I have a bit of a next level flying anxiety question. I know this sounds a bit silly to an aviation professional, but let's say that one has a very flexible schedule and large amounts of airmiles that allow you to change flights for ~free (costs something like 20 euros with our national carrier). I also generally hate flying/am always anxious, but find myself able to man up and stand 99% of aviation weather without being a complete wreck. But those couple of times the weather has been REALLY terrible though... well, it was nightmare-inducing terrible. (3 out of ~400 flights come to mind, one was during a tropical cyclone in Asia, one during Hurricane Sandy, and the third one just randomly had 3 hours straight of insane turbulence and ended up diverting.)
ANYWAY so let's say that for the aforementioned reasons I can change my flights for pretty much no cost/harm, and I'd like to have a way to find out in advance if there is something truly, ridiculously terrible ahead on our route. I've been looking at sites like turbulenceforecast.com and random weather satellites but I have a hard time differentiating the level of how bad it would be from these images. For example looking at this map:
Let's say the red line is our flight path. I assume that the cloud-shaped thing means bad weather, and FL480 means flight level 48k feet (?) etc. The rest I don't understand. I'd have no problem flying into "standard" bad weather that almost always seems to be present around the equator and especially Indonesia, but my question is how could I differentiate "another day at the office" from a genuine worst weather of the year by looking at these pictures? What do the things I circled (the black triangles and the XXXs) mean?
And yes I obviously know that you can never fully predict anything in advance, but given how captains often warn us in advance about bad weather enroute etc they must have some way of knowing when it's bad and when it's not. So if there are any resources for us mere mortals to figure out in advance when it's (likely) going to be 100/100 terrible, it'd be awesome. Oh and, I don't need a lecture about how pilots always fly around the worst weather anyway and how it's all perfectly safe etc, this is just purely a convenience issue. Like the time we flew (seemingly) into the cyclone, I would gladly have paid 20 euros and spent another couple of days in my destination to avoid that. I just assumed that it wouldn't be that bad, but in hindsight if there would've been a weather map to look at indicating the severity of that in advance I would've snap changed flights.
Not asking about any specific flight route fwiw, this is just something I've been thinking about lately. Thanks and I hope your recovery is still going well & you'll be up in the air soon!
Last edited by Chuck Bass; 01-04-2017 at 10:49 PM.