When I first started building this site, the purpose was to provide the best information possible to pilots. The hope being pilots with good information make good decisions. The combination of thousands of rational and educated decisions, lead to a better more reasonable industry.
Any free market requires some level of transparency for the players to make sensible, rational decisions. Without sensible decision making we end up with Dot-Com bubbles or Real Estate bubbles, or possibly even educational bubbles. Bubbles are just unbounded enthusiasm un-tempered by un-educated players. Most of the time its these players who are hurt the most when the laws of economics or physics or whatever begin to apply their unrelenting arithmetic.
If only the players had known the arithmatic before hand, they could have understood and expected the natural consequences tied to reality. Its similar to the old saying , ” when you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.” Doesn’t really matter if you like the other side, it just comes with it. So most rational beings will avoid the stick where they may not like what’s on the other side.
What does this have to with Weather forecasting and Pilot Demand forecasting? When we as pilots go flying, we like to know whats on the other side in regards to weather, before we pick up that stick. Matter of fact for most airline ops this is required by regulation. All of us know though that sometimes due to circumstances beyond the forecasters models or by just plain chance things go differently. In some places they say they plan on the weather going differently almost every time, but does that stop them from trying to use forecasts? No, its the best information available about what we can expect. We may not trust the forecast but that is sometimes healthy. It does however, give us a bench mark, to apply our own experience and the experience of others to. We begin to interpret those models for our own circumstances, much better than we could have without any data.
You probably by now see the similarity. Why should we invest tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in flight training, without having some idea what we can expect. Sure we could look at the “weather rock” and the ground and see a shadow, and assume its sunny. Most of us know that it is a very limited picture. Similarly, 6 years ago at a regional they would have easily said, “well today upgrades are happening in a year and a half”. Today most are seeing 5-8 years.
Its the hope of this website to provide a baseline of data much like weather forecasts from which pilots and their mentors can apply their own experience and knowledge to make better informed decisions.
