I no longer trust the stormscope to keep me out of thunderstorms (CB) since an unfortunate encounter with an area heavily charged with electricity.
Aviathor what kind of stormscope you use? I have a WX1000 with nav option works pretty well….
Wx500 coupled with G1000.
It seems to work pretty well until you realise its limitations.
I guess that some of it has to do with electrical activity being able to develop pretty quickly in convective weather. In any case a stormscope is a poor ersatz for weather radar.
This is the WX500 stormscope displaying on the KMD550, and on the Sandel SN3500 (x2).
I think stormscope interpretations take some experience. Honestly I prefer the separate display though I have a SN3500 like Peter (WX1000E can’t be interfaced though with the SN3500 like the WX500 can..) as the dots show much more clearly and you can monitor what is happening. Also the quality of the installation plays a major role how sensitive the storm scope detects the strikes IMHO.
What I noticed indeed in summer when TCU’s starts boiling the dot’s can start popping quite quickly and multiply (but maybe it’s to late already to take evasive action) but in any case a storm scope is not a tactical avoidance system. ADL or Achim’s solution in combination with a stormscope is of course even better…
I have experience with the WX11 and the WX1000E both work rather well….(but WX doppler radar can’t be beaten of course.. :) )
Of curse my view is biased but I’m not convinced by on board lightning detection. In fact I had an IMC flight into Basel years ago. As my old instructor told me in such a case rely on the stormscope so this is what I did and that flight outright scared me. That stormscope was no help at all while we wet through some bad weather and I kept coming back at my old ideas for the ADL project…
On our current plane we also have an WX500 and I can not remember one flight where this device made a difference. If we ever upgrade the complete avionics on our plane I will remove it and sell it (by the way the same applies to that basic radar altimeter). In my opinion useful weather awareness tools are:
1) Turbocharger: Often at FL200 you are out of the base clouds and can navigate many weather situations visually.
2) On board radar: Our 10 inch dish is very effective navigating short range weather up to 40NM ahead. Some bizjet systems also work at greater distances.
3) Data link weather. No matter which system you buy Avidyne, Garmin or my ADL devices data link weather is the only solution which can be easily retrofitted to about any GA plane at reasonable cost.
Wish I had ADL on my yesterdays trip from Hungary to Belgium
Please form an orderly queue ;-) If you have a WX1000 I can probably work out a trade in deal on this device. The WX1000 sells at reasonable prices in the US so you might end up paying very little for the upgrade.
The following two pictures show some bad weather on arrival. On the on board radar screen you can also see a little yellow stormscope cross which is not a lot of information compared to the extend of the weather.
1) Turbocharger: Often at FL200 you are out of the base clouds and can navigate many weather situations visually.
I would include minimum prop de-ice on that one….once your prop starts to vibrate how will you get rid of it when climbing ?
What makes a prop collect ice? I’ve never had it so I’m wondering. With the turbo I get out on top unless it’s convective. Mobile phone/satellite weather shows me where it is possible and where not.
Even during my incident with severe icing, the prop was fine and I could not feel any vibration. The rest of the airplane was a flying igloo.
Well like with any airfoil..
You can’t use a stormscope to reliably steer away from all types of dangerous WX if flying in IMC. It shows only where there are strikes, and these happen only during a specific phase of a TCU/CB development.
The usefullness of it is in that if it shows a cluster of strikes, you don’t go there. So it is just a tool.
Like the IR images are just a tool. It’s a very good tool but it can show irrelevant high altitude cloud as something dangerous.
I am sure Achim’s prop was iced up and if he took a photo with a high speed camera he would have seen it. But probably not the tips; if you work out the TAS, it is quite high, and anything above about 350kt TAS will not normally ice up. And most of a prop’s thrust comes from the outer 1/3 or so.
With my very limited experience so far I can say that I would disregard the stormscope when looking at the images on the ADL.
On a recent flight I was at FL190 still in some light IMC and to my right in a safe distance the ADL showed strikes and associated precipitation as red areas. ATC asked me to go further left and out of a sudden the stormscope was depicting two cell like structures ahead of me. The ADL was almost clear in that area (it was green). My initial reaction was to avoid that area and I let ATC know about it. But then I concluded the strikes on the stormscope must be ghosts and I started to follow the ADL information only.
Obviously I would have climbed out of IMC to look around but I was already getting closer to my destination and flying on cannula.
