Direct Dialogues with Pilots

Invited by Singapore Airlines (SIA), I delivered a lecture on the windshear and turbulence alerting services for the Hong Kong International Airport at its Flight Operations Safety Symposium in August this year (Figure 1). The 2-day Symposium was attended by over 200 SIA pilots. Lecturers at the Symposium also included a radar expert from the US presenting on the onboard weather radar. This was intended to improve the skills of the pilots’ operation of the weather radar which in turn would lower the chance of the aircraft encountering turbulence associated with severe weather.

While en-route back to Hong Kong from Singapore, I had a chance to try out the onboard Internet service in uplinking the weather information of the Observatory’s Aviation Meteorological Information Dissemination System (AMIDS) to the aircraft (Figure 2). The AMIDS is a system dedicated to provide weather information to airlines. This test confirmed that, even though the onboard Internet service was still not very popular, graphical weather information could be directly uplink from the Observatory’s ground-based system to the aircraft so that the pilots could grasp the latest information in support of their operation of the flight.

Presentation on the windshear and turbulence alerting services for the Hong Kong International Airport at SIA’s Flight Operations Safety Symposium.

Real-time weather radar information on the AMIDS successfully uplink to the aircraft.