brief

skywatch brief is the core command. It assembles a full AIM 7-1-5 preflight brief from multiple real-time FAA and NWS data sources and outputs JSON.

Synopsis

skywatch brief TARGET [--to DEST] [--departing-at TIME]

TARGET is one of:

• An ICAO airport identifier: KCDW
• A coordinate pair: 40.688,-74.174

Single-airport brief

skywatch brief KCDW

Fetches adverse conditions within 100 NM of KCDW, the current METAR, active TAF, winds aloft, and the Area Forecast Discussion for the responsible WFO.

Coordinate brief

skywatch brief 40.688,-74.174

When no airport is within 25 NM of the supplied coordinates, the response includes a note field explaining the nearest airport used. If the nearest airport is more than 25 NM away, a warning appears in the note.

Route brief

skywatch brief KCDW --to KACY

Adds an enroute_forecast slot to the response. Skywatch builds a corridor between the two airports (25 NM spacing waypoints), checks adverse conditions along the full route, and reports distance_nm, bearing_deg, and waypoint_count in the corridor metadata.

The destination forecast (destination_forecast) reflects the to airport’s TAF, not the departure airport.

Departure time

skywatch brief KCDW --departing-at "2026-05-02T13:00:00-04:00"

Accepts any format that Ruby’s Time.parse understands: ISO8601, natural strings like "tomorrow at 8am" (with a timezone-aware shell), or epoch integers. When supplied:

• The departing_at field is included in the JSON response (ISO8601)
• TAF groups are filtered or annotated to the window around the ETD
• If the ETD falls outside the available TAF window, destination_forecast.note explains this

Combined route + ETD

skywatch brief KCDW --to KACY --departing-at "2026-05-02T13:00:00-04:00"

Full brief: corridor adverse conditions + departure-airport current conditions + destination TAF around ETD + winds aloft.

Output

All output is JSON. Pipe it to jq for filtering:

skywatch brief KCDW | jq '.adverse_conditions'
skywatch brief KCDW | jq '.vfr_not_recommended'
skywatch brief KCDW | jq '.winds_aloft.forecasts'

See Brief response shape for the complete JSON schema.

Partial failures

If one data source is unavailable (network timeout, empty response from a WFO), the affected slot may include a partial_failures array. The brief is still returned — slots that did succeed contain real data. The agent surfaces partial failures explicitly rather than silently omitting sections.

Flags

Flag	Type	Description
--to DEST	string	Destination airport ID for a route brief
--departing-at TIME	string	ETD in any Time.parse-able format