[old curmudgeon]

Interesting.

I have lost contact with the new stuff.

When I quit, I canceled every single aviation magazine subscription and refused to become one of those airport hanger bums.

I would rather be outside with my horse.

I do know that these ideas were being discussed.

Is the aircraft presented in an accurate manner related to satellite weather so the pilot can actually “thread the needle” where cells are close?

Of course, the ideal would be both that and airborne. Use the satellite weather to get the big picture and choose a better route and the airborne to handle the close encounters.

[justlurking]

A lot has changed. The FAA has been slow in rolling it out to the rest of the country, but a pilot program in Alaska has replaced radar tracking (primary and secondary returns) with "automatic dependent surveillance", a term that basically means that airplanes squawk their positions periodically, using info from an on-board GPS. Ground stations collect the transmissions and integrate them into a coherent view for ATC. Individual aircraft can also listen and plot the location of aircraft near them on an on-board display.

The radar images are only near real-time: I think the lag is up to 10 minutes. So, I wouldn't want to try to use them to thread the needle, without something on-board. But, the ground radar composite addresses some of the problems with attenuation.