Transcription
Hi, and welcome to meteorology. Uh, this summer class is an 8-week online course that uses the same material that we use during a normal semester but is going to be completed in about half the time. So it'll be a little bit of work, but uh, I think if you follow along and and kind of keep up, you should be just fine. Uh, I commend all of you for taking this during the summer, and uh, hopefully, because it's accelerated, you don't have time to forget stuff, so you should be good to go.
So let me introduce myself. My name is Mike Man. You can see my email address uh at the top of the slide; that's the best way to get a hold of me during the semester. And uh, we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a second. I'll be reviewing the syllabus, and then eventually I'll tell you a little bit more about myself and uh why I'm teaching this class.
So as far as the syllabus, because this is kind of the the meat and potatoes of this class, uh, we—it comes in modules. So hopefully, if you're on an online class, you're familiar with how Canvas works. Uh, if not, there are some references in the syllabus uh that you can link to to get more information uh from uh some of the online help sources that we have at OCC, which are pretty handy. Uh, but the modules themselves elves are set up in the order in which you should be progressing through the class. So if you follow along in the order that they're written, you should be just fine. Uh, there are reading assignments uh to reinforce, of course, the lecture, quiz, and exam material. So make sure that uh, after you've watched the lecture, you've taken the time to read and overview some of that information. And if you do have any questions, of course, you can always email me.
So make sure you follow everything in the order, do the quizzes, uh, which are very important as far as attendance is concerned. Since this is an online course, it's very important to make sure uh that you interact with the course. And since it's not live or live online, the only way you can interact with this course is usually by completing something like a discussion or quiz or an exam. So the most important one, of course, besides the big exams, are is the first week. So make sure that you participate in some of the assignments in the first week, and uh, because if you don't, unfortunately, there is a mandatory drop. So if I don't see the interaction with that first week, uh, I will unfortunately have to drop you. So uh, kind of keep up in that way, and you'll be just fine.
Um, other than that, email responses, as far as far as a syllabus is concerned or any questions about the course, uh, go ahead and send me an email. I have a 24- to 48-hour policy uh when it comes to uh responding, because you know, occasionally I might be on a trip or a weekend or something like that, and uh, but I will get back to you fairly quickly. And sometimes, especially if on the I'm on the computer, I'll get back to you really quick. So uh, I do have Zoom meetings, so those are available if you need them uh for for us to have a conversation about whatever the, you know, could be an issue with the class or yourself or some personal stuff, whatever the case might be. Uh, you do need to make an appointment ahead of time, so send me an email; I can send you a link to a time that we both agree on, and uh, and that should work out really well.
The other thing that's important for this class is making sure that you read the entire syllabus uh before taking the syllabus quiz. Now, now most of our quizzes, as you'll find out, are open book, uh, which is awesome, um, but you know, it's your opportunity to get the highest score on these quizzes as possible uh when you're taking them. So uh, take your time, make sure you get the answers correct as much as you can, and that'll uh really do well for you towards the end of the semester. The exams though, as you'll find out, are not open book, of course, and they're under a lockdown browser. So that's all part of the first module; things that you'll have to set up to make sure that your computer is able to use the lockdown browser. If you have any other issues, you can contact myself or OCC support, which is in the syllabus, which is the best for technical help, uh, since I really can't do anything technical uh for the course from from where I'm at. So uh, make sure that you look through the syllabus and find those links. If you have any other question questions or problems, you know, please get a hold of me. All right.
