Documents

• Belfort Instrument Company: How Wind Shear Affects Aviation
  In navigating the skies, pilots must know local wind conditions to successfully fly aircraft. Rapidly changing wind currents may lead to a condition known as wind shear, which changes the speed of the air as it moves over a plane’s wings. This can lead to an abrupt loss of altitude and air speed. Wind shear may also create sudden updrafts or downdrafts, as well as shifting headwinds and tailwinds. The condition typically occurs as a small, localized phenomenon, often located near fronts, inversion layers, or thunderstorms.

  Over the years, wind shear has created significant problems for aviators. To minimize aircraft accidents caused by wind shear, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated in 1988 that all commercial aircraft carry onboard wind shear detectors. This requirement has significantly reduced incidences of in-flight accidents resulting from wind shear.

  Pilots flying aircraft often have the ability to maneuver through sudden wind shear because the distance from the ground allows room to make adjustments for loss of airspeed or altitude. When planes taking off or landing experience low level wind shear, however, aircraft are close enough to the ground that pilots have little room to adjust should a sudden disruption occur.

  Belfort Instrument Company manufactures several sensors to automatically detect weather conditions. One, the Aerovane Wind Vector Transmitter, measures wind speed and direction, and many airports use the instrument to detect low level wind shear. This helps protect incoming aircraft from sudden shifts, making takeoffs and landings at airports utilizing the Aerovane Wind Vector Transmitter safer and more reliable.

• Belfort Instrument Company: Weather Monitoring Tools For Safer Flights
  Intense, concentrated winds that blow down from rain showers and thunderstorms in a diameter of up to 2.5 miles are known as microbursts. When the area of the downburst is larger than 2.5 miles, the event is known as a macroburst. Each event can have devastating effects on aircraft.

  A Microburst can achieve wind speeds of more than 150 miles per hour, and can wreak havoc when they hit the ground. When the downdraft hits the surface, the winds spread out in all directions, causing vertical and horizontal wind shears that are extremely dangerous to pilots flying in low altitudes. Microburst activity is most dangerous to planes that are within 1,000 feet of the ground, as during landings and take-offs.

  A plane entering microburst activity may experience high head winds that lift the plane, then sudden, strong tailwinds that will force the plane downward and its speed and engine power may not be strong enough to allow it to sustain altitude.

  Pilots are trained to visually identify and avoid microburst situations, and large airports are required by the FAA to have microburst detection systems, so that controllers can alert pilots of a microburst event, affording the pilot enough time to take remedial action. Microburst detection systems include Doppler Radar and Low Level Wind Shear Alert Systems, as well as other weather monitoring tools.

  Belfort Instrument launched the DigiWx product line to deliver critical weather information to seaplane bases, private landing strips, heliports, and public-use airports that cannot afford expensive systems. DigiWx fulfills the need for real-time wireless weather information for both pilots in flight and airport personnel. It provides users with wind direction, wind speed, temperature and dew point, relative humidity, condensation altitude, headwind, tailwind, and crosswind components, latitude, longitude, and visibility.