An aviation weather site that translates the dense, cryptic weather products pilots are required to interpret into clear, visual explanations. Built by a CFI-track student and meteorology tutor for the people who sit across the table during ACS oral exams and freeze when asked what a TAF actually says.
This site has two goals:
- Help pilots prepare for the weather knowledge and risk-management portions of the FAA ACS / checkride.
- Make aviation weather easier to understand and more interesting, so pilots actually develop appreciation for meteorology rather than just memorizing definitions.
Most pilots — including ones already certificated — struggle with the weather portions of the ACS. The official products (METARs, TAFs, prog charts, AIRMETs, SIGMETs, area forecasts, icing/turbulence/PIREP data) are not the problem. They're free, accessible, and authoritative. The problem is that they were designed in the 1970s for teletype machines and have never been re-translated for visual learners.
CrosswindWX does that translation, and tries to make the underlying meteorology genuinely interesting along the way.
Built by Samuel McDowell — private pilot with an instrument rating, currently working toward commercial, with a minor in meteorology and experience tutoring weather lab at university. End goal: fly for NOAA.
Educational use only · Not for navigation or flight planning · Always consult official FAA/NWS sources.
- Learn — Weather concepts mapped to ACS task elements. Pressure systems, fronts, stability, turbulence sources, icing, fog formation, thunderstorm life cycle. Each concept gets a short explanation, a visual, and "what the examiner wants to hear."
- Decoder — Paste a METAR or TAF, get a plain-English breakdown plus a visual representation (cloud layers at altitude, wind arrows over a runway, visibility cone, etc.).
- Nav Log Helper — Walk students through filling out a VFR/IFR navigation log. Pulls winds aloft, computes ground speed, fuel burn, and ETE per leg. Aimed at the early-XC-planning phase where students drown in the math.
- ACS Reference — Quick lookup of the weather-related ACS tasks for Private, Instrument, and Commercial. What the standard says, what knowledge it requires, and links to the relevant sections of Learn.
aviation-weather-site/
├── README.md ← you are here
├── ROADMAP.md ← multi-month build plan
├── index.html ← landing page
├── pages/
│ ├── learn.html ← Learn index
│ ├── decoder.html ← METAR + TAF decoder
│ ├── navlog.html ← cross-country nav log calculator
│ ├── acs.html ← ACS checkride task mapping
│ ├── minimums.html ← personal minimums builder
│ ├── crosswind.html ← crosswind calculator
│ └── learn/ ← 15 concept pages (icing, fog, fronts, …)
├── css/
│ └── main.css ← all styles
├── js/
│ ├── main.js ← shared interactivity
│ ├── metar-decoder.js ← METAR parsing
│ ├── taf-decoder.js ← TAF parsing
│ ├── poh-c172s.js ← C172S POH performance tables
│ └── poh-interp.js ← 3-axis POH interpolation
├── assets/
│ └── skewt/ ← generated skew-T diagrams
├── reference/ ← project principles, ACS task notes
└── tools/ ← Python helpers (skew-T generation)
The site is plain HTML/CSS/JS — no build step, no frameworks. To view it:
- Open the project folder.
- Double-click
index.html. It opens in your browser. That's it.
For a slightly nicer dev experience, install the Live Server extension in VS Code. Right-click index.html and pick "Open with Live Server" — the page will auto-reload as you save changes.
- HTML/CSS/JS — vanilla, no frameworks. You'll learn the actual web platform before any abstractions.
- Data sources — NOAA Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov) provides free APIs for METARs, TAFs, PIREPs, winds aloft, and more. No API keys required for most endpoints.
- Hosting (eventually) — GitHub Pages or Netlify, both free.
License TBD — to be decided before the repo goes public. Code will likely be MIT; content license may differ. Do not add a LICENSE file until this is confirmed.