So as far as the uh books that you'll need for the class, uh, the first is the Aviation Weather Handbook. So that's the main one that you're going to need uh for uh this class. The nice thing about the Aviation Weather Handbook is it is an FAA uh published book, and in that case, it gives you all the information you'll need to pass a lot of the these FA exams. So if it's in this book, this is most likely where they're getting all their weather questions from. So uh, it's a good handy reference. Uh, in addition to the the next one, which is the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. This is also a really good book for you to have and uh because it talks about all sorts of things Aviation uh that you'd be able to reference to and maybe a different perspective on something that you need a little bit more clarity; you'd be able to most likely find it here. Now uh, of course, both of these books should be available for you uh in the Orange Coast uh bookstore, uh, but if you need them from somewhere else, you can find them on Amazon. Uh, you can also—this is the kind of cool thing—because there are FAA Publications, even though the ones in the picture that you see say ASA on them, because they actually take the FA information and put them in a book form. So you can actually order a book, but from the FA, you can actually download the PDF for free, which is pretty awesome. So the link to that, of course, is in the syllabus; you go ahead and click on that and download it; it's straight out of the FA uh website, and uh just keep it on your—as a—it comes down as a PDF, which is uh kind of nice because it's easy to search and all that kind of good stuff.
So most of the time uh when I start my lectures, I'll start off with a quote, not always, but uh in this case, this is a pretty good one. Uh, it starts off—we don't know who actually says it, but it really doesn't matter because it's the uh the information that's important—says it's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you're on the ground. If you kind of think about that, it's it's uh it brings true, especially when you start to fly, and uh you get in kind of a situation where uh what I call is Jiminy Cricket or that that Consciousness that you have; you're thinking about, you know, maybe I made a mistake; I shouldn't be flying right now. Um, an example that I have uh was flying out of Fullerton; I hadn't had my instrument uh rating yet, and uh because of that, I was—it was a VFR flight up to Fresno uh flying in a Piper 180. As I took off and flew out of Fullerton, uh kind of crossing over the LA Bas, and I realized, even though legally I had three miles of visibility and it was basically hazy—uh, not cloudy, but just hazy—uh, I thought I should be good to go, you know, I got a a couple hundred hours, uh, but as I took off and started climbing in that direction, I realized after a few minutes that I looked down and I said, you know, I really can't see a lot of landmarks very well, and it was really hazy. 3-mile visibility is not a lot of visibility, and uh at the end of this semester, we're going to have a personal minimums thing that uh we're going to work through; it shows you checklists and things to look up and who you get the information from to create this uh as far as a personal minimums list. And that's one of the things that I learned out afterwards that's really important for us to know what our limitations are when we're flying. In this case, of course, I just turned the aircraft around because that's, you know, that would be the smart thing to do; came back and landed in Fullerton because I knew where I left from and where I needed to go to, and it was still visual uh conditions. So anyway, uh that's just one of those things that, you know, if something feels funny in your in your your stomach or you start having a little bit of Doubt, uh you either can discuss it with a CFI or call somebody or just delay or change the flight to another day.
Right, so in this class, we're going to talk a lot about the weather environment. Right, so so uh the weather environment is—we're going to talk about some kind of really specific stuff. Um, of course, we're not talking about a beautiful day like this, but uh you know, it's always nice to have those, and but we're going to be talking about some different components of the atmosphere uh that can cause different uh effects on our aircraft and ourselves while we're flying. So one of those, of course, is the temperature. So we're really going to look at temperature because it has a really big impact on weather and the types of weather depending on the time of the year. So we'll look at uh temperatures as it it affects the aircraft's performance. We're going to look how heat does that as far as how it affects air density. Uh, we'll we'll see a big difference in that; we'll actually do that fairly soon. And then, of course, cold conditions and which typically work in our favor because the air is a little bit more dense, and we get more performance performance out of it. And as we talk about it a little bit more, you'll understand why that is. Other things that are important, of course, are wind. So wind can come from any direction; it can go up, down, sideways, slantways; it doesn't really matter; there's a bunch of different ways to, you know, figure out where the winds are coming from and what direction they're blowing. And then you have to be able to, as a pilot, figure out how am I going to deal with those winds uh based upon what I'm doing: taking off, Landing, in-route operations as far as uh you trying to be as efficient as possible while we're flying.
