METAR's - what you may be missing with Brian Rutledge

All right. And we are live on time. Nice. I like it. Hey, we're going to get to Brian's Metars here in about 60 seconds. A couple things to tell you. Heather is in chat today talking to members and potential members if you're interested. 574-767-1797 is our customer service line. Heather is monitoring that seven days a week. You can call or text that number. And I'm gonna throw something else at you real quick. We've had several sales going on through all this craziness and I want to tell you that the cell, the previous cell ended. But guess what? For all of you that keep asking because you missed the cell, I got a private code that I throw out every once in a while for a bonus for somebody to come in to visit our video. So KK25 off, that's a running code. You can use that for the big professional pilot package. That's a nice savings. And you can also use it up the first month of any monthly membership. So that's a good deal. So Heather's going to be here in chat. We're going to bring Brian in from California and teach you some good stuff on Metars. This is good for brand new students. This is a good refresher for pilots. I see a lot of add on pilots and have over the years that choke on checkrides reading Metars. And I've seen it firsthand because they'll say, oh, I'm already a raid pilot pilot, I know Metars. And then they choke when the examiner takes them over and pulls up a Metar. I've watched them choke and I've had the examiner come out and say what's wrong with your boy? He's in there and he's about ready to fell because he can't read a frickin Metard. He's a private pilot with, you know, 800 hours. So metars are important. So I am going to bring Brian in and let him teach you some meters. Here we go. And then Brian will stay on topic during the Metar presentation and then Brian will be available to take your questions after the presentation on Metars or whatever else you might want to talk about flight and ground training needs. So here we go. Let's bring in Brian.

Today we are going to go over Metars. Metars are one of those things that as a new pilot, a seasoned pilot, you have to stay on top of being able to decipher what a Metar is telling you. So Metar is an aviation routine weather report and the important thing to remember about a METAR is it is a routine surface observation. Surface observation is what is the driving point here. It's not an airborne report. It is a surface report at an airport. It is issued 55 minutes past the hour. It is valid for one hour. Now, at times you may see speci that would be in the, in the place of where you would see metar. And that's just telling you that it is a special weather report. These weather reports are unscheduled. It's when the conditions change and there's certain criteria have to be met. One example is maybe the field is a vfr, maybe it's marginal vfr. And then it goes ifr. Ten minutes after the original METAR had come out, they would put out a specie. That's when you would probably see one of those. Now, metars should always, always be checked. You need to check them for all hazards, not only for flight safety, but also for your aircraft performance. So you need to pay attention to what the METAR is telling you so that you can begin to make your go or no go decision. Now, here's a basic METAR here in the Sacramento area. And the METAR at the beginning will always show you which airport it is. The identifier. So KMCC, that's the McClellan Airfield in Sacramento. And then it's got a series of numbers after it that end with a Z. So the first two numbers, that's going to be the day of the month, so the 20th day of the month. And this report was issued at 1455 Zulu hours. So always at the beginning is the identifier and then the date and the time that it was issued. And it's valid, it's valid at that time. Now, auto, sometimes you're going to see Auto, that means no human intervention whatsoever. When this METAR was generated, it is all computerized, the entire thing. The next set of numbers, 14004kt, that's just the direction the wind coming from and its strength. So the wind in this example is from 140 degrees at 4 knots. 10 SM, that just means it's 10 statute miles of visibility. Few 110 means there's few clouds at 11,000ft. So the key here is to remember, you know, with the Numbers, if that said 001, that would mean 100ft. If it said 010, that would be 1,000ft. But this shows 11 0, that is 11,000ft. Moving on to the next set of numbers. That's your temperature and your dew Point again, remember, this is in degrees Celsius. So the temperature is 12 degrees Celsius and the dew point is 7 degrees Celsius. Next is your altimeter setting. It's an altimeter setting of 3006. You just plug in the decimal point in between the two zeros, and that would be 30.06 on your altimeter. Next is RMK and then something after that. The A01 RMK is remarks. So if there's remarks in a METAR, this is where they're going to be listed at the end. And we're going to go over these a little bit more because there's some remarks that tend to trip people up. Now, this particular one, a 01, that just means that at the McClellan Airfield, it does not have a precipitation discriminator, meaning it can't tell you if it's snowing, if it's misty, if it's raining. It's not able to tell you. Now, I'll tell you, at McClellan, they can tell you that I just made this METAR up. I, I typed it up and I put a 01 in there just because that's where I wanted to start with the remark section. But