Vous êtes confronté à des déviations météorologiques inattendues. Comment planifiez-vous les imprévus dans l’aviation ?

A comprehensive weather briefing analysis is one of the most essential pre-flight tasks for both pilots and dispatchers. Combining these weather forecasts with actual NOTAMs, traffic demands, crew flight, and duty limitations, and the airplane's capabilities and certifications is the key to consistent fuel planning, which will reduce undesired impacts on Customers, Crew, and Airline.

In aviation, planning for contingencies due to unexpected weather diversions involves thorough pre-flight preparation and real-time decision-making. This includes analyzing weather forecasts, identifying alternate airports along the flight path, and ensuring adequate fuel reserves for diversions. Pilots and dispatchers continuously monitor weather conditions, updating flight plans as needed, and maintain clear communication with air traffic control and ground operations. Additionally, having established protocols for passenger communication and crew coordination ensures safety and minimizes disruptions, allowing for swift and effective responses to changing weather conditions.

When planning a flight, proper analysis of the weather forecast is crucial. Weather at the destination airport, destination alternate airports, enroute airports and overall enroute weather over the route must be properly analysed at all times. Strategies like, planning additional fuel and increasing of contingency fuel can be useful in avoiding and minimising weather diversions. Apart from this, continuous weather watch and understanding the realistic weather conditions using the PIREPS can be also helpful.

As the only newspaper that is distributed at the three Port Authority airports in Metro NY, I work with the Airport Operations and Emergency Operations Center to then re-distribute this information to our readers. All stakeholders at JFK Airport, in particular, have a strongly recommended procedure of dialing into briefings, and strongly suggested to attend regular Zoom-like scheduled updates to keep all informed. It is incumbent for all stakeholders to reach out too their partners and passengers with this information. Unfortunately a lot of this information must go through corporate level communications departments and may not reach their population quickly. Media does a better with this since here are fewer hoops to go through.

In context to this, proper communication with the airline’s OCC (Operations Control Center) is also vital. Dispatchers or the operations controllers work there have all the necessary sources to analyse weather conditions and NOTAMS at the alternate airport or the enroute airport to which the crew is planning to divert to. On the other hand, when pilots informed the OCC staff regarding the diversion, they can arrange the required ground support at the diverted airport by proactively communicating with the personnel at that airport to make the process easier.

It is extremely important that we analyze all the weather forecast before starting our flight, based on this information we will be able to manage our fuel calculation to execute our flight in complete safety