The uh next thing that we're going to look at, or one of the things we'll look at, of course, is precipitation. So if you look at this slide, it's kind of cool because it walks through four different types of precipitation. So it's not just rain, which is what most of us think about; precipitation is kind of an overall word talking about rain, snow, sleet, and hail and other things that can almost be in between, right? Cuz you can have, you know, snowy rain or sleet, that kind of stuff. Uh, hail can be different sizes depending on where it's at; if it's coming from a thunderstorm or not, all sorts of stuff. So we'll look at all the different types of forms of precipitation, where we typically will find them, and what we can do about it, of course, when something like that happens. Uh, the next thing we'll probably look at, and it will be part of a lot of our discussion, is pressure. Okay, well, maybe not this type of pressure, right? But we're going to be talking about the atmospheric pressure, of course, and that deals with density, uh where we're climbing or descending in altitude, and whether or not we can have good or bad Performance Based on the air pressure and uh all these kind of things that—because you'll you'll find out that a lot of these different uh factors will work together also: temperature and pressure and all sorts of stuff. So we'll look at them individually, and then we'll see how they interact with each other as we go through the course, and you'll feel a little bit more confident in some of that information uh as we work our way towards the end of the semester. So understanding these concepts, of course, will help you in your aeronautical decision making and as you start to plan your cross-country flights.
Introductions—this basically is going to be about myself. So I'm going to give you an introduction, and this introduction kind of gives you a template of what you can do on your first uh discussion assignment. So the first discussion assignment is all about talking a little bit about yourself. I'll give you a slide—basically the name and why you got into it or why you like Aviation, that kind of stuff. I'll show you that in a second, but uh let me tell you a little bit about myself, and then you can get an idea of what you should should talk about uh during the discussion assignment.
So I started out flying, like most of you will. Uh, I like Cessnas, uh mainly; I like high wings because I like to have the view, knowing that it's blue above me; I want to see all the rest of the stuff. So that was mainly why. Uh, the other reason is it's a high wing; you get a little Shelter From the Sun if it's hot outside, which as we kind of roll into summer, you'll you'll appreciate that part. It's got two doors, which is also a bonus, just in case, right? It's always good to have another way out, uh, but in this case, I just like Cessnas; a fairly docile, great training plane, and uh we talk about it a lot in uh aerodynamics, which I offer in the spring, and uh a lot of fun to fly. Uh, the others uh would be Pipers; Pipers are wonderful aircraft; they also are just as docile as a Cessna 172, and there's—these are great airplanes that you guys can learn into. So I started this way back in the early '90s. Uh, even though I did transition out of one career to another, I originally was a critical care respiratory therapist, and I did that for quite a number of years uh before I was working on another degree and saw the planes coming into LAX. I was in Carson at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and as I watched uh before a night class all the planes come in, and I thought that'd be kind of interesting, you know, I wonder what it'd be like to be a pilot. My dad was a pilot in World War II, surprisingly, uh because he had me when he was a little bit older, and but unfortunately, he passed away; I never got to ask him questions about what it was like to fly a B-17.
As I progressed past that, and I just started to move into a new career, when I decided after a demo flight that that was really what I wanted to do, I continued my journey, and I started a Part 135 charter company uh kind of from scratch. And when I did that, this is uh a representative of one of the first planes that I flew in that charter company, which is a Turbo 210; wonderful plane, holds six passengers, typically you have four with a bunch of luggage. Uh, surprisingly, it goes very fairly fast and can haul quite a bit of stuff and go in and out of some very short fields, which is a lot of fun. So most of that—this charter company uh was essentially focused on like ecotourism and and was mainly focused on the Southwestern United States and Mexico, but uh we could also go to Canada too, but in order to get there, we had to get a different type of airplane, so we switched up to a Golden Eagle uh which is a nine-passenger pressurized piston twin. Uh, in this—turbocharged piston twin—this shot's over in Catalina by the way, which is one of those airports you'd have a blast getting checked out to um because it's fun to fly in and out of there; there's places to eat when you get there; they have a bunch of merch and stuff inside which is a lot better than it used to be, and then they have really big cookies if you're a cookie fan uh that they have, so you can hang out outside, maybe see a buffalo or two as you watch the airplanes come in.
