about pilotised

What Pilotised is

Pilotised is a small independent site: a set of live aviation weather and performance tools, and a library of plain-English guides. It is written for student pilots and general aviation pilots who want to understand the reasoning behind a figure rather than just read it off a screen. Everything is free and nothing needs an account.

Where the numbers come from

• METARs, TAFs, SIGMETs, airport details and runway alignments come from the Aviation Weather Center at aviationweather.gov. Reports are fetched on demand and held for at most five minutes.
• Precipitation radar tiles come from RainViewer, refreshed at most every two minutes.
• Airport positions and elevations come from OurAirports, a public-domain database shipped with the site.
• Every calculation on the site, the crosswind components, density altitude, the wind triangle, top of descent and holding entry, is worked out here from those inputs. None of it is passed through from a third party.

Wind, runways and true against magnetic

A written METAR reports wind in degrees true. Runway numbers are magnetic. Pilotised never mixes the two: wind components are computed against each runway's true alignment, and the magnetic variation published for that airport is applied where a magnetic figure is what you actually want to read. Spoken tower and ATIS winds are magnetic, so they will not always match a decoded METAR for the same minute.

What this is not

Pilotised has no official status and is not an approved source for flight planning. It is for training, revision and reference. Brief every flight from the official service for your area and check NOTAMs. Feeds go stale, airports stop reporting, and code has bugs: treat every figure here as something to check, not something to trust.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong or a guide explains something badly, please say so on the contact page. Corrections are the fastest way to make this better and are always welcome.