A Proposed Weather Taxonomy for General Aviation Pilot Education and Training

According to the latest Nall Report published by the Air Safety Institute of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), there has been a downward trend in U.S. weather-related General Aviation (GA) accidents and fatalities over the last ten years. While this trend is encouraging, the percentage of those accidents that are fatal (known as lethality rate) has remained relatively steady between 67 and 89 percent through the same period. In 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the weather-accident lethality rate was 76 percent. These numbers are a continuing concern for safety-minded organizations such as AOPA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Transportation Safety Board, and it is not surprising that these organizations offer weather-related training materials to the GA community through their web sites and live events.

General Aviation pilot weather education and training also remains an active area of interest within the research community. The present study expands upon an organizing construct for GA pilot weather education and training that was developed several years ago as part of an FAA-funded research project on Weather Technology in the Cockpit. The construct is centered on three main knowledge categories, or tiers: 1) Weather Phenomenology; 2) Weather Hazard Products; and 3) Weather Hazard Product Sources. The concept behind the categorization is that phenomenology (basic theory and concepts) should form the foundation of a pilot’s weather knowledge (bottom tier), while the hazard products are a means to understand how the current and future weather may impact his/her flight (second tier).  The third tier is not intuitively obvious, and resulted from examining the large volume of commercial weather products and applications available to the GA community, in which implicit assumptions made about users' weather background and understanding of the product’s strengths and weaknesses may not be accurate. The top tier is the most applications-oriented of the three.

The current (“1.0”) version of the taxonomy contains the three original tiers, along with two to three subcategories within each. Each subcategory itself can contain between eight and 22 topic areas. All told, there are 79 separate line items in the current version of the taxonomy--36 in the Phenomenology tier, 29 in the Hazards Products tier, and 14 in the Product Sources tier. The taxonomy was developed by a subject matter expert team consisting of aviation meteorologists, a certificated flight instructor with a meteorological background (who is also a doctoral student), a human factors psychologist, and two human factors doctoral students.  Additional subject-matter material for the taxonomy came from the course outline for Embry-Riddle’s introductory aviation meteorology course. This paper will introduce the most recent version of the taxonomy and discuss one of its potential applications, in which student pilot performance on specific knowledge questions coming from each of the three tiers will be tested as predictors of performance in a hands-on hazardous-weather simulation scenario.