Cross Country Relocation...Radar Required!

http://www.findmespot.com/spotadventures/index.php/view_adventure?tripid=337717

Summer relocation of the HRII, Miami to Portland. 3,364 miles, give or take!

Lunch in Destin, FL
Dinner in New Orleans
Lunch in Junction, TX (almost got us stuck in TX Saturday)
Dinner in Phoenix
Lunch in Salt Lake City

I'll take my XM NEXRAD over the iPad/Stratus2 NEXRAD anytime. Much more reliable. Other than that, Foreflight beats all my Garmin $tuff by a mile. Flown with both for a long time and the XM is way better for radar.

I agree that the XM is great stuff, the ADSB wx is good stuff, but you wont find me in IMC conditions around convective stuff without a real radar and that aint gonna happen in an RV. You assesment of radar required is spot on for IMC in convective areas.

VMC around it is another whole story. One peek is worth a thousand sweeps..
Been there done that and the NEXRAD stuff is a great tool for strategic planning.

Hope your trip goes smoothly. What a great adventure.

drdestructo said:

http://www.findmespot.com/spotadventures/index.php/view_adventure?tripid=337717



I'll take my XM NEXRAD over the iPad/Stratus2 NEXRAD anytime. Much more reliable. Other than that, Foreflight beats all my Garmin $tuff by a mile. Flown with both for a long time and the XM is way better for radar.

Click to expand...

My experience is exactly the opposite. I lost track of the number of times I had to call/contact xm to send a refresh signal to make my xm radio work. Happened so often I stored the internet address on my iPad. But once, I was in the boonies with no internet, no cell service. Couldn't get xm re-activated. Not just that radio, either, I've had the same problems with my car xm radio. For a while I kept xm and ADSB-in. Essentially the same within what, 300 nm? Farther out the ADSB resolution is degraded compared to xm, but so what? Even in an RV it's going to have changed by the time I get there.

Certainly agree that either one is a great tool for long range plannng, not close in avoidance.

Edit: Forgot to mention I use Skyradar D2/WingX on iPad and GRT HX. Most areas I pull in multiple ground stations in flight, but often none on the ground, as expected.

RV8iator said:

I agree that the XM is great stuff, the ADSB wx is good stuff, but you wont find me in IMC conditions around convective stuff without a real radar and that aint gonna happen in an RV. You assesment of radar required is spot on for IMC in convective areas.

VMC around it is another whole story. One peek is worth a thousand sweeps..
Been there done that and the NEXRAD stuff is a great tool for strategic planning.

Hope your trip goes smoothly. What a great adventure.

Click to expand...

Amen to the above. XM has way to much possible lag to be used real time for convective wx avoidance. This has been written in blood by some very good pilots.

sailvi767 said:

Amen to the above. XM has way to much possible lag to be used real time for convective wx avoidance. This has been written in blood by some very good pilots.

Click to expand...

While I don't disagree with the premise (use XM for VFR convective weaether avoidance - don't trust it in IFR with complex weatehr), I would like to see the accident reports for the fatalities of folks that flew into thunderstorms IFR with XM weather on board. I have been looking for them, and haven't found them.

Certainly there are lots of cases where folks flew into bad weather (to a bad end)
while IFR - just haven't seen the cases where they did it with XM or ADS-B Nexrad on board.

Paul

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:

The pilot?s inadvertent encounter with severe weather, which resulted in the airplane?s left wing failing in positive overload. Contributing to the accident was the pilot?s reliance on outdated weather information that he received on his in-cockpit Next-Generation Radar (NEXRAD).

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=20111219X15943&key=1

Larry beat me to it, I was also thinking of this specific accident. It was covered pretty dramatically in the AOPA ASF CFI renewal course I took last fall.

Dave

Ironflight said:

While I don't disagree with the premise (use XM for VFR convective weaether avoidance - don't trust it in IFR with complex weatehr), I would like to see the accident reports for the fatalities of folks that flew into thunderstorms IFR with XM weather on board. I have been looking for them, and haven't found them.


Paul

Click to expand...

A couple here and here off the top of my head. I remember these two because they were close to me and each time I was airborne at the same time, dealing with the same weather system. There are lots more...

flyeyes said:

A couple here and here off the top of my head. I remember these two because they were close to me and each time I was airborne at the same time, dealing with the same weather system. There are lots more...

Click to expand...

Holy xxxx! Read the first one: "On two previous occasions the pilot had damaged airplanes flying thru 'heavy' weather". This has nothing to do with NEXRAD, this guy just had a death wish and apparently an inability to learn from experience.

Good links - thanks! And yes - you have to really want to get through weather bad to penetrate a thunderstorm area in the clouds in our type of airplane..... and you likely won't make it!

The trip was made entirely VFR using NEXRAD for route planning on the fly. Sometimes we were high (14,500) sometimes low (1000 agl). Couldn't have made the trip as flown safely without NEXRAD. Russ