Evening Folks! On a test flight from LOWW-OMDB earlier today I took the following shots. On reflection (pardon the pun!), they show the WXR doing its everyday thing rather effectively, so I thought I'd share them here. Up until now, night flying with live weather has necessarily required the PIC to visually avoid areas of bad weather and/or turbulence. If - like me - you use an ENB-series or SweetFX type filter to enhance the darkness, this is near on impossible. I'm sure many of you are like me in that ploughing into a thunderstorm detracts from the experience somewhat. You wouldn't do it in a real 777 after all!
Remember, these are shots from a beta, subject to change/improvement/etc. Somewhere over Iraq I started seeing returns off to the left of track. Over the course of 5 minutes or so it became apparent that the storm line was likely to intercept my track a bit further downroute. As I got closer, I started seeing strikes out front.
By the time I was approaching DENKI, there was a particularly active cell very close to track.
I commenced a step climb a little early just to see if I could get above it. The moment the nose pitched up, the return diminished as the WXR scanned further up the cell, from this I deduced that I was probably very near to the height of the top of the cell itself.
By the time I leveled at FL390, the cell had disappeared from the returns and I was able to carry on without a track offset. A quick glance out the left showed the cell still popping away, but now well below me as well as 10NM clear. OK, so not much of a crisis, I'll grant you, but it shows just how much the WXR enhances your ability to identify, assess, and react to weather situations along track. My next flight is OMDB-VHHX, so I'll be looking for more TS SIGMETS enroute to explore! If I find any, I'll share them here. B) Cheers!