Airfield Watcher provides up to date situational awareness of the weather and NOTAM at the airfields vital to your operation, enabling you to assess the impact of weather changes and/or airport disruption on your flight schedule. Airfield Watcher is web-based and can be run independently or as part of skybook - our complete Dispatch, Briefing and Journey Log system.
The Airfield Watcher removes the work from monitoring the airfields that are operationally significant to an airline. Groups of airfields can be monitored, including the active departure, destination and alternate airfields for breaks in minima or NOTAM subjects or weather codes that match criteria set by the airline. Any issues are graphically displayed automatically on screen making it easy to see where issues may occur due to weather or disruption at airports. Airfield Watcher removes the need for staff to manually trawl through lots of meteorological and NOTAM information looking for issues that may affect the airline's operation. Instead staff can now react more quickly to forecast situations and get the time to plan ahead.
Airfield Watcher generates a clear picture of the METAR, TAF and NOTAM for your operational airfields, enabling you to easily see worsening weather trends and to be alerted to NOTAM that may impact on your operations.
Information is displayed using simple graphics made up of segments that show the key weather parameters at each airfield, namely Cloud Ceiling, Visibility, RVR and Wind Speed and Gust. As well as those parameters, the weather codes and NOTAM subjects are also checked and alerts displayed graphically. Within Airfield Watcher, clicking on an airfield graphic will display a full Met and NOTAM briefing for that airfield.
You can define custom airfield groups to monitor based on your operational preferences, making it quick and simple to view weather and NOTAM information for any airfield you are tracking.
Airfield Watcher also provides a more automated and smarter way of creating groups, just send us your flight plans and Airfield Watcher will automatically group and monitor the departure, destination and alternate airfields that are relevant to you.
Airfield Watcher alerts you to any significant changes at the airfields being monitored based on sets of minima parameters. A general set of minima can be setup to monitor all airfields or you can create custom minima for category A, B and C airports and individual minima for tricky airfields with special requirements.
Based on the minima you setup, alerts are displayed using the traditional green, amber, red sequence, making it easy to spot notable changes in weather and NOTAM and react promptly.
Before using Airfield Watcher, our dispatchers made a weather briefing regarding their destinations at the start of their shift, once per day. A continuous weather briefing was not part of their duties.
It happened more than once that only the flight crew during the briefing realised that the weather at their destination was at or below the minimum. At this point, it can already be too late to delay a flight (flight duty time) or to reroute the flight to another destination.
We operate at some very weather critical destinations like London City, Florence and Balkan airports, all of which have very different minima’s regarding wind (tailwind, crosswind), visibility and ceiling.
With the Airfield Watcher our dispatchers now have a tool where they can update the weather on all our destinations themselves within a few seconds and even update alternates too. Nowadays we are able to detect weather issues at our destinations and alternates much earlier and, especially, easier than before.
Samuel Eberle
Manager Operations Control – Helvetic Airways
