What is a Briefing?
By James Williams, FAA Safety Briefing Magazine
In my early flight training days, things seemed so much simpler when it came to weather. To get a weather briefing, you called or stopped in at a Flight Service Station (FSS), and the briefer gave you all the information about weather and other topics relevant to your flight. If you didn’t talk to a FSS briefer, you didn’t have a briefing. A good preflight briefing is important because, in addition to being valuable for your general survival, being familiar with all available information concerning your flight is also a regulatory requirement (14 CFR section 91.103). But as technology changed, the idea of visiting an FSS disappeared, and calling one became less relevant. With the rise of many excellent third-party options, an obvious question became even more important: What is a briefing these days?
An Answer at Last
One of the things I learned after joining the FAA was that even seemingly simple questions don’t always have simple answers. However, an idiom that I learned around that time regarding advisory circulars (AC) has always provided some insight into reacting to such questions. An AC is a way, but not the only way, to comply with a regulation. To answer the above question, the FAA produced AC 91–92, Pilot’s Guide to Preflight Weather Briefing. The goal of this AC is to give pilots a roadmap for developing their self-briefings and debunk the idea that there is such a thing as a “legal briefing” that can only come from Flight Service. While Flight Service (1800wxbrief.com) remains an option for weather briefings, it is far from the only one.
The goal of AC 91–92 is to help pilots feel more comfortable conducting their own self-briefings.
In fact, the AC has an extensive, but not exclusive, list of resources including what information each can provide. These include AviationWeather.gov, FAA’s weather cameras, the Alaska Aviation Weather Unit, FAA’s Special Use Airspace/TFRs, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, the Weather Prediction Center, and more.
You will notice that all these resources are government systems, but that does not mean they are the only resources you can use to meet the weather briefing requirements. There are several third-party resources that you can use. So long as you cover the elements of a standard briefing (adverse conditions, synopsis, current conditions, forecast conditions, winds aloft, NOTAMs, and PIREPs), you have a comprehensive briefing. It doesn’t matter if you get the information from a one-stop shop like 1800wxbrief.com or from services like ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot. The important thing is to use the service that provides you with all of the required information and allows you to properly plan, brief, and file for your flight.
Covering Your Bases
You aren’t required to document your briefing, although recording the information in a weather log is a great idea. Many commercial services will record all the activities you completed, including the briefing you received. If that’s important to you, you should ask your chosen provider if they record that information. The FAA is not particular with how you get a briefing; they care that you get a complete briefing.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out AC 91–92, please do. It’s a reasonably quick read and an excellent framework for self-briefing. If you want more info, check out our FAASTeam courses on self-briefings (VFR and IFR courses are available).
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James Williams is FAA Safety Briefing’s associate editor and photo editor. He is also a pilot and ground instructor.