Uh, let's see—the chapter—I've had this airplane for a while; there was a little bit of a change uh to the mission of the company, and some of the clients were going more towards into Mexico, and uh I had to service them with a a plane that was a little bit more reliable and was able to go into some of these airports such as Celita Lindo right here, uh which is a kind of a sand, SL, dirt strip right next to the beach off to the left-hand side of the picture. If you walk down about about a quarter mile, you'd be just walking right into the ocean, which is pretty cool. Uh, let's see—other things we'll talk about hopefully in the future uh towards—I think it's the second half of the very short semester—uh, about lecture number nine, we'll talk about icing, and I'll talk you a little bit—little—little story about this aircraft and how it performs in icing and something that happened to me on my way to uh Arrowhead to pick up a customer. All right, so we'll talk about that one later.
So I moved from uh Cessna Caravan and I went into the airlines to start flying and as a pilot for SkyWest. There was a few different models uh that I flew; the CRJ200 is a 50-passenger jet. This is typically what most of the pilots will learn in as they start to fly, right? Uh, of course, that's after you pass all this other stuff: the ground school and simulators and all that kind of good stuff. But of course, the first first time you fly that aircraft, you had never flown a jet with people on board, and it's pretty wild. So you go from a simulator straight into flying passengers, paying passengers on a jet; it's crazy, but it is a lot of fun. And eventually, we moved up to or I moved up to flying the CRJ700, which is a kind of a little bit of a hot rod; it's got big engines and a smaller fuselage in comparison to the CRJ900, uh which has similar size engines, but it's extended and uh all three of them are fairly fast airplanes, even though the CJ200 isn't isn't the best performer overall, and it's usually used for like shorter legs and stuff like that. So when I left the airlines, it was mainly for lifestyle reasons, which allowed me to come and teach at Orange Coast College, which is great because I love teaching new pilots and teaching them all the experiences and stuff that I've gone through; put a little bit more relevance in a lot of my lectures, so people can kind of understand some of the concepts a little bit better uh with maybe some of the stories that have that use those same examples as we kind of go through the semester. Uh, so I'm basically full circle because when I became a respiratory therapist, I got my degree at Orange Coast, so I'm a post-Coasty, so that's one of the ways to put it, and uh so now I'm back teaching at Orange Coast, which is a lot of fun, right?
So uh currently, though, since uh I got most of my commercial experience through flying, uh I didn't do the traditional CFI route like most folks do, and because of that, I'm kind of doing things a little bit backwards. So I've finished all the commercial flying as far as Charter and the Airlines, and now I'm going back to get my CFI, which I should knock out this summer and uh start teaching uh students directly, which will be a lot of fun. So I've come full circle, and uh now at this point, it's your opportunity to be able to take your experiences; doesn't matter if you have a lot of experiences or not; it's your enthusiasm and your your willingness to kind of step up and try and be an aviator, which is what what's important. So whether you're going to be in going into dispatch or drone flying or airline pilot flying or, you know, private, it doesn't really matter. So this is your your opportunity during this discussion that you guys are going to do uh is to make sure that you express the way you feel about Aviation and what your goals are and that kind of stuff. Keep it simple, and then have your—this is an opportunity for…
You interact with other students. Which, of course, as you'll read, and the discussion is part of the assignment. It's to make sure that you not only post your own information but comment on others, so we can get to know each other. You'll find out this is going to be beneficial in the long run because aviation truly is a very small world. So, the folks you meet today are probably folks that you're going to know probably throughout your career, which is kind of nice. So enjoy the course as much as you can. We'll get into some more details here in a second, but you'd be surprised, when you do this discussion, how much you might have in common with a lot of your classmates.
