Good evening, fellow aviation weather wonks.
As the title of this newsletter suggests, we're unwinding from last week's EXCELLENT Fall 2025 FPAW Meeting, held at Campbell Scientific in Logan, UT. Let us say, right up front, that the Campbell crew did an OUTSTANDING job as hosts and supporters of aviation weather.
You may be wondering about how the meeting came down. Here are some stats:
- There were 220 total registrants, with 57 indicating they planned to attend in person, and 163 saying they intended to participate remotely.
- As best we can determine (that is an acknowledgement that our info may not be totally accurate, because it's really hard to know exactly who was in the room), we had as many as 47 participants in the room at any one time, with three In-Person registrants not participating at all, and seven In-Person registrants (including three Feds) attending, but only remotely.
- At the same time, as many as 135 other individuals attended the meeting remotely over the three-day period. Twenty Fed and another 20 non-Fed remote registrants did not participate, as best we can tell.
- And, yes, if you're tracking those numbers closely, we had 12 remote participants who did not register, presumably getting the meeting info from friends or colleagues (and that's OK).
- Despite the very last minute churn caused by the government shutdown, there were 36 outstanding presentations delivered over the three days of the meeting. As of this time, 3/4s (27) of those presentations have been posted on the meeting web page at https://fpaw.aero/events/2025/fpaw-2025-fall-meeting.
- Finally, and with a great deal of sadness, let us remind you that our friend and fellow FPAW Co-Chair, Matthias Steiner/NCAR, participated in that role for the final time. We hope and pray that he will continue to attend our gatherings, either in person or remotely, as he enters his next life chapter.
- As you know, Nathan Polderman/United Airlines became FPAW Co-Chair effective October 1, 2025. We are very much looking forward to see what we can collectively bring to the aviation weather community in the coming years. Given that Nathan is an operator, and Matt is an operator/researcher/engineer, it seems that Matt may have to focus on the RED side of things, so that we are a complementary, balanced pair.
We know that our audience was pretty thin by the time we were wrapping up on Thursday afternoon, so if you missed it, we'd like to invite you, in advance, to join us and our Oklahoma State University hosts at a TBD location from April 21-23, 2026 for the Spring 2026 FPAW Meeting!
Matt Fronzak and Nathan Polderman
FPAW Co-Chairs