What's the deal?
VFRTactics.ca is a Canadian VFR weather planning assistant. The idea is to take some of the pre-flight pressure off you as a pilot by handling the time-consuming number crunching.
Why is this better than hand calculations?
Think of it this way. Obviously, it is every pilot's responsibility to make sure the forecast weather will not be hazardous for a given flight. The entire flight planning process can take up to an hour for a moderately long flight, and weather planning needs to be done before many other calculations. Besides, a pilot needs to do their weather planning as close before a flight as possible so they can be sure of the latest weather. The spark for this website comes from the observations that
- Flight planning often takes long enough that the pilot can't use weather data published closest to the time of departure
- Weather calculations done by humans are often partially arrived at by guesses, crude rounding, and estimations
When a computer does flight weather planning, both of these issues are avoided. Give it a try, and compare it to your own numbers. It'll stack up! Why not now?