to fly VFR right can fly VFR in vmc conditions as a Private Pilot without an instrument rating and not be able to see the terrain below you as long as you have the proper Cloud clearance requirements you're meeting the letter of the law but here's what I want you to think about if you're flying over a layer of clouds that has low visibility and those Cloud bases go all the way to let's say 200 feet or even the surface now you're legal to Fly Above those you're in clear air you you have a discernable Horizon you don't have to use your instruments so you're Trucking along in your in your plane no problem and you have an engine failure you do your emergency procedures you go to Best Glide and you start gliding down now if you're not within Glide range of an area that's in vmc conditions down to the ground you've got a big problem on your hands because you're going to glide into this cloud and you may not have enough time when you glide through the bottom of that cloud to pick out a spot for you to do your Force landing on so even me with thousands of hours of instrument time I'm very very comfortable in instrument conditions have no problem flying I I'd have no problem gliding an airplane in instrument conditions but you can't land in inst you can't do a forced Landing in instrument conditions and expect a good outcome right it's basically I'm just going to fly Best Glide until I see something and if it's a bunch of trees or a concrete wall there's not much I can do about it I can't see it because I'm IMC it's hard enough to do a landing in IMC conditions to a Runway that has an instr Runner approach much much less in the middle of nowhere while you just had a forced Landing event so that is a exact scenario that I that I ask in a check ride is is that something you would do have you thought about that as a private pilot and more than likely in your training you haven't been faced with that scenario because we especially when we're training we tend to be kind of fair weather Flyers so you may not have even thought about this scenario so take that time to think through okay well what would I do if I had to fly over an area that was covered by an airat Sierra um so so that's a a great answer to that is saying yeah I'm not going to fly through an airmat Sierra even over the top of an airmat Sierra I'm going to fly around it that way if I have an engine failure I can always find something on the ground to to do a successful forced Landing all right that's fog and Mist Frost this is another big one I'll usually start asking this in the winter time I try to be disciplined and ask it during the summer uh it's impossible to ask all of these questions for every check ride but I do like to throw in some questions about Frost if we show up in the morning and the plane is just covered in Frost what do you do it's clear blue skies just a thin layer of frost there on the plane can I take off the answer is no I can't take off with frost on the on the plane uh I need to get the frost off of the plane either mechanically by by wiping it down which could be a pretty big task I could move it into a heated hanger uh I could hanger it that night and prevent the frost right or I could maybe maneuver you know turn the airplane taxi the airplane uh if I have to or or tug the airplane around where it's facing the Sun so when that sun comes up It's Quickly going to melt that ice off uh and then the last one here is obstructions to visibility smoke Haze volcanic ash Etc so this um you know if you're in the west this might get asked a lot of you know there's there's fields that when we have a big forest fire in the west that go in instrument meteorological conditions because of smoke right a big Wildfire could cause an Airfield to go into IMC conditions it could lower your visibility um you know well below three miles all right and then last knowledge topic is Flight Deck instrument displays of digital weather and aeronautical information so if your aircraft is equipped with the adsb in then it's getting weather information from the FSB Network and that is providing you with basic uh metars taffs a sort of pixelated radar picture I expect you to know how that stuff works what I'm asking here is okay can you look it up you know first of all can you connect your iPad to it can you get weather information inflight from your iPad yeah absolutely if you have a Sentry that you fly with or a uh some sort of adsb receiver absolutely I can pull that information into my iPad and use it as a decision support system the important thing I want you to realize is that that information is now delayed and I need to use it knowing that it could be delayed uh especially the radar picture if you're using this to try to dodge a thunderstorm uh or or some area of instrument conditions for instance uh you need to make those adjustments early and give it a wide birth because that information could be delayed up to 15 minutes it kind of depends on what you're looking at I believe I have a link here that takes us to Aviation Weather Services that's chapter 13 in the pack chapter 13 in the pck talks about uh some of the weather services that we have includes including our inflight uh information that we have on our efbs okay now on to the risk management section of this item or this section uh risk management one uh R1 making the go noo and continue divert decisions including and this has three uh subcategories a is circumstances that would make diversion prudent personal weather minimums and hazardous weather conditions including known or forecast icing or turbulence aoft so those are the three things that it brings up as risk management on deciding if you should make a go noo decision personal minimums I have a link here this is going to the chapter two of the risk management handbook and it's a that whole chapter is devoted to how to develop personal minimums for yourself what I will expect as an examiner is that you have some sort of formalized