Hello and thank you for taking the time to read the 40th issue of EZNews!
We highly value those members who have chosen to enable automatic renewal of their EZWxBrief membership on a monthly basis. If you haven't done so, please sign in and visit the User Profile page and click on the Renew button. By doing this, you can establish your monthly renewal with a Visa, MasterCard, or Discover credit card. This ensures that you remain connected and continue to enjoy the simplicity of EZWxBrief all year long.
For members new to EZWxBrief, you won't find EZWxBrief in the App Store or Google Play Store. For the best user experience, EZWxBrief is optimized to run as a progressive web app (PWA) and must be installed on your device which takes less than 10 seconds per device. Follow the link to the blog post above or see the 180+ page Pilots Guide for more information on how to install EZWxBrief as a PWA on all of your devices.
We need your help!
If you are enjoying the simplicity of EZWxBrief v2.0, we need your help to get the word out to other pilots. This release is long overdue, but after 18 months of development and a substantial financial investment, this innovative product can go a long way to helping general pilots plan a safe flight using a minimal amount of their valuable time. It's the only application available on the market that allows pilots to quickly assess and quantify their personal risk with an extremely reasonable monthly subscription price. If you have a social media account or any other means to let other pilots know about this groundbreaking progressive web app, please point them to https://ezwxbrief.com. We greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word!
NEW! Skew-T Weather Essentials recordings are on sale!
If you were not able to attend the live Skew-T Weather Essentials class that finished on July 1st, you now have the option to purchase all of the recordings from this 12-week course. A summary guide (in PDF form) will be available to download upon purchase (an email is also sent with a link to download this guide) that includes the following -
Table of contents
Hyperlinks to the twelve unlisted YouTube video recordings of each class
Hyperlinks to a PDF containing the slides for each class
Hyperlinks to each quiz and quiz answers for each class
The recording for each class is 45 to 60 minutes in length. This is provided for your personal use only. Please do not share this summary guide (or its contents) or post it online. We appreciate your cooperation.
AirVenture 2024 was a huge success!
It was great to meet many of you at AirVenture this year either at the EZWxBrief booth in Hangar D or at one of Scott's seven presentations. Scott had the chance to demo version two of the EZWxBrief progressive web app to over 100 attendees throughout the week. It was great to hear the positive feedback for v2.0.
Overall, the weather at the show was outstanding. There were a few rain showers and a thunderstorm that rolled through the Oshkosh area during the early part of the week. Most of those moved out of the area quickly and did not significantly affect the event that once again had a record-setting attendance of 686,000 people. We look forward to seeing everyone next year, July 21, 2025 - July 27, 2025.
Looking for a great gift for a pilot?
Turns out that our booth neighbors in Hangar D at AirVenture were the team from pilotMap. They offer a fantastic METAR map that can be hung on the wall. It uses colored LEDs that depict the current flight category for the airport (VFR, MVFR, IFR and LIFR). The LEDs for each airport are updated every 15 minutes and connects via WiFi. They have a wide selection of regions throughout the U.S. as well as their largest map that covers all of the conterminous U.S., southern Canada and northern Mexico and includes 1,852 airports. We have no financial arrangement with pilotMap, but if you place an order, tell them that their good friends at EZWxBrief sent you.
Project 2025 and its potential impact on aviation weather
During AirVenture, we received a lot of questions from attendees concerned about how Project 2025 may affect aviation weather if the GOP wins the election in November. Here's just a short summary of what will likely occur and how it may affect the weather you get before and during your flight.
If you are not familiar, a conservative proposal drafted by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has begun a debate by, among other things, proposing that a Republican administration privatize weather forecasting now done by government agencies. The plan calls to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency for the National Weather Service. Specifically on page 664 of the Project 2025 document it states,
"The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other
agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories."
Their reasoning for this is listed on page 675 and states,
"Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main
drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future
U.S. prosperity."
Essentially, the Heritage Foundation does not believe that global warming and climate change are real and they want this messaging to the public to be eliminated.
The plan also states that forecasts provided by private companies such as AccuWeather are more accurate than those provided by the National Weather Service, and so it recommends that the NWS “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” or enter partnerships to sell its data. Even if the pricing of the weather guidance is reasonable, any license agreement will also require substantial liability insurance.
While it is uncertain how this will play out, small companies that offer products like EZWxBrief will essentially be "priced out" of the market or will need to raise their annual or monthly subscription to a substantially higher amount which may be unreasonable to the average subscriber. Moreover, many other aviation apps that now provide a free tier to their subscription model will likely roll this into their annual or monthly subscription given that much of the aviation weather data pilots use today is provided to them by NOAA at no cost. Services such as the Flight Information System-Broadcast (FIS-B) through ADS-B In, could be eliminated or privatized requiring a monthly subscription to what is now a free service (after the purchase of the required hardware). Flight Service (through Leidos) could be eliminated or privatized as well and may require a fee.
Eliminating much of the free weather reports and forecasts will likely create a savings of $4 annually for the taxpayer as estimated by some studies, but the impact financially to the average pilot will be substantially higher if the weather guidance provided by NOAA is commercialized. Moreover, much of the aeronautical data and charts that are updated every 28 days and used by many aviation apps is currently provided freely by the FAA. Just to give you an idea of how expensive this can be if the data is commercialized, take a look at NAV CANADA. NAV CANADA does not provide their aeronautical data for free. The current cost is $57,222.00 annually (as of September 23, 2023), with an insurance requirement of $100,000,000 aviation liability. For many small companies, this is simply unsustainable.
Screen sizes and format issues with EZWxBrief
We need your help. During AirVenture, there were several attendees that stopped by the booth and pointed out some formatting issues with the route profile and meteogram views on their portable device. If you are seeing weirdness with any device you own and have set up EZWxBrief to run as a progressive web app, please contact us and attach a screenshot along with the type of device (e.g., Google Pixel 8 Pro). We don't own every possible device for testing, so we are hoping you can help find these issues so that we can push out a fix and solve the formatting problem for all of these devices.
EZWxBrief v2.0 update
Since v2.0 was released at the end of May we have been squashing bugs and making the platform more stable for users. This is now v2.0.1. No new features have been added in July for this version. If you have any issues signing in, this is usually the result of the browser auto-filling the password field with an old/incorrect password. We recommend that you type your password in manually or request a new password using the Forgot your password? link below the Secure Sign In button on the Sign In screen. You will receive an email (check your spam/junk folder) that will allow you to reset your password accordingly.
Most pilots are weatherwise, but some are otherwise™
Dr. Scott Dennstaedt
Weather Systems Engineer
Founder, EZWxBrief™
CFI & former NWS meteorologist
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