In 2024, as an eager and curious student pilot, I wanted to understand how the upcoming winter season would impact VFR days at my home airport. I couldn't find any forecasts or weather tools to quantify that information, so the computer engineer in me set out to attack this problem. It wasn't long before I turned to historical METARs for answers, and built software to visually summarize the METAR trends.
Later in my flight training, I found my software especially useful for cross-country planning. I frequently used it to help build a mental model for what runways I'm likely to use, and how the weather might change throughout a given day during that calendar month.
Not only did my software help me as a student pilot, but it also became the first step to bridging the data gap between pilots and America's ~2,500 airports with historical METARs. Visual METAR Trends was born.
We are Hack Engine. Our aim is to use data science methods to increase pilots' confidence and improve safety margins -- long before the first forecast is available.
Sign up for free to get started.