personal minimums created for yourself uh these need to be written down and you need to be able to hand them to me and say hey these are the personal minimums that I'm holding myself to here's a really important thing that's practical to the actual check ride if during your check ride the weather becomes outside of your personal minimums and you decide to continue to fly then that's grounds for disapproval right because you're telling me in the on the ground portion hey these are my personal minimums well remember you're the pilot in command for the check ride so if we step to the airplane and you decide to take off and violate your own personal minimums then that is a failure so create your own personal minimums and stick to them including for the check ride right the right decision there is to say hey Seth sorry the winds are outside of my personal minimums or the ceilings below my personal minimums I'm going to have to discontinue the test and I'm going to say hey that's an excellent decision way to stick to your personal minimums that's what they're for so now that you know that make sure you devise your personal minimums appropriately right because we we may have a longer discussion about your personal minimums if you say well I'm not going to fly unless I have 10,000 ft ceilings well let's think about this for a second because 10,000 foot ceilings those are pretty high right 10,000 feet above the ground we can't even Cruise that high in 172 comfortably we can definitely do all of our Maneuvers safely from really 4,000 ft and Below we can do all of our Maneuvers with no no issues at all so 10,000 fot ceilings that's not real practical so make sure your personal minimums are practical your CFI can help you to develop these uh I've got resources in the Ace guide that help you develop your personal minimums and in fact if you click on the personal minimums link here uh it's off one page it scroll down a page it's uh and I'll fix that in a future version uh but it takes you to developing personal minimums uh from appendix 4 out of a weather decision making uh AC I didn't include the whole AC I just included this page this has all been integrated into the weather handbook except they didn't bring this across so what I really like about this is it has this is from the FAA it has suggested personal minimums down here uh so ceilings for dvfr 3,000 ft ceilings 5 miles visibility those are reasonable personal minimums so you could just copy these straight across you could make your own it's it's really up to you as the pilot and command just make sure you do it prior to your check ride don't show up to your check ride without having develop some personal minimums with your CFI uh hazardous weather conditions including known or forecast iing DET turbulance Loft we've already discussed this probably in in the previous section going through the knowledge topic it's just at what point is the turbulence going to cause you to divert or cancel uh and then our our forecast icing knowing that icing chart and the freezing levels hey if I've got forecast icing and I go and do my updated brief before I take off and now the icing layer is Dro or the icing levels Dro to ground level and we have visible moisture that's a that's a no-go decision right there okay next we have R2 this is use and limitations of another subcategory we have three subcategories r2a installed onboard weather equipment uh B aviation weather reports and forecasts C inflight weather resources so use and limitations of each of those so let's look at installed onboard weather equipment we can find this in uh chapter 13 looks like this is the pack we have electronic flight displays and multifunction display play weather so this is our our Next Rad systems this this section of the pack covers all of that if you've got uh weather and I'll call the I'll use the term underglass and what that means is you have weather that's displayed to you on your main uh multifunction or PFD of your aircraft so if you're flying an aircraft that has maybe aftermarket g5s maybe old 172 that has a couple of g5s you may have weather in your a Garmin 650 might be a panel Mount weather information if you're flying though an older sixpack doesn't have any glass in it at all but you have a uh a Stratus that you put in the window to give you adsb in now you've got weather information on your efb essentially those are coming from the same place um the the big difference here and I really don't expect you to know a huge difference between this but just so you are aware there's two different ways that we can receive WEA in the plane on our iPad or in our displays and that is one the primary most common one is through adsb so adsb that's getting to us from ground stations it's limited by line of sight and it's also limited by the coverage of those ground stations which isn't necessarily 100% so there's portions of the country where you won't be able to get weather uh information those are probably getting fewer and and farther between um but as as we've gotten more and more into the the adsb you know system as it is uh but but there are there could be gaps in coverage there the next way we could get weather information is through satellite now satellite obviously that's not limited to line of sight that's coming from above uh it's also higher bandwidth so we're typically we're going to get more information and like a radar picture is going to be a higher resolution not as pixelated as adsb weather satellite weather in the plane is generally limited to um certain special receivers that you can buy at that that just sit on the dash or the the newer avionics such as like a G1000 nxi even the old G1000 you could you could have Nexrad plugged in there U but those are going to be additional subscription fees so it's going to be more expensive than adsb because adsb is the service adsb is free you just need to have a way to receive it so once you have that receiver you