at McClellan, they do have a 02 and it can tell you if there is precipitation of what type. Now, this one here, this metar, this is out at Mather Airport again in Sacramento. And at the very beginning, it shows the airport identifier, the date it was issued, which was the 11th of the month at 1455 Zulu. It's an automated report. But what we want to look at is we want to start here with the winds. It looks a little bit different than the first metar. So if you notice this one is 150 at 15 knots, and then the G just means that it is gusting 25 knots. So this should start to get your attention when you start to see gusts. Next is a series of numbers with a V in the middle. Sometimes people get a little tripped up on this. They're not too sure what it means. And all it means is the wind is variable from 140 degrees to 210 degrees. Again, another big indicator that the winds are not your normal winds. You know, these are gusting, the winds are strong and it's variable, it's moving. So if you're doing an approach, are you going to have a headwind, you're going to have a tailwind, is it going to turn to a direct crosswind, something you need to be paying attention to in your planning next is visibility. Again, this is 1/2 statute mile of visibility. And now we have a cloud layer that is BKN is broken. So we have a broken layer.004. So that's 400ft. We have a broken layer at 400ft. Next is your temperature and dew point. Again, this does look a little bit different. So 04 is 4 degrees Celsius and the M means that it is minus 1 degree for the dew point. Minus 1 degree dew point. Again, altimeter setting of 290.84. And now we get to the remarks section that looks a little bit different than the original one. This one a 02. We talked a little bit about it previously at the McClellan Metar that we showed you. This is a precipitation discriminator that does show rain, snow, mist, any of those things. It can determine the type of precipitation at the airfield. Slp. And we'll just kind of click through each one of these P0004 and then the T with all these various numbers. Then this set of numbers. 1, 0108 and 52006. What in the world are all those numbers? And this is what usually trips people up when they're reading a metar. So we'll go through each one of them and then the money sign at the very end. So let's look at the first one. Well, SLP034, that one just simply is sea level pressure. So with sea level pressure, when you're going to, you're not going to use this. As a general aviation pilot, and even when I was flying in law enforcement, we never used this. This is something that military pilots would use. And what they're going to do is they're going to take this number 034 and convert it into what's called hectopascals so that they can determine what the pressure is for their setting. So you take the 034 and you're going to add. Now this might sound a little confusing, so just really bear with me. You're going to add either a 10 or a 9 to the very beginning of the numbers. And our goal is to get as close to 1,000 as we can. Now, with that being said, we have to add a decimal point first between the three and the four. So we have zero 3.4. Now let's add a nine to the beginning. It would be 903.4. That's not very close to a thousand. But if we add a 10 instead, we now have 1003 0.4. That is the conversion to hectopascals for this sea level pressure setting that we're looking at. So 1003.4 is the conversion. Moving on to the next one. P004. You're not going to use this, but you will see it in a metar. And if you're preparing for a checkride and that METAR that you're told to look at and decipher has it, at least now you have an idea of what this means. It just Simply means there is 04 inches of liquid precipitation that fell in the last hour at this airfield. The next one, the T0431 006. This one you will see a lot on metars and basically the T just means the exact temperature. This is going to be exact temperature and exact dew point at the time that this metar came out. If there is a zero following the T, that means that the next series of numbers is positive. If there is a one, then it means it's negative. In our example it is zero, so it's positive. The next two numbers, 43 just put a decimal in between them. So the exact temperature at this report was 4.3 degrees Celsius. The exact dew point because it starts with a 1 means it's negative. It is 0, 0.6. So we have minus 0.6 degrees Celsius. Next set of numbers, you're not going to use them, but it is something that you could be asked and your examiner may not even know what it means because this is something that doesn't come up too often, but it does happen. And this is the 6 hour maximum temperature for this particular metar. And again deciphering it, if it's a one at the beginning that means it's six hour temp. If it's a two, then it is the six hour minimum temperature. But this is the six hour maximum temperature followed by a zero. That means that the numbers are positive. And then 10.8 on the end just add the decimal between the zero and the eight. So the maximum six hour temperature that they are saying for this airport is 10.8 degrees. Next one, this one you will see a lot on a metar usually starts with a five. And this is your pressure tendency. So it's a three hour pressure tendency for this report. If it's followed by a 2, that means that the pressure is rising. 