Voice-activated METAR briefing for airports worldwide, built for hands-free use through Siri — so you can get the weather while driving to the airport. Say “Hey Siri, Run Airport Weather,” answer with your airport identifier, and listen.
Opens in Apple Shortcuts · iOS 16 or later
A METAR is built for visual scanning, not for speech. The shortcut decodes it into plain English and reads it back. This is a real report, and the exact briefing Siri speaks for it.
You need an iPhone running iOS 16 or later. Use Safari for the download. Other browsers put the downloaded file in different places, so the steps below assume Safari.
Two steps, spoken. Ask for the briefing, and Siri reads it back — whether you’re at your desk or driving to the field.
Say “Hey Siri, Airport Weather,” then give the airport identifier using the ICAO phonetic alphabet or by spelling out the letters.
Siri speaks the current METAR out loud and shows it on screen — hands-free, so your attention stays on the road or the ramp. Overseas, the briefing follows the station’s own format: visibility in kilometers and pressure as QNH in hectopascals.
Siri understands the identifier more reliably when you use the ICAO phonetic alphabet. For an airport like Newark, which has the identifier EWR, say “Echo Whiskey Romeo” — or, if that’s easier, just spell out the letters as “E-W-R.” Either way works, but the phonetic version tends to be recognized the first time.
“Airport Weather” sits close to requests Siri already knows, so it sometimes answers with the general weather forecast or directions to a nearby airport instead of running the shortcut. The fix is to give the shortcut a name Siri can’t confuse with anything else, like “Pilot Briefing.”
