The FAA's Weather Technology in the Cockpit Program - Deriving a "Minimum Weather Service"

The proliferation of devices providing weather information to the cockpit continues to grow at a rapid pace. These devices, ranging from a cell phone to an IPAD to integrated avionics systems to other commercially available options, provide pilots with a variety of weather information of various quality and various rendering standards. In the meantime, NTSB reports have shown that General Aviation (GA) weather related accident and incident trends have not changed must in the past 10 years, with far too many of these accidents involving fatalities.

The FAA's Weather Technology in the Cockpit Program (WTIC) program is performing research to address this issue through development of a "minimum weather service" or “MWS”. The MWS is defined as the information needed to support consistently safe and effective pilot decision making in the cockpit as well as standards/guidance for cockpit decision support tools. The overall objective of the MWS is to improve safety and efficiency in the National Airspace System by addressing gaps in cockpit MET technology and MET information that are associated with safety risks. The WTIC program will determine and recommend standards/guidance for the MWS ranging from commercial aviation operations to the General Aviation operator. The program will define the necessary meteorological information, the associated parameters of the information (i.e, accuracy, latency, update rates), and presentation elements to safely and efficiently incorporate it into collaborative decision making (CDM) relative to adverse weather decisions and performance based navigation.

This presentation will not only outline the process the WTIC program is using to derive the minimum weather service, but also look take at initial look into some of the gaps and findings that have been uncovered in initial research.