Introduction
VFR Tactics is the honours project of Alex Kwiatkowski while at Carleton University under the supervision of Dr. Louis D. Nel. The project's full title is "A Canadian VFR Weather Planning Assistant", and a copy of the final project writeup can be found at _____.
The project's objective was to develop a real-time interactive website that will provide pilots with a significant part of the weather-related data needed to produce more timely and more accurate (i.e. safer) flight plans. This relies on rigorously relating multiple weather data sources into a single multi-variable output.
Raison D'Etre
Pilots are among the few for whom the standard weather reporting typically found in newspapers and on television is inadequate. Although pilots are concerned with ground-level phenomena, they must also consider weather aloft along their indented route. For the purpose of aircraft flight the weather parameters of interest are not just large factors such as clouds and precipitation but also many other variables such as atmospheric pressure, rick of icing, wind direction, wind speed, and temperature.
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 although weather planning is only a subset of that time, it is an early step in the procedure. This requires the pilot 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 site comes from the observations that
- flight planning often takes long enough to preclude the ability to use weather data published closest to the time of departure, and
- weather calculations done by humans are often partially arrived at by guesses, crude rounding, and estimations.
Scope
The scope of this site is broadly summarized by the honour project's title: A Canadian VFR Weather Planning Assistant. The site currently works for Canadian pilots only because different weather data sources would be needed for other countries, including the United States. Adding such extra sources will likely be added in the near future, however. The term VFR is an acronym for "Visual Flight Rules", and refers to the requirement that a VFR flight stay within some visual limits, including being able to see the ground at all times, and maintaining a certain distance from clouds. All airliners, and most commercial flights do not fly VFR, but IFR or "Instrument Flight Rules". Thus the target population for this site is primarily recreational pilots, student pilots, and flight instructors. The entire flight planning process is substantially larger than just the weather-planning portion, but this site only considers the latter. For legal reasons, a pilot is always ultimately responsible for flight safety, which means this site must always be considered an assistant to a human pilot's planning. See our Terms and Conditions for more details.
There are many existing alternatives for flight planning software, but are typically limited to use outside Canada, too expensive for the previously mentioned target population, or are fragmented into multiple mutually exclusive sub-programs that do not allow for a comprehensive, automated interface. This site fails none of those tests!