It’s rare that I bother to look at a weather source other than EasyVFR.
As for my “official” national weather source, I haven’t used it in years. All the weather data that you need is freely available from many weather sites. If the Dutch keep going like that, they’ll soon find that nobody is using their Aviation Weather, and their position is no longer needed.
Meteo Schweiz still provides TAF and METAR for Switzerland for free.
The other products are available either via
http://www.skybriefing.com or http://www.homebriefing.com (Austrian briefing system)
A very good site is the German http://www.flugwetter.de which has most products for Switzerland and Germany as well as many others included.
While I find it weird that the KNMI now requires AOPA membership for this, I honestly wonder why there are still private pilots who are not member in AOPA these days. They are after all the only kind of lobby we have and have done quite some remarkable work in recent years. I wish more countries would give access like that to AOPA members. But giving access ONLY via that way is very weird indeed.
Meteo Schweiz still provides TAF and METAR for Switzerland for free.
That’s an ICAO (or WMO?) obligation, you get all TAF/METAR data worldwide for free. The best source in my opinion is the US NOAA ADDS.
Meteo Schweiz still provides TAF and METAR for Switzerland for free.
It’s only for Switzerland and at the top of that page they state it shouldn’t be used for briefing due to update cycles. The old pageused to show METARs with half an hour delay, so not usable. The new page seems to be better, ~10min delay. But the design, frankly, is an eysore.
I agree that there are free weather resources available on the internet that are easier to use then the official national weather service.
I honestly wonder why there are still private pilots who are not member in AOPA these days.
Well; it’s all about freedom of choice and I find it incorrect that one is forced to join a national branch organisation in order to get access to official weather data. My personal view is that AOPA NL has very little influence in The Netherlands, let alone on the EU scale. Since my flying is mostly abroad, I prefer to be a member of a organization that get things done in Brussels, like PPLIR.
KNMI reluctantly gave me an account to the restricted website, but they warned me (in an unfriendly way) that they might start charging me in the future.
Since it is a public institution they’ll need to change the law for that, so it won’t happen anytime soon.
I think the ICAO obligation to provide briefing services is limited to an “ARO”.
There was a debate here in the UK about what exactly an ARO is, and one old aviation consultant said that not every airport has an ARO but he didn’t know the answer. One can assume that Gatwick has an ARO but maybe not Shoreham?
It came up because when the UK closed the FBUs (the two regional offices which accepted handwritten – usually faxed but also telephoned – flight plans and stuffed them into the AFTN) and tried to move everybody to AFPEX (forgetting that to get AFPEX access you needed to provide a UK address but, ahem, some pilots filing FPs in the UK did not live in the UK… hey what a surprise 
) they were required to provide a FP filing service to comply with ICAO obligations.
But only physically, at an ARO. There is no obligation to provide a phone/fax/internet/whatever-remote service.
This was eventually solved, with as little publicity as they could manage, by getting the AFPEX office to accept faxed and phoned flight plans but of course they dislike that because there are only a few people there (I’ve been there) and I recall the boss writing on one forum that that one of them had to be sent on a course on how to smile. The whole issue is largely a non-event because everybody who can switch on a laptop or an Ipad is filing online anyway, so it is just a few pilots who don’t use the internet who are stuck with it.
Same with weather provision. I doubt there is any ICAO obligation to provide any wx service which is in any form actually useful to us pilots (i.e. online).
The bottom line is that we have the free US-run GFS model and almost all free wx websites use that, plus they obtain worldwide tafs and metars from ADDS in the USA, but the locally managed wx models can be more accurate.
But the local models are mostly run as revenue centres because e.g. the BBC pays the UK Met Office at least (IMHO) a million a year for the data and for the hopefully not too unattractive UKMO staff member who presents it. The BBC is hardly going to use GFS… and I am sure every European country does the same. And all the time they can make money like that they are not going to make it available online for free. The UKMO does the MSLP charts for free and that’s about it. Access to the 3D model starts at 5k/year or so (according to a commercial wx repackager I spoke to a few years ago).
