What instruments does an airplane have regarding the weather?
The old standby for weather information is radar. All airlines use it, most corporate aicraft and most regional airlines. A device developed for light aircraft is the “lightning detector”. Its advantage is that it can be installed on an airplane with a propeller in the nose. (Weather radar needs a large antenna. If the nose location is not available, the antenna has to be made small enough to go in the wing. This small size makes the range of the radar limited.) The detector looks for static electricity in the air instead of looking for precipitation like a radar does. The theory is that static electricity is a good predictor of turbulance. The most recent addition to cockpit weather is what some call XM-weather. It is a display for showing weather maps, radar from ground stations and text descriptions transmitted by a satellite directly to the plane. The result is that pilots have much better access to information than ever before.
