I was looking at washington aeronautical maps this morning and ATIS said wind was "34012."  I know that this means compass and 12 knots but does it mean the winds are blowing towards 340 or blowing from 340.  Trying to determine what runway to use.  Thanks.

Wind direction in aviation is always from the direction listed.

 

Regards,

Ró.

It should be a true direction from where wind is blowing.

 

EDIT: my bad, you can find magnetic or true wind info at ATIS, depends of equipment I guess.

 

EDIT2: most of time from ATIS is magnetic.

 

too many edits I guess :smile:

wind on the atis is true as far as I remember as an air traffic controller. Mind you that was a few years ago and I am a lot older now lol

 

Hi Ro, how is the ATC system working in Ireland these days? Heard of any probs with the equipment?

 

Craig

If it comes from the mouth it is magnetic ad if it is in text it is true.

No, no problems with the equiptment, don't think we've had any problems with our equiptment here since that incident back in 2008 (?) when someone accidentally unpluged a computer and no one figured out what had happened for about a week.

 

We've introduced a new system for traffic management called point merge recently, it seems to be working very nicely much more efficient than the old system of holding patterns.

 

ATC in Ireland has always been of a pretty high standard though TBH, quite innovative too, they came up with a system there a few years back that has save billions of dollars worth of fuel at this stage by providing direct routings to aircraft through Irish Airspace to and from the NAT tracks and the east coast of Ireland.

 

Regards,

Ró.

If it comes from the mouth it is magnetic ad if it is in text it is true.

Exactly right. ATIS,ASOS,AWOS is reported in magnetic, whilst the METAR, TAF, Winds Aloft is reported in true. Winds are always provided in the "from" direction. Important to note that if you don't have an ATIS report, and you are picking up winds from METARS you need to convert the wind to magnetic by applying the variation. Particularly important if you are dealing with large variations where your computed crosswind component would be drastically affected.

 

Keep in mind that there is an exception with respect to getting wind reports from FSS. They usually just read the text report directly, with no adjustment for variation, so you are most likely getting TRUE wind direction from the FSS attendant.

Thanks for the update Ro

 

Glad to hear that all is working well. I worked on the new CAIRDE system from 2002-2004, testing and training the lead controllers how to use the system. Towards the end there was talk about IAA taking responsibility for a chunk of UK airspace to the north on a revenue sharing basis. Made sense that the one centre (Shannon) looked after the transition from continental to oceanic airspace.

 

Rgds

Craig