Here's kind of the meat and potatoes of our course: Why do we study the weather? Why we study the weather? I just list a few things that we're going to talk about throughout the semester. And one of them is a go/no-go decision. It's important when you're trying to make a decision of whether or not you're going to fly that you take everything into consideration. So we're going to be focusing more on the weather side of it. And then, of course, Stanley and some of the other folks that are teaching other courses will talk about the details associated with other things outside of the weather. So hopefully, we'll be able to make good decisions. In addition to the go/no-go decision, forecasting is super important. That's kind of the main part of weather because we can all look outside, for the most part, and figure out what the weather is today, or at least in the area that we're at. But the beauty of aviation is that we can fly to other places, such as from here to San Francisco. And we know that the weather typically can be different from Southern California and Northern California. And because of that, we need to have, or be able to figure out, what the weather is going to be like in the future, which of course is what forecasting is all about. So you'll be able to anticipate what you're going to be flying through.
Choosing the proper aircraft—we'll talk about that throughout the course—because there are certain things that different aircraft have that can actually help or hinder you when it comes to weather. The other thing, in addition to the aircraft, is your personal experience. So in the beginning of the course, where you don't have much experience at all, versus someone who, like myself, has a lot of experience, there's a big difference between the type of pilot that you are at the time and the choices of the type of weather that you feel like you're capable of flying in. So we'll talk about that throughout the course and hopefully help you build up some of that judgment so you can make some good choices. A little bit later, we're going to talk about crummy weather, light IFR, crappy IFR. We're also going to be talking about some bad weather, right? So, pretty dangerous weather actually. We'll start talking about that, but it's important for you guys to look at both these conditions. As long as you're prepared and you have the right aircraft, you should be fine. Um, but understanding what to do when the weather goes down and how to get out of that situation is something that we need to go ahead and think about ahead of time. And, of course, the last thing we're going to talk about is aircraft performance. Some of it has to do with aerodynamics; other has to do with ground handling. And we'll talk about all those different aspects as we continue on in this course. All right.
Now that we've talked about a little bit about some of the stuff or benefits that we're going to get from the course, we're going to talk about the description itself. So, we're going to talk about, in this course, the forces that generate or affect the weather. And some of those things are some like weather systems, highs and lows, and warm fronts and cold fronts and stuff. We'll talk about all that kind of stuff. We'll look at all the weather hazards that might be associated with some of those different variables that we're going to have to deal with as we start to look at the weather more in depth and make decisions. A little bit later, we're going to use some of the aircraft weather services that are available to us—both online, on the phone, through apps, all that kind of stuff—to be able to, you know, get the information that we have in order to evaluate the weather. We get quite a bit, so I think you'll enjoy, as we go through the course, talking about all the different places that you can look for it and how easy it is, for the most part, to be able to get some of this information to make your job as a pilot a little bit easier. We're going to look at aviation meteorological reports. So there's kind of the staples of when you go to fly, whether it's local or distant. We'll talk about all those different types of reports that you can go over. And, of course, the end result is cross-country weather planning procedures, by using that information that we received, to make sure that we have a safe flight when we fly.
One of the reasons why we do this, of course, is because we want to try and be as safe as possible. So here's an example of a report that was written: It's a weather-related aviation accident study. Now, of course, you look at the dates, 2003 to 2007—that was a little while ago, you know, a little over 20 years ago, almost 20 years ago, 2007—but, uh, in this case, what this report does is it starts to walk through some of the information that causes aircraft crashes, accidents, or incidents, um, because due specifically to the weather itself. So I've highlighted in red a lot of those conditions that cause problems for pilots. And some of them are going to be pretty obvious to you guys, right, if you just kind of read through it. We're going to talk about them individually here in a second. You'll find out that all these things are things that, of course, can upset the aircraft or the person that's flying the aircraft if they're not familiar with it, and that could be a problem, which is why it leads to accidents. But in these contributing factors that we're looking at, you know, one of the reasons why we study the weather is to avoid those conditions that can cause us, or our passengers, or the folks on the ground, harm if we don't handle it properly.
