PPGS Lesson 11.8 | Weather: Air Masses & Fronts

Welcome back to Epic Flight Academy’s Private Pilot Ground School!
In this Weather lesson, Certified Flight Instructor Mike Thompson explains air masses and fronts—the building blocks of weather systems that every pilot must understand.

You’ll learn how air masses form, what factors shape their temperature and moisture content, and how fronts such as cold, warm, stationary, and occluded fronts impact flight conditions. Using detailed diagrams and practical examples, Mike connects meteorology with real-world flight scenarios, helping student pilots predict changing weather during preflight planning and cross-country operations.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand how to identify and interpret the movement of air masses, frontal boundaries, and their direct influence on visibility, turbulence, precipitation, and safety in flight.

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📘 Video Chapters

0:00 – Introduction
0:40 – Air Masses & Fronts
0:46 – What Is an Air Mass? What Makes an Air Mass?
1:06 – How Does an Air Mass Form?
1:12 – What Does an Air Mass Need to Form?
1:52 – Diagram of a Typical Summer Air Mass Pattern
3:34 – History of How Air Masses and Fronts Were Named
4:11 – Review of Dew Point, Cloud Types, and Stability
5:20 – How These Concepts Connect in Meteorology
5:37 – Cold Front
7:45 – Warm Front
7:55 – Why Do Warm Fronts Move Slower?
9:55 – Stationary Front
10:57 – Occluded Front
11:23 – Overhead and Profile View of an Occluded Front
13:47 – Third Example
14:23 – The Three Stages of Occlusion
14:31 – Summary and Review

🎓 Start Your Pilot Training Journey:
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This course is taught by Epic Flight Academy's own Mike Thompson. Mike Thompson is the author of "Telling Is Not Teaching", which promotes the idea that the “new school” of teaching that embraces electronic technology cannot sacrifice the “old school” of human relationships because the human brain stills learns in largely the same way that it has for millennia.

"Telling Is Not Teaching": https://www.amazon.com/Telling-Not-Te...

To begin YOUR pilot training, visit our website: https://epicflightacademy.com/pilot-t...

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