Schedule
How the preflight briefing reads the TAF for the hours you booked, what the hatched blocks mean, and how the runway recommendation, surface condition and forecast runway changes are worked out.
A weather site does not know when you are flying. Your schedule does — so the briefing opens on the window you booked and answers for those hours rather than for right now.
Open it from the Weather button on any reservation, or from Weather in the sidebar for a field on its own.
Everything here is advisory. It carries no NOTAMs and no TFRs, and it does not replace a legal briefing.
The coloured bar across the top is the flight category hour by hour: green VFR, blue MVFR, red IFR, purple LIFR. The hours you booked are ringed; two hours either side are shown faded, because weather does not stop at the edge of a reservation.
Blocks are grouped by the TAF period governing them, and each group is labelled
with the change that opened it — TAF for the opening group, then FM or
BECMG. A boundary on the bar is a boundary in the forecast.
Click any hour to move the whole briefing to it. The wind, the ceiling, the runway recommendation and the highlighted raw TAF line all follow. A banner appears offering to go back to your departure time.
A block with diagonal stripes has a TEMPO or PROB group reaching into it.
These never replace the prevailing forecast, which is why the block keeps its category — the answer to "what will it be" is unchanged. The stripes say something might interrupt it. Directly under the bar every transient group in view is listed, and the one covering the hour you have selected is bolded and shows its raw text.
A TEMPO is worth reading. TEMPO 0717/0719 3SM -SHRA BKN015 on an otherwise
green afternoon is the difference between a comfortable flight and one you turn
around out of.
A TAF runs 24 to 30 hours. For a booking beyond that the bar shows dashed grey blocks and says so, and where a surface forecast is available it is offered as an outlook — clearly marked, because it has no ceiling in it and is therefore not a flight category at all.
The recommendation is the runway the wind favours: most headwind first, then least crosswind, then length. Each comparison has a three-knot tolerance, because wind is reported to the nearest knot and ten degrees and a runway heading is itself rounded — so a gap of one knot is noise, and length decides instead.
Headings are magnetic, as painted. Wind is reported in true degrees by both METAR and TAF, so it is converted using the field's magnetic variation before anything is compared. The footnote says which variation was used.
Use the dropdown to see the components for any other end — useful when you want the long runway anyway, or are briefing a particular approach.
Set a minimum runway length and width in Settings. Ends below them are excluded from the recommendation, shown faded in the list, and named underneath. The limits in force are shown as a badge next to the recommendation, so the advice is never read without knowing what was ruled out.
Likely dry, Likely wet or Likely icy, worked out from the weather.
VCSH is rain somebody else is
getting.For the current hour this is read from the last six hours of observations. For a later hour it is read from the TAF period covering it, and the line underneath says which. Beyond the end of the forecast it declines to call it.
This is not a runway condition report. That is a FICON NOTAM with an RCAM code, published when somebody has been out and assessed the surface. This is the inference a pilot draws from the weather, drawn for them, and a FICON NOTAM overrides it.
If the TAF has the wind moving enough to change which runway is favoured, the box says so:
Runway change 31 → 13 possible at Thu 1:00 PM, based on the TAF.
It is worked out with the same rule as the recommendation, tolerance and your minimums included, so it will never point you at a runway the page refuses to recommend. Most periods produce nothing.
The weather page carries a satellite map with radar, AIRMETs and SIGMETs, each layer switchable. Click any shape for the full advisory text, its altitudes and its validity.
PIREPs within 50 nm of the field are listed with their altitude and age. Negative reports — a pilot reporting smooth air — are shown plainly rather than as a hazard.
Airports you add on the weather page are saved to the organisation, not to your browser. The practice areas, the usual cross-country destinations and the alternate everybody uses are a property of the operation, so everyone sees the same list on every device.
A reservation briefs the aircraft's home field by default. If the aeroplane is somewhere else, set Departure airport on the reservation, or type a different identifier into the briefing to check a destination or an alternate without editing the booking.
Fill the FRAT from this carries what the briefing already knows — ceiling, visibility, wind and gusts — into a new flight risk assessment. You stay free to disagree with any of it; the point is not retyping figures already on screen.