In this course, we're going to learn a little bit more about risk, right? Because risk is inherent in most things that we do in life, whether we're driving a car, we're hiking in the mountain, whether we're playing sports, or flying, we have to realize there's always going to be risk in anything that we do. Now, reducing risk is called risk mitigation. Now, the FAA plays a role, but it really kind of makes sense for all of us to want to do this anyway because we want to live to fly another day. So what we, what the FAA would like to do is they want to increase the pilot's awareness when it comes to AV, or aeronautical decision making. I mean, they actually even publish a book called Aeronautical Decision Making, which is actually pretty interesting. You'll get into that one a little bit later as you start to, you know, go through some of your ratings and stuff, and you'll find out that this book is actually pretty handy in helping you make decisions and kind of building up that confidence that you need that you'll be able to use a little bit later on in your career as a pilot. But a lot of that starts with classes just like this one on weather, because having a good knowledge and a good base of, of, of the weather and forecasting and the kind of stuff will give you that big boost when it comes to aeronautical decision making when it comes to a little bit later on in your career.
So let's look at some of those factors that are listed on this slide: Causes and contributing factors to weather and weather-related accidents. So the first one listed is wind. Now, wind can be your friend or a foe, right? Faster or slower, it kind of makes you work for the, for the money you're getting paid when it comes to flying in like tough crosswinds and kind of that kind of stuff. But we'll talk about winds, how to compensate for them, how, what, what you do to air speeds, all kind of stuff, all those things that you need, or those tools that you need in your back pocket to be able to fly as safely as you can and mitigate some of those risks when it comes to wind. But wind is one of the largest factors of accidents in airplanes, and mainly because it affects us every single time that we go fly a plane. Now the next one is visibility and ceilings. So visibility, obviously, is what you can see; typically it's in statute miles. And then ceilings are something usually associated with a cloud layer above the airport, and the ceiling just lists on how low that cloud layer is. So this is typically, this can be pretty bad as far as a contributing factor because if someone didn't get the forecast ahead of time or anticipate, through that forecast, what those weather conditions might be, they could potentially fly into a situation where they might actually not be able to land because the conditions are worse than either were forecast or beyond the capabilities of themselves or the aircraft that they're flying. So this can, this can affect visual flight pilots and instrument-rated flight pilots, so a little bit different there.
Other things that are important, of course, high-density altitude, which we're going to talk about fairly soon, not of course today, but high-density altitude when it comes to flying in or out of, let's say, a higher altitude airport, such as Big Bear or Mammoth, or someplace like Salt Lake City, Utah, that kind of stuff. So whether it's mountains, deserts, hot or humid conditions, they all affect aircraft performance and aerodynamics, and it's important to be able to calculate this kind of stuff ahead of time to make sure that you can truly anticipate how well that aircraft is going to perform. So turbulence is something—well, not everybody likes, I mean, I'll be honest with you, most pilots that you know, they like a smooth ride. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, right? So, but if you get into turbulence, it's, you know, it can vary from a little bit of turbulence to quite a bit. It can happen on warm days; it could happen around thunderstorms or even clear air turbulence where you can't even see what's going on and it all of a sudden it just happens. So we'll talk about turbulence. I'm going to show a video during—turbulence is probably, I think, one of the funnier videos that I show in the class, um, but it's an example of what turbulence is and how passengers are reacting to it as they're flying along in a fairly large aircraft.
