fourflights.com is up!

fourflights.com is a website that delivers flight assignments based on current weather conditions. That is what this blog is about. Every hour, dispatchers update the website with flights to airports with four different flight rules: LIFR, IFR, MVFR, and VFR. If you're a pilot you probably know what this means:

LIFR - Low Instrument Flight Rules
These are really poor conditions for even experienced instrument-rated pilots to land aircraft. A lot of times flights to airports with LIFR require a CAT II or CAT III aircrew certification (more on that in a later post). LIFR is a subset of IFR.

IFR - Instrument Flight Rules
This is no cakewalk and requires special training. Conditions that require instruments (avionics) to complete a flight are usually because of poor visibility and/or low clouds.

MVFR - Marginal Visual Flight Rules
A subset of VFR, conditions do not legally require IFR, yet are probably too challenging for visual-only flying.

VFR - Visual Flight Rules
This is the "see-and-avoid" kind of flying at its most basic. Clouds are no lower than 3000 feet above ground level, and visibility is more than 5 miles (and usually more!)

Here's a chart for comparison.

Category	Ceiling (feet)		Visibility (miles)
LIFR	less than 500	and/or	less than 1
IFR	500 to 1000	and/or	1 to 3
MVFR	1000 thru 3000	and/or	3 thru 5
VFR	more than 3000	and	more than 5

Stay tuned to this blog for updates and more information about fourflights.com