I’m learning to fly airplanes. Weather is important. Pilots get weather reports as METARs and TAFs. Which are inscrutible at first blush, but remarkably concise and efficient once you learn it.

You can get a sense for how inscrutible the language is when you learn that METAR officially stands for “aviation routine weather report”. The actual reports are no better.

That wodge of text is current weather at four airports in the Bay Area. The first line is San Carlos, where the wind is from the north at 6 knots, visibility is 20 miles, cloud cover is scattered at 10,000 feet, and it’s 16°C (dewpoint 5°C). That report is pretty simple; it gets more complex when you have codes for thunderstorms, fog, volcanic ash, etc. Charmingly some of the codes are English (TS: thunderstorm) and some are French (GR: grêle, hail).

On first and second exposure I was horrified at this coding. It felt like a 1940s telegram. But having spent a couple of hours studying it I can appreciate its brevity. One particularly nice feature is that it’s (more or less) fixed width, so you can quickly vertically compare reports over time or from multiple airports. They’re also ideally suited for Twitter: @KSQL, @KPAO.

The METAR websites offer a “translated view”, with the data all unpacked into multi-line English. I see now why the pilots I know don’t use it; too wordy, and you know the compact format already why not use it? I still think you could make a better reporting system using simple HTML tables, but aviation is conservative. mobilemetar.com strikes a nice balance for iPhone users.

I’m toying with writing blog entries about the pilot learning process, maybe even a separate pilot blog. Or maybe just mix them in here. Have an opinion? Mail me.