So other things we'll talk about is carburetor icing. If you're flying an aircraft that has a carburetor, as an example, the one I'm flying right now is an older 172, and it does have a carburetor in it, and so I have to be concerned about carburetor ice. We'll talk about what it is and how it can affect the performance of the aircraft when you're flying updrafts and downdrafts. Of course, those are pretty straightforward, right? We're flying along; you could get bounced up or down. And we'll talk about how that can affect your aircraft, how to control things, how to fly when it's really crappy out, that kind of stuff. So we'll chat about that a little bit more. This can happen in mountain flying, crossing over deserts, or in thunderstorm weather when we have a lot of instability, right? So other things, of course, are other reasons that we can have factors that are related to aircraft accidents; they're listed down at the bottom. Now, in this case, you look at some pretty big things right here, right? Precipitation icing, thunderstorms, wind shear—this is pretty gnarly stuff—but in this case, we're going to find out that the reason why this is kind of down at the bottom and the risk is not as high because of risk mitigation. So because we're learning about it now, when we get into a situation where we know there's a lot of precipitation icing or thunderstorms, we're going to know how to avoid it, how to fly the aircraft as safely as possible so that we have better outcomes when it comes to flying the aircraft.
To give you a view of what it looks like when I just arrived at LAX, we were taxiing back to our gate following this Triple 7. And if you can't see it, of course, but if you saw a radar, you'll see three large thunderstorms that were right off the coast of LA. And in this case, we had to dodge through those thunderstorms as we made our approach because they had to switch runways because that instrument landing system that they typically use getting into LAX had, well, it flooded, and because of it, it went down. So we had to switch runways, used the opposite runway, and did a non-precision approach, just like the old-school way, you know, where you had to actually control the aircraft by yourself, follow all the indications with raw data, and, uh, all while flying this big dog right in front of me, and, uh, which of course can be a little nerve-wracking because the bigger the aircraft in front of you, the more chances of wake turbulence and stuff, which we'll talk about later in the class, um, which you need to try and, of course, mitigate that threat, you know, try, try and avoid it. So in the end, of course, everything worked out well, and, uh, as you can tell, we, cuz we're taxiing behind him, and it's just another one of those days where you earn your money when you go out and fly in commercial aviation.
Another one, this next picture—let's see if we can get it to come up—there we go. This is about 35,000 feet, flying to Denver. And in this case, you're going to see a beautiful day, right, as we're crossing over the mountains. And one of the things, of course, as a pilot, you have to think about as you're crossing over, even though you're enjoying the view, is to think about, as you're crossing over the Rockies, that clear air turbulence I mentioned here a few minutes ago. So when you cross over the Rockies, anything can happen. Of course, you can get mountain waves and all sorts of stuff that you didn't anticipate. And so always being prepared. And so if there's any advice that I could give you right off the bat at the beginning of the class, is anytime you're in a commercial aircraft and you're flying anywhere, always wear your seatbelt. I'm not joking. So anything can happen out of the blue, totally unanticipated, and if you have your seatbelt on, you probably, you know, the worst-case scenarios, you might spill your drink or something like that, or some food could go fly, but at least you'll be still sitting in your seat, safe and secured, and, you know, because some bad things have happened truly when clear air turbulence happens that is totally unanticipated. So we'll talk about that during class too, show you some pictures of—it can be pretty devastating.
Other good things, of course, we have a picture here; there's, there's two displays. The one on the left is a multi-function display; the one on the right is a pilot's flight display. And in this case, we're on our way to Atlanta, and we just happen to be in the jet stream, which is a lot of fun to do. So every time you get into the jet stream, if you notice at the top, I kind of highlighted it, it's our ground speed, or the speed in which the aircraft is traveling over the ground, in knots. In this case, is 637, which is over 700 mph, and so we're going really, really fast, which is a lot of fun, to be able to get that opportunity to do that. You can see here in a second where I'll show you—where is it going to pop up?—here we go—where it shows the degrees, 240°, and the squin speed that is on our tail of 156 knots. So we're, we're just jamming. So this, the faster trip I think we've ever had going into Atlanta, which was a lot of fun to do. And so these are some of the kind of cool things you can look forward to.
