How To Get A Weather Briefing: What Student Pilots In Los Angeles Need To Know

Ask a student pilot how the weather is and they will look out of the window. Ask a private pilot and they will tell you the METAR at Van Nuys, the TAF at Burbank, whether the marine layer is forecast to burn off before noon, what the winds are doing at 3,000 and 6,000 feet, and whether there is a fire TFR over the Angeles Forest. The difference between the two answers is the weather briefing, and learning to get a proper one is a skill that the regulations require, that the checkride tests, and that most students find surprisingly satisfying once they can do it.

Here is what a legal briefing is, where we get it, and what Los Angeles weather does that the textbook does not always mention.

What The Rule Actually Requires

FAR 91.103 says that before any flight the pilot in command must become familiar with all available information concerning that flight, and for a flight away from the vicinity of the airport, or any IFR flight, that specifically includes weather reports and forecasts, fuel requirements, alternates if the flight cannot be completed as planned, and any known traffic delays. The rule does not say how you get the information. It says you have to have it, and if something goes wrong the first question anyone will ask is what briefing you got and when.

For a student on a solo cross-country there is an extra layer. Under 61.93 your instructor has to review your planning and the weather before endorsing the flight, so you will be walking them through your briefing before you go, and a briefing that consists of glancing at the sky does not get an endorsement.

Where A Briefing Comes From

The official source is Flight Service, which the FAA contracts to Leidos. You can call 1-800-WX-BRIEF and talk to a briefer, or use the website, 1800wxbrief.com, which gives you the same standard briefing in written form and records that you got it. That record is the point. A briefing from Flight Service is time-stamped against your name, which is the evidence that you complied with 91.103.

ForeFlight and similar apps pull their briefings from the same source. When you tap the briefing button in ForeFlight for a filed route, the app requests a briefing through Leidos and it is logged in the same way, which is why we teach students to use the app's briefing function rather than just reading the weather pages inside it. Reading the METARs in the app is looking at the weather. Requesting the briefing is getting briefed.

Behind both of these sits aviationweather.gov, the National Weather Service's Aviation Weather Center, which is where the raw METARs, TAFs, area forecasts, AIRMETs and SIGMETs come from. Students should learn to read it directly, because it shows the graphical forecasts for clouds, visibility and turbulence in a way that a text briefing cannot, and because it is what you will use to keep an eye on the weather during the week before a flight. The TFR list, at tfr.faa.gov, is separate, and during fire season in Los Angeles it is not optional.

What Is In A Standard Briefing

A standard briefing has a fixed order, and once you know it you can hear where you are in the briefing without being told. It starts with adverse conditions, anything that might make you cancel: thunderstorms, icing, low ceilings, strong winds, TFRs. If the conditions are marginal you will hear the phrase VFR flight not recommended, which is advice rather than an instruction, but advice that a student pilot should treat as a decision already made. Then comes the synopsis, the big picture of what the weather systems are doing; current conditions along the route; the en route forecast; the destination forecast; winds and temperatures aloft; NOTAMs, including the ones for the airports you will use; and finally any ATC delays.

An abbreviated briefing is for updating a standard one you already have, or for a single item. An outlook briefing is for a flight more than six hours away, and it is what you get the night before a morning cross-country, followed by a standard briefing on the morning itself. The outlook tells you whether to set the alarm. The standard tells you whether to go.

The Los Angeles Part

Three things about the weather here are worth more attention than the textbook gives them.

The first is the marine layer. From late spring into summer, and on plenty of mornings the rest of the year, a layer of low stratus pushes in from the ocean overnight and sits over the basin and, on the deeper days, over the Valley. Santa Monica and Torrance can be at 800 feet overcast while Van Nuys is clear, or the reverse. The TAF tells you when the forecaster expects it to lift, and the METARs at the coastal airports tell you whether that is happening on schedule. We covered the pattern in detail in why June mornings scrub flight lessons; the short version is that a morning briefing in Los Angeles is mostly about ceilings, and a good student learns to read a TAF for the hour the stratus is forecast to break.

The second is wind, and specifically the two kinds. The afternoon sea breeze is routine and shows up in the forecast as a shift to the south and west after midday. The Santa Ana is the other kind, dry and from the northeast, and when the winds aloft forecast shows strong northeasterlies at 3,000 and 6,000 feet in the autumn, the briefing will usually carry an AIRMET for turbulence and the day needs the thinking we described in Santa Ana winds and flight training.

The third is heat. On a summer afternoon in the Valley the temperature at Van Nuys can be 100 degrees, and the density altitude, the altitude the aircraft thinks it is at, climbs well above the field elevation. That changes the takeoff roll and the climb rate in ways that matter in a training aircraft, and the briefing gives you the temperature and altimeter setting to work it out. Our post on density altitude in the Valley has the arithmetic.

How We Teach It

Students at Los Angeles Flight School start getting their own briefings before their first solo. Early on the instructor gets one alongside and compares notes; by the cross-country phase the student presents the briefing and the instructor asks questions about it, which is exactly what the examiner will do on the checkride. The oral exam almost always includes being handed a set of weather products and asked whether the flight can go, and the answer the examiner wants is not yes or no but the reasoning. Our private pilot oral exam guide has the kind of questions to expect.

The habit we are trying to build is simple: the briefing is the first thing, not the last. Get the outlook the night before. Get the standard briefing before you leave the house, not in the car park. Check the TFRs even when there is no fire in the news. Look at the METARs on the way to the airport to see if the forecast is holding. And when the briefing says the flight should not go, be the pilot who is relieved to have found out on the ground.

If you have never sat through a briefing and want to see how one is done, it is part of every first flight lesson here. The instructor will walk you through the morning's weather before you walk out to the aircraft, and by the end of it you will know more about the sky over Van Nuys than you did when you arrived.