Thwarted yet again

I’d arranged with Rosie for me to fly MYRO down yesterday so she could do the check flight but the wind just blew and blew and blew. So the plan just went straight out of the window.

Today we’ve had a severe weather warning for ‘constant heavy’ rain here in the South-East but, surprise surprise, not only is there absolutely no sign of it, but this morning would have been perfect for me to have got the check flight done as it’s bright with medium-high broken cloud and practically calm out there. But I can’t because I’m expecting my mother to arrive any time now to visit for the day.

And thanks once again to the Met Office for a brilliant weather forecast – NOT! When will they ever start getting things right because even with all of the technology available to them, they can’t do forecasts with any accuracy at all apparently. And even while I was sitting here an hour ago with bright skies and broken cloud they were still trying to convince me when I checked the Met Office web site for the regional weather that I was actually experiencing heavy rain, as they’d forecast the day before 😕

The worrying thing is, of course, that the Met Office general analysis and forecast is used for the aviation forecasts as well, so they must be just as inaccurate. It seems to me that because of the embarrassment the Met Office has experienced over the past couple of years on account of their appallingly inaccurate ‘long range’ seasonal forecasts (Barbecue Summer and all that) now they have swung the other way and always make their forecasts highly pessimistic. This may be fine for the general population who might feel good when the forecast ‘bad weather’ doesn’t materialise, but not so good for people like pilots whose activities are highly linked to what the weather is actually doing. If I’d been planning some local flying this morning and had decided to do something else instead on account of the weather forecast, I’d be very annoyed indeed 😐

As it is, I’m just feeling a bit frustrated!