can get adsb information at no cost um with Next Rad information uh The Next Rad Radar coming via satellite that does involve a subscription fee so you do have to pay for that service but you get slightly better service um so that might be a question that that you get asked during the check writers what are the difference between Next Rad and adsb all right now on to our skills remember we have to demonstrate all of the skills in any task so in this task we have three skills they are skill one use available aviation weather resources to obtain an adequate weather briefing skill two analyze the implications of at least three of the conditions listed in K3 a through K3 L using actual weather or weather conditions provided by the evaluator and skill three correlate weather information to make a go noo decision so the first one man this is an easy one to get done get a weather briefing the day of your check ride you don't have to do it in front of the examiner you can show up to your check ride please show up to your check ride having already completed a weather briefing you can complete a weather briefing through 1 1800 web.com through calling 1800 weather brief uh through foreflight through Garmin pilot um you can do a self- weather briefing so let's talk about that let's say well I want to do a self- weather briefing how do I do that well let me show you an amazing checklist there's here in the Ace guide you just click on the weather briefing link and it takes you directly to a page in advisory circular 91-92 this is a sample pre-flight checklist and it is a excellent checklist for you to use if you're doing a uh basically a self conducted weather briefing if you show up to the check ride and you've completed everything on this checklist here and a you know about the checklist you have it either on your iPad or you could print it off if you want I'd suggest just having it on your iPad and you can speak to each one of these items in the checklist you have done according to the FAA and myself you've done a very good self- weather briefing now whether you did that through an official service or you just peac mailed it together yourself using aviationweather.gov in this checklist I don't care you've met that skill in in the um the ACs there so skill one super easy skill one use that weather checklist or do a four-light weather briefing uh but do a weather briefing before you show up to your check ride don't show up during your check ride and I you know you know your examiner is going to ask that I'm going to ask that hey did you get a weather briefing today um no not yet well come on you know it's no surprise it was right there in the ACs so no I'm not going to fail you if you don't have a weather briefing done but I'm going to make you do a weather briefing so you're either going to have to you know generate one on foreflight you're going to have to call you're going to it's going to waste time so just have this done and of course remember this is all scenario based questioning so this is all in our you know flight that we're doing to wherever I decided to you know down to Pensacola um Houston wherever we're going um I'm going to say okay well you did the weather briefing maybe 5 hours ago uh or even the day before you did a weather briefing 12 hours prior to our flight now you want to do an updated weather briefing how would that look well again you go back to your weather briefing checklist and there's a standard weather briefing elements and then there's abbreviated uh briefing elements so just say yeah I would do the abbreviated element ments that uh update my changes that I did my briefing 12 hours ago I'm going to update it 2 hours prior to the flight with this abbreviated perfect and that's a great answer uh all the answers are right here all right skill two analyze the implications of at least three of the conditions listed K3 uh a through I so this is the three you got to analyze three of the conditions that we talked about here this is mentioned twice now in the ACs mentioned there in the skills and then we had a note note two up at the top of the page that tells us this so now we know for certain that our examiner is going to have to ask three of these questions if they choose K2 they're also going to have to ask three of those questions which I figure most examiners are going to wind up asking about Metar so you're you're probably going to get at least six know topic questions on this I would say we're covering on in general we're probably covering eight on a check ride using scenario based questioning I can think of eight just off the top of my head of you know we're covering three of these that's three down uh I'm going to ask you about taffs and metars so that's five we have to cover winds aoft for our cross country navigation planning that's six uh I'm always going to ask about airmets and sigmets so that's seven and um the eighth one what would the eighth one be oh my Prague chart question my prag chart that that's that's number eight so I'm always asking at least eight questions don't get flustered at this it it's not a huge amount of information I've tried to make the cross referencing all of this information as easy as possible uh and I'll be adding more links as we go on into the future here um but but again it's pretty straightforward to know um how you know to come up with some good answers to the the scenario based questions you could get around these topics all right lastly skill three correlate weather information to make a go noo decision remember that's already a risk management topic that it talked about is making a go no go so we're going to do a real world go no go decision um if we're taking the check ride more than likely it's a go decision because the rules on a check ride should be that we don't start our check ride unless we think there's a reasonable chance that we can finish it right that's the the rules that we have to abide by as an examiner so since