CamTom12 wrote:

Cary wrote:I think all of us whose flying life exceeds 15-20 years or so can identify with how blind we flew "back then", when the only way of gathering the weather ahead while in the air was to visit with Flight Watch every so often. When we were on the ground obtaining weather enroute, we talked to FSS for a briefing update, or if we were lucky and there was an FSS on the field, we got a face-to-face and looked at NWS faxed maps that had come out a few hours earlier while obtaining our briefing.

I got a chance to do this in Northway a little while back. It was pretty interesting, watching all the stuff that rolled in through the FSS there.

Today, what the FSS obtains is much more current, rather than already 4 hours old. All around, technology has made today's weather flying almost magic compared to weather flying when I first obtained my IR some 42 years ago, whether it's obtained from FSS, TRACON, sometimes Center, but especially in the cockpit. I didn't realize how far it had come until 4 years ago, I installed a Stratus 2 to accompany my newly installed iPad Mini armed with Foreflight. My local flights were interesting, but my first long flight after that, from here to OSH, was the real eye-opener. Having weather on board that could show stuff relatively near but also a couple hundred miles away was fabulous! And it's done nothing but get better since then.

Cary