0 to 3 is rising. So it's a 2, that means it's rising. Then the last three numbers is your pressure change. So you just got to add a decimal point just prior to the last number and that will Give you your pressure change. So this one is a 0.6 inch pressure change and it was rising over the last three hours. That one, you will see that number a lot. Now, one thing you don't want to confuse this with is in TAFS, which we'll do another separate lesson on TAFS have a series of numbers that start with a 5, a 6, but it is not the same. You do not want to confuse these two. The five would be for turbulence and this is a real good one when we get into it. And a six would cover icing. So we'll talk about that in the next lesson. And the last symbol, the dollar sign, that just means that maintenance is needed. Take the METAR information that you see with a grain of salt. It doesn't tell us exactly what's wrong with it. If the wind is correct, if the ceiling is correct, we really have no idea of knowing. It just means that it needs maintenance. So metars, when you see the sky coverage in a metar, they'll be broken into different abbreviations. So you see few. And then SCT is scattered, BKN is broken and OVC is overcast. And let's see what each one of those means. Few, that just means trace to 2.8of sky coverage. Not very much. A few little clouds floating around in the sky. That's going to be few scattered. Now they say in the books three, eight to four. Eight of sky. Well, just think of it as you look outside and half of the sky has clouds. That is a scattered layer. BKN broken 5, 8 to 7 8. Or you look outside and there's some few spots where you can see blue sky through the clouds. Just a couple. That's going to be a broken layer, overcast, complete coverage. You're not seeing any blue sky. You walk outside, you look up and it is completely covered with clouds. That is overcast. Now you notice broken and overcast both have an asterisk next to them. And that's because the lowest layer, something you got to remember when you want to determine what the ceiling is. The ceiling is the lowest layer of broken or overcast. That's what constitutes a ceiling. And one thing I did not put on there is if vertical visibility, they'll see a V followed by another V and it has a lower number than the broken or overcast. That also constitutes your ceiling. So it's the lowest layer of broken, overcast or vertical visibility will dictate what the ceiling is. There are some additional remarks that you'll see in metars. We see this first one Here in California quite a bit. The second one not so much in the Sacramento Valley but be more up in the Lake Tahoe region. But RAB05 and then an E30 what does that mean? Means rain began five minutes after the hour and ended at 30 minutes after the hour. Pretty simple. That's a real easy one. So you can pretty much guess what the next one means. Snow began 20 minutes after the hour and ended 55 minutes after the hour. This remark see it occasionally here at our home airports. PK wind PK just means peak and it's telling you that the wind was blowing 1-50-degrees from 150-degrees at 45 knots and that occurred 10 minutes past the hour. This one I haven't seen this one here at our home airports WSHFT basically is wind shift so the wind shifted 20 minutes after the hour but it was due to this fropa F R O P a frontal passage very very important if you're flying in an area and you see something like this. So now you know there's frontal passages occurred and we'll get into talking about fronts and cold fronts, warm fronts, occluded fronts and additional lessons. But this would be something to get your attention for sure in a Metar. One big thing you don't want to just look at the current Metar for the airport where you're departing as well as the airport that you're going to or any airports in between. You really want to look at at least the last six hours to get a real good idea. And one way to do that is to go on the aviationweather.gov website here. This is just a screenshot of the Metar page that I had pulled up for this particular airport and you'll notice one of the center tab says or drop down menu says past six hours. When you click that on that website you can go 2 hours, 3 hours, 4, 6 12. You can go out quite a bit. And when you when you select six hours it gives you the six hours. The last six hours of the Metar reports at that given airport, which is a really good tool if you go down to the very very bottom line you'll see that it was the winds were two seven zero at nine knots and they had a scattered cloud layer at 4,000ft. Temperature was 28 dew points 19 and the altimeter setting was 2997. Then the remarks, you'll see some of those remarks that we Talked about the A02 sea level pressure 146. The exact temperature and dew point follows that the pressure changes. Everything's in there pretty much that we were talking about at this particular airport. But if you move one line up, you'll see that the winds changed to 3,00 at 9 knots. And now you went from a scattered layer to a broken layer. Now go all the way up to the very top one and you'll see that at that time, six hours later, clear skies, 10 miles visibility, get your altimeter setting and it just gives you an opportunity to see what the conditions were in the past compared to what the conditions are now. And then as you continue with your pre flight planning, you can make a pretty good guess of what it's going to be like in the future. So you know, you take all these things and this is how you start to get the go, no go decision for a particular flight. So we will, we will go over TAFs in the, in the next lesson and we'll see you there.

