Free Weather Theory Course for Pilots

As reported in this month’s Flying Magazine, the National Weather Association (NWA) is offering a free online weather theory course.   It is designed to help general aviation pilots understand how weather theory affects flying.
When you go to their website (see links below) you will find they currently offer two “modules”  An introduction module and an aircraft performance module.  To begin you download each module to your computer.  You are actually downloading a zip file which contains an executable file that will launch a  Macromedia Shockwave presentation.  Each download is roughly 22 megabytes.  The introduction module goes over:

• Moisture
• Vertical Motion
• Stability

The aircraft performance module goes over…well, how weather affect aircraft performance.

I found both tutorials and courses to be extremely informative and highly educational.   The aircraft performance is very through and goes through many different aircraft performance scenarios and how weather would affect that situation.    I also learned from their website that they are planning on releasing two more courses Aviation Weather Forecasts and Application of Weather Theory.  I look forward to both additional courses.

My only complaints about this course would be that it is advertised as online and really you download the course which makes a “offline” course and also the menu and navigation were a little bit clumsy.  Once you start a section, you can’t stop it.   I actually had to use CTL-ALT-DEL and the task manager to end it when I had to stop it mid course.

You can check it out and review it for yourself at http://www.nwas.org/committees/aviation/WeatherTheory/

Enjoy.  I look forward to hearing your comments about the course.