Poll: Our Readers Loved DUATS and Don‘t Use it Much

In a recent poll we asked our audience what their experience was with the soon-to-be decommissioned DUATS flight planning service and the response we got was, honestly, not very surprising. DUATS service was inaugurated in 1989 and was the first FAA-approved online method of getting the weather and filing a flight plan. The FAA plans to phase out DUATS.

About 40 percent of our online respondents said they were hard core users and were sorry to see the service go, and another ten percent reported having loved the service at one time but transitioned to other methods of getting weather and filing a flight plan some time ago.

About a third of respondents weighed in that they never used DUATS and instead called Flight Service to get the weather and file a flight plan.

Even after the end of DUATS, pilots will still be able to access flight briefing and filing services through Flight Service's website or through the services of a number of commercial providers. Read Isabel Goyer's piece on how DUATS changed flying life for the better for hundreds of thousands of pilots.