In addition to that, we have this picture; we took off out of Houston, going over the overcast, or in this case, kind of, it's not a marine layer, but this is typically what our marine layer looks like, or is very similar, out of Southern California. But it's really kind of cool as to see the sun come up reflecting off the clouds, which is kind of neat. Other things we got—this departure out of Dallas. In this case, I'm sitting in the back, and this was kind of funny because thunderstorms can do really nasty things to airports in Dallas. And we'll talk about an accident that happened in Dallas quite a few years ago, but we all learn from mistakes sometimes that people have made in the past so that we don't make them in the future. But in this particular case, we were all actually going in one direction, and then they had to switch the whole airport around, and everybody that you see here had to turn their airplanes around and go to the opposite end of the field because this is what we were dealing with. So I took this picture of the radar as I was sitting in the seat, looking at, at the same time I took that last picture, and we are located right where that little blue dot is, and it was pretty crazy. So because of that, of course, we had to switch the runways. Eventually, we took off, but the reality is is no one's going to take off into a thunderstorm because it truly will end badly, right? So we'll learn a lot about thunderstorms; we'll have a whole lecture when we come to talk about it, which is kind of cool.
Now, one of the fun things that you can do as an airline pilot is you can request this San Francisco tour departure. So it's cool, have, what, what heading was it out of the bridge? I know. So the things we're going to learn in this course, of course, will be METARS. So if you don't understand anything you see on your screen right now, by the end of the semester you will know what all those terms mean. So if you want to start practicing now, there's, there's a website called AWC, Aviation Weather Center, and if you use this site, it'll start—you can start to look up some of the weather information and maybe start to practice. So I'll be telling you throughout the semester to continue to practice METARS, terminal area forecast, that kind of stuff, so you can start to read some of this raw material as, as you get prepared to, uh, do all your flight preparation, flight planning, that kind of stuff a little bit later. Other things you'll be able to do, which is kind of fun in an aircraft, is being able to fly just over the clouds with the sun just opposite, and you'd be able to get these kind of interesting-looking viewpoints of your aircraft. So there's kind of a little bit better picture as we were flying a 172 up north, or I'm sorry, it was in Southern California, as we were flying towards John Wayne Airport, right? You'll be able to identify things like towering cumulus, which is an indicator typically of a potential thunderstorm in the future that could eventually end up with this, which is the anvil that comes out of the top when it starts to mature, gets bigger and bigger, that kind of stuff. We'll explain what that is. And of course, last is this short video for KLAX coming into LAX as I was waiting for the end of my shift when I was sitting what's called hot reserve, when they need, you know, pilots available at kind of a moment's notice, just in case someone calls in sick or whatever the case might be, so they can keep the planes flying typically.
That happens in, of course, somebody's base. Uh, but this was kind of cool because KM did us a [Applause].
All right, now that you've enjoyed the view, not only of KM but of the parking lot—they're super exciting, right? Um, I leave you with this. So, uh, as we fly over, skimming the tops of the clouds, going up to Eugene, Oregon, we look at the first line. This says, "Don't forget to complete all the assignments in each each module." Right? Super important because that's how I take role for the class and Par participation. Right? So make sure you get all your assignments done.
The syllabus quiz has some very important guidelines for you guys to be aware of: like quizzes, tests, assignments, email—all sorts of stuff. Make sure you take your time and go through it. There is a syllabus quiz—open book, of course—but make sure that you read read through it so you can answer the questions appropriately. Right?
And then, of course, last, we'll always remember this class is of a shorter time frame uh than a regular semester. So, you know, try and keep up as much as you can. If you do and take the quizzes, active in the discussions, that kind of stuff, you know what you're going to be perfectly fine. I do have, uh, before any of the big tasks, uh, a study guide uh before each the the midterm and the final. So, if, as long as you do that study guide and look up all the answers for the study guide, you actually should do it quite well. So, know that that's uh going to be the case. I look forward to uh working with you guys throughout this semester. And of course, if you have any other questions, feel free to uh send me an email. And otherwise, I look forward to seeing you at the next lecture.