How Do You Read a METAR and a NOTAM? A Student Pilot's Guide in Middle Tennessee

The first time most students see a METAR, they think we handed them a typo. A wall of capital letters, slashes, and numbers that looks more like a password than weather. NOTAMs are worse. They come in all caps, in a code that seems designed to hide the one thing you actually need to know.

Here is the good news we tell every new student at Smyrna. Nobody is born reading these things. It is a skill, not a talent, and it clicks faster than you think. The pilots who rattle off a METAR like they are reading a cereal box are not smarter than you. They have just read a few hundred of them. You will too.

Let us take the mystery out of both.

What is a METAR, and why should I care?

A METAR is a snapshot of the current weather at an airport. Most airports with weather equipment put out a fresh one about once an hour, and airports issue special updates when conditions change quickly. It tells you the wind, the visibility, the clouds, the temperature, and the pressure setting for your altimeter.

Why does it matter to you as a student? Because before every single flight, you need to know what the sky is actually doing. Not what it looks like out the window, but the measured, official picture. A clear morning at Smyrna can hide a low cloud deck moving in from the west, and the METAR will tell you before you ever start the engine.

Reading weather is not about passing a test. It is about deciding, honestly, whether today is a good day to fly.

How do I actually read a METAR line by line?

Let us decode a made up example so you can see the pattern. Picture something like this for our home field:

KMQY 151853Z 18009KT 10SM FEW045 SCT250 28/19 A3001

Read left to right, and it breaks into tidy pieces.

• KMQY is the airport. That is us, Smyrna Airport.

• 151853Z is the date and time. The 15th of the month, at 1853 Zulu, which is UTC. You will learn to convert that to Central time in your head. During central daylight time, you subtract five hours.

• 18009KT is the wind. It is coming from 180 degrees, which is due south, at 9 knots.

• 10SM is visibility. Ten statute miles, which is as good as it gets in a standard report.

• FEW045 SCT250 is the clouds. A few clouds at 4,500 feet, scattered clouds at 25,000 feet. Add two zeros to the cloud number to get the height above the field.

• 28/19 is the temperature and dew point in Celsius. Twenty eight degrees, dew point nineteen.

• A3001 is the altimeter setting, 30.01 inches of mercury. You dial that into your altimeter so it reads the correct altitude.

That is the whole thing. Once you see the structure, you stop reading it as a code and start reading it as a sentence. Wind from the south, light, ten miles of visibility, a few low clouds, warm and comfortable. A beautiful day to go out to the practice area.

The parts that trip people up

A couple of things surprise new students. The wind is always given in reference to true north on a written METAR, but the tower gives it to you in magnetic when you are flying. Small difference, worth knowing. And when you see a G in the wind, like 18015G25KT, that G means gusting. Steady at 15 knots, gusting to 25. Gusts matter a lot on landing, and we spend real time teaching you to respect them.

What about the weird weather codes?

METARs use short abbreviations for weather. Once you learn a handful, most reports read easily.

• BR is mist, FG is fog.

• RA is rain, SN is snow, TS is a thunderstorm.

• - means light and + means heavy, so -RA is light rain.

• OVC means overcast, a solid cloud layer, while BKN is broken and SCT is scattered.

Here in Middle Tennessee, summer afternoons love to build thunderstorms, and you will get very familiar with TS in a forecast. Learning to spot it early, and to plan your training flights for calmer morning air, is one of the most useful habits you will build.

So what is a NOTAM, and why does it look so ugly?

NOTAM stands for Notice to Air Missions. It is the way the aviation system tells pilots that something is temporarily different from normal. A runway is closed. A taxiway light is out. A tower is unmanned for the night. A temporary flight restriction is in place because the President is visiting Nashville or a big event is happening.

NOTAMs have a reputation, and honestly they have earned some of it. They can be dense, they can be repetitive, and the important line is sometimes buried in the middle. But the idea behind them is simple and good.

A NOTAM is just the airport leaving you a note about what changed since the map was printed.

Think of it like a detour sign on a road you drive every day. The road is still the road. The sign is just telling you that today, the left lane is closed, so plan accordingly.

What a NOTAM might tell you

The ones you will care about most as a student are the practical ones close to home.

• A runway or taxiway closed for maintenance.

• A runway light or approach light out of service.

• An obstacle, like a crane near the airport.

• A temporary flight restriction you must stay out of.

Imagine planning a cross country to a nearby field, only to find a NOTAM saying the one runway there is closed until next week. Better to read that at the kitchen table than to discover it circling overhead. That is the whole point.

Do I have to memorize all of this before I fly?

No. This is where new students put pressure on themselves that they do not need. You will not stare at a raw METAR and decode it cold on day one, and you do not have to.

Here is how it really works. Modern flight planning tools and official aviation weather sources will show you a plain language translation right next to the coded version. You can read both, side by side, and your brain quietly learns the pattern. After a few weeks, you catch yourself reading the code first and only glancing at the translation to check. That is the moment it clicks.

What we care about is not whether you can impress people at a party by reading hieroglyphics. We care that you can answer three honest questions before every flight:

• Can I see well enough to fly safely today?

• Is the wind something I can handle at my current skill level?

• Is anything about the airport or the airspace different than normal?

METARs answer the first two. NOTAMs answer the third. That is the real job.

How do I get good at reading them?

Practice, and low stakes practice at that. One of our favorite tips for students is to pull up the Smyrna METAR every morning with your coffee, even on days you are not flying. Read it. Decode it in your head. Then walk outside and check yourself against the actual sky. Does nine knots of wind feel like nine knots? Does that low cloud layer match what you read?

Do that for a couple of weeks and something shifts. The code stops being foreign. You start to feel the weather, not just read it. And when you sit down to plan your first solo cross country across Middle Tennessee, checking weather and NOTAMs for every airport on your route will feel like a normal, calm part of getting ready, not a hurdle.

Keep in mind that weather products, tools, and the exact way NOTAMs are formatted do change over time, so always use current official sources and let your instructor show you the latest resources.

Every pilot you admire once stared at a METAR and felt exactly the way you do now. The difference is a few weeks of reps and someone patient in the right seat to point out the pattern. That part is the fun part, and it is a big reason we love teaching people to fly out here at Smyrna. Come read a few with us sometime. The code gets friendly fast.