All right. Nice job Brian. Get an echo here. Turn it off. So I'm going to reiterate 574-767-1797. You can contact Heather by text or phone phone at that number. Great presentation by Brian. He is going to do TAFs next Tuesday. He's working on that now. And Brian will be jumping in chat here to talk to you and take any of your questions. I want to mention that Brian is. If you don't know Brian yet, if you're new to our channel or you haven't been to our channel a while, Brian Rutledge is our operations manager. Brian just retired from a sheriff's department where he was a deputy for 25 years. He's a 30 year aviator, started flying airplanes 30 years ago. In the last 15 years he's been flying for sheriff's department aviation unit, both airplanes and helicopters. So he is a CFI in both airplanes and helicopters. And as a member of helicopter online ground school or as a new member, just signing up. You get a phone consultation with Brian and Brian can talk to you about your ground training needs, your flight training needs, anything along that lines. And Brian brings a special, is bringing something special to the table. Because I'm just a helicopter cfi. I did helicopters first, got my CFI and I did my private fixed wing privileges after I was working as a cfi. Brian coming from the fixed wing world and then moving into helicopters and now being a dual rated cfi, Brian has that insight that I can't always give you. I can repeat a lot of things that I hear but I'm you know, pretty much 100% helicopters when it comes to teaching. So a lot of times, you know, Brian has some insight for you, a member because probably 50%, I would say of the people that join our ground school and or 50% of people that do helicopter ratings, probably half of them are add on ratings. And I say that from my 20 years of teaching, I know probably half the people I've helped get ratings over the years. Many, many, many of them are fixed wing making the transition to helicopters. So we're proud to have Brian on board because he, number one brings that expertise to the table. Plus Brian comes from a different, he came into the helicopter industry a different way than I did. I did the civilian route, getting all my ratings. Brian did it through the sheriff's department. So in turn I have experience in all the small piston helicopters where Brian had the luxury of know moving right into turbines. Right. Because he worked for a sheriff's department. So that gives Brian a different background of experience than what I have. So we feel like that complements both of us. I don't. I see Brian's in the chat. Good. So I'm going to let Brian go ahead and chitchat with you again. We're going to do Brian's Taft presentation in next Tuesday. And just real quick, on a personal note, the last week or so has been quiet. My daughter had her wisdom teeth out last week. Her birthday was the beginning of the week and then the poor girl got her wisdom teeth yanked. And I've been taking care of her the last five days and she's finally getting better but she's had a rough go of it. So that's why you haven't heard much from us in the last week. And that's why last week we didn't go live on Tuesday was because had my wrapped up self wrapped up and all that. You know, we always encourage everybody. You know, family's number one, your helicopter career and videos and training. That's number two behind your taking care of your family. So I'm going to look over and see. I see that Heather has two questions in there. I take it Brian's in there answering those questions. So go ahead and answer your question now. I don't know how much longer we'll stay on here. I do want to talk about the phone number again one time. Heather, since all this craziness started in the world, I decided to let Heather work from home. And my deal with her was, hey, how about you? I'll let you work from home and in turn I'll pay you but take Care of the hogs phone seven days a week. So that's what she's been doing. It's been working out real well. She's been interacting with people. Heather has been with me now over two years and Heather can answer many of your questions about signing up for helicopter land ground school because she's been with me now over two years. She knows a lot of the very basic questions and I shouldn't say just very basic questions. She's got a good feel for what goes on in the industry, for being a non pilot just from her dealing with people every day. And she's sweet person to talk to, you'll love talking to her. She sends every new member a welcome email to make sure that they've got logged into the site, make sure everything's working for them. And then she schedules people that phone consultation with Brian where Brian can get on the phone with you, chit chat with you about either the site, how things work, he'll talk to you about your ratings. We call it a 30 minute consultation. But Brian by his own admission is they turn into an hour or two, hour and a half. But with that being said, Brian tells me that he enjoys talking to the members and he's had a lot of really great conversations. And we offered that as a bonus for current members and for new members as we try to take hogg's customer service to the next level. We've been online over eight years now and I'm very proud of what we've done and the amount of people that we've been able to accomplish or help has been amazing. And when there's just a couple of us, you know, it's a lot to take care of everybody. Not that I'm complaining, because I'm not complaining, but bringing Brian into the picture brings again helps us take that customer service to the next level because he can help with answering questions. He stays on top of the site and jumps right in there. When a member has a question within Helicopter online ground school, he tries to get to it as soon as he can and he gets in there several times a day. And then if we find something that needs updated, we occasionally even find a mistake where maybe something was misstated. He found one yesterday. A member pointed out something in the site, that instructor accidentally, they knew what they were saying but it came out of their mouth the wrong way. Boom. I went in and a couple minutes got that fixed, uploaded it. So something else that helps me take the site to the next level is having Brian there to help fill the questions and it was simple because he's like, hey, go to this video, video such and such at timestamp 538. That's where that little issue is. Boom. Go in there, I fixed it, re uploaded it and we're good to go. So you will members, you will see this Metar presentation inside Helicopter on Ground School. I'll edit it up and it'll be in there just as soon as I'm done. It'll be there in there very, very quickly. So the Metars is a new presentation inside Helicopter Island Ground School. I believe it's going in the private course and it's also going in the, I think it's in the commercial side too. And it's also going to go into a new product that we're building that I'm not going to talk about yet because it's not finished yet. But that's going to be pretty cool when we get that going. So I see lots of comments in there. That's awesome. 