we're doing the check ride right now if you're getting asked these questions you're doing a check ride you probably you're are in a go scenario um now what I may want to do and what I typically do what other examiners may do is they may change some of those observations that you had in the real world so the day of the check ride you're looking at the real weather uh I may change some of those and say well let's say instead of uh broken at 6,000 the weather in route was broken at 2500 how would that affect your decisionmaking process and that may drive you to say well in that case it would be a no-go for me I I wouldn't fly that route and what I like to hear then is how would you overcome that so I would either wait for better conditions or uh maybe it's better for me okay let me ask about this simulated weather you're giving me is there any better weather north or south or east or west of that that I could fly to and avoid and I may say sure to the north it's completely clear okay well instead of canceling the flight altogether I would change my flight to deviate around that area of low visibility or low ceilings and I would go to the north now since I know that between me and my destination there's low ceilings I might also add in an extra fuel stop just to in case the weather deterior Ates and that helps me mitigate the risk of the flight there that's the type of answer that I really like to hear because that shows me that you you've got that higher level of pilot and command decision making and the answer isn't just nope I'm going to cancel nope I'm going to cancel is a I think that's the easy way out and sure typically I'm not going to fail you you know I'm not going to give you a disapproval because you cancel too many flights I I don't want to do that right but I also don't love to hear that answer all the time I want I want to see you uh demonstrate some higher level decision- making and kind of that that analysis to say yeah I don't need to cancel this I can do it safely here's how I'm going to mitigate the risk so instead of just saying no give me a detailed answer of how you're going to do that now you may get faced with a scenario where it's straight up yeah we just can't flly there's no way safe way to do this we can't fly today we're going to have to wait until tomorrow uh or we're going to have to wait until whatever you know uh but that's that's how I would suggest answering that question and that's some examples on how you could be asked this uh now since I've mentioned it a couple times the uh the new ace guide has new scenarios or new format of scenarios that are listed here so the scenario that I give is you you're flying to Palm Springs uh taking your grandmother to a wedding there uh that's the the scenario we run through if you take a check ride with me uh you're going to get different scenarios I probably have five or six different scenarios that you'll get and they're all based on hey we have a reason to go from point A to point B we have passengers with us uh and in my scenarios I typically say there's a weather system that's moved through recently and the reason I do that is to cover the the knowledge topics there of that frontal system movement the Prague chart knowing how that affects the winds and air masses and all that so hopefully other examiners are doing something similar they give you some sort of scenario that you can plan for ahead of time and it gives you a little bit of an idea of the kind kinds of questions that they might ask from this section so uh that is Task C of weather information uh next up we have area of operation one task D which is cross country planning this one is a little bit shorter uh but but we'll still devote a whole episode to that uh some updates on me I'm working on the electrical system part two uh I think it's been like almost a year since I've did part one of the electrical system but uh we've actually U A friend of mine u a mechanic built a Miniature Aircraft electrical system for us uh we're going to look at that and the schematics of the electrical system get into that uh what I might do as well is start releasing some CFI content because man I get a lot of questions about CFI content I think there's a lot of you guys that are out there uh preparing for a CFI exam um so I might start releasing uh some CFI episodes and kind of jump out of order here of just doing Private Pilot if you would like to see content like that or anything else feel free to contact me Seth lvsl Arrow you can also contact us on our Shopify store if you have a question about the ace guide a lot of people have been purchasing the ace guide and if you're watching this and you've purchased it man I really appreciate your support uh that really has allowed me to dive into that guide and do a lot of updating on it that's one of the reasons why I haven't been doing a lot of podcasting or videos lately is I take a lot of time out of the week to work on this guide to make sure it's the most upto-date and current and useful and consistently I'm adding stuff to it love to hear the feedback from you guys as well so I can tell I'm rambling so it's time for me to tie things up here for today's episode thank you so much for listening thank you for your support thanks for watching if you're joining us on YouTube I hope to see you next time don't forget to like And subscribe tell somebody about this podcast and YouTube channel if you want to continue the conversation join us on our Discord channel uh we've got a lot of great conversations that happen in Discord I'm on that pretty much every day and I'm doing live sessions on Discord trying to do that once a week so if you have some questions jump over to our Discord Channel you can find links I think here on YouTube but definitely on the site vl. Aro uh there's a Discord Channel link there and you can join us uh in between these episodes to keep the conversation going thanks again and we'll see you next time [Music]