Weather or Not
From Dallas to Canadian, TX What do you make of the pilot's decision — that's me — to fly the red segment to KCDS, the Childress, TX airport, then change direction and follow the green route to the refueling stop KHHF, the Hemphill County airport in Canadian, TX? Daring? The green segment cuts through a yellow/orange/red area produced by radar. It warns of significant levels of rain. Nearby yellow lightning bolts indicate that systems augmenting radar have detected lightning. Taken together, it means that significant thunderstorms are ahead. On top, all this is included in a large brown-shaded area for which a SIGMET (significant meteorological information) predicts major thunderstorms. Flying into that mess seems like folly, doesn't it? We include the picture here as part of a discussion how radar images and SIGMET predictions should guide a pilot's decisions. Let's start. With the advent of ADS-B and XM-Weather, pilots now have a lot of weather information on