36 people still here. You did a good job Brian, today because when you have 36, 37 people that have hung in there, that's pretty good. And I just noticed Heather, text me last minute, hey, I can't find the link on YouTube for whatever reason. I have it marked as unlisted. So everybody that's here today, they're here because of the email that went out to our members or people on our email list and then anybody that was on Facebook. But it's not public on YouTube. So the people that are here got here because they got invited with a link. Next week's we'll try to make sure that I mark that as public because these videos are for the General public on YouTube and recently a guy said what's the difference really between what you're doing there and what's in the site? Well, in the site you don't have to listen to me go on and on about the phone number and everything else. You know the site, everything's in there nice and organized by the rating you need. We have private pilot, commercial pilot, instrument pilot, certified flight instructor. And any of you that are interested in signing up, you can do so@helopterground.com you can call or text Heather at 574-767-767-1797. We have all those ratings, we have a 30 day money back, no hassle guarantee. And I'm going to throw my code out there again. And I keep this as a private code that I can throw out anytime I feel like it. And usually if somebody calls me or emails me a question about joining, I usually throw that code out there if they ask for a discount or military discount or whatever the case is. So because you joined or you were here today, I'm going to throw that code up and that is good for brand new membership and this would also be good for upgrades. Brian has been taking care of members that will email. Hey Kenny, I've been thinking about upgrade during the sale and you know, can we do this? And so I've been referring those to Brian because Brian has done a really good job at checking in, seeing where you're at and setting you up to do an upgrade. So Brian has been in charge of the upgrades. So you're welcome to email me as always. That's fine. And you can also email brian@brianelicopterground.com if you're a current member and you're looking to upgrade or downgrades. We don't very rarely ever do a downgrade, but if you're looking to upgrade, that would be the way to do it. Contact Brian@BrianHelicopterground.com so you just take that code KK25OFF and you enter that in the coupon box during checkout. And once you enter that and click Apply then it will show you what the discount is so you'll know exactly what it is. And specifically on the professional pilot package that is a great savings. If you can figure 25% off the total cost, that's pretty huge. It's a great savings and people have been jumping on that. They like the professional pilot membership and it's nice to get a nice discount on that. That includes private commercial, CFIN instrument and I will verify that is unlimited. There's no other charges. You'll never be billed again. Anything on the professional pilot, it's a one time fee, you keep it for as long as you need it. That does include the 30 day money back, no hassle guarantee. Now the monthly memberships that discounts just for the first month. But the beauty of helicopter land ground school monthly membership is you stay as long as you like, cancel anytime, come back anytime. And we've had the monthlies in place now for probably going on two and a half years. And we really like the fact, and many members like the fact that they can come and go as they please. They can come in, for example, they come in for a few months and do the private and they'll email and go, hey Kenny, I'm gonna take a break. Thanks for the videos. They helped me tremendously. To get through. But I'm gonna take a break while I build my commercial time. But I'll be back and then you see them come back for commercial and or instrument and then the same thing with cfi. So because we say this all the time but then we get the question, we get emailed, well, hey, can I cancel anytime and how do I do it? You can unsubscribe in the site yourself or we can do it for you. Either way, the beauty is keep as long as you like. Cancel anytime, come back anytime. It's really a beautiful thing and has turned out to be a really, really good way of offering a membership to people. So depending on your budget and where you're at throughout your training, you can come and go as you need. We always part as friends and we always take your feedback and moving the site forward and always look at everybody's individual circumstances and always willing to work something out if somebody has an issue with something. 100%. Heather and Brian both know the way we've been doing this for eight years is not only do we have a 100% money back guarantee, we always work out something with you to make things right if there's some kind of an issue. But it's been awesome. Thanks everybody for being. I see some people dropping off now because I'm on here rattling going on and on. So we will see you next Tuesday 2pm Brian is going to be doing Terminal aerodrome forecast. You saw his Metars today. The next one will be taf. Do us a favor and subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. That way you get notified of when we put out videos and do live events. So subscribe to the channel. Click the bell when you do. That way you will be notified of the new videos. So give us a thumbs up for Brian's presentation. I see 15 on there. That's pretty awesome. So thanks everybody. We will see you in the next video.

Peace out.