iFly GPS Forum

This has been asked for before. If it were easy to calculate winds aloft automatically, every aviation device on the market would do it. ....

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I understand how difficult it can be to get a complete current winds aloft for all the altitudes I might love to have (what's above me, what's below me, what it is ahead of me).

But apparently iFly already has SOME access, as when I touch a location and the Options comes up, if I drill down far enough it comes up with a chart of winds aloft at different altitudes at that location. I understand those are (a) sometime out of date and (b) are approximations/guesses based on models of the atmophere etc. But it would be nice if iFly would take out of that chart it's best guess and make it more acessible or optionally dynamically visible near my plane.

Here's another thing: The wind where I currently am should be always acessible/calculatable from my ground track, ground speed. For example, I can always get the wind speed and directionwhere I am by flying a 360 degree at constant airspeed turn noting my ground track direction at the point where my ground speed is highestl (that's the wind direction). Then subtract the lowest ground speed I see during the turn from the highest, and that's the wind speed.

In fact many of us sometimes make rough guestimates of wind direction and speed by comparing our ground track, heading, ground speed. Would be surprised if you said you don't do that. So if I can exactly calculate the wind and direction making a 360 turn, I suspect someone with more patience and math skills than me can show that most of the time the last few minutes of GPS track info in iFly could be used to dynamically generate a wind speed and direction estimate. Possibly it might require the aircraft to perform, say, a 30 degree turn and back to assure reasonable accurracy.

I posted that tsuggest quite a long time ago and IIRR Shane liked it, but put it on the very back burner and beyond his math.

Alex