If you follow the free-tools corner of this hobby, you have probably noticed how busy it has become lately. We talked about WingRally only yesterday with its own take on the “tell me where to fly” question, and Where2Fly rebuilt itself a few weeks back around the weather you will actually land in. Into that same crowd steps Bad Weather Finder, and its pitch starts from a frustration most of us know well. You spot a destination reporting thunderstorms, you fire up the sim, you brief the route and load the aircraft, and by the time you are climbing out the storm has drifted off and you are descending into calm air and clear skies.
That timing problem is the whole reason the tool exists. Its creator, long-time simmer Andrei Ilinskii, says he kept running into it before evening flights, choosing a route for its current weather only to arrive an hour or two later in sunshine. Bad Weather Finder, free and usable without an account, a no-login simplicity it shares with tools like Plan2Sim, tries to answer a slightly different question: not where the weather is rough right now, but where the forecast expects it to be rough when you actually get there.
The flow is short and guided. You choose one weather challenge from a set of five, thunderstorms, precipitation, low visibility, low ceiling or strong wind, then say whether you want it at takeoff or on landing. You pick an aircraft class, from a 120-knot piston up to an A320 or 737-class airliner, which the tool uses to estimate flight time and runway plausibility, and you tell it how long you have to fly. From there it returns a small ranked set of routes rather than a dense table, each one timed so the conditions you asked for fall inside your departure or arrival window.
The route screen is where the tool shows its hand. For each suggestion the tool lists the forecast confidence, an approach impact rating and an overall difficulty score, presented with a bit of humour (a 65 out of 100 arrival into Guangzhou carries a “buckle up” note). It also shows how many sources agree. The developer says Bad Weather Finder checks the window from one hour before to one hour after your planned arrival and cross-references it against airport TAFs, the Open-Meteo model, GFS and ECMWF data, live METARs, aviation SIGMETs and current radar.
None of this makes weather-first route finding a new idea, and to his credit Ilinskii does not claim it is. This is a corner of the hobby that has filled up quickly. Where2Fly now bases its destination suggestions on arrival-time forecasts too, and a run of METAR-scraping sites will happily rank the world’s airports by how nasty their current conditions are. What Bad Weather Finder does differently is start from the specific challenge you want and the phase of flight you want it in, then build outward from there. The forecast timing and the multi-source cross-check are where the real work happens. Whether that challenge-first workflow suits you better than picking a destination and checking its weather afterward is going to come down to how you like to fly.
Two extra modes sit alongside the main finder. Weather Board is a live shortlist of simulator-ready airports where interesting conditions are expected in roughly the next 90 minutes, sortable by weather type and browsable by region, with one-click “fly to” and “fly from” options. Weather Watch is the more unusual of the two. It follows active tropical systems using National Hurricane Center advisories and points you toward nearby airports you could realistically fly from, though the tool is firm that you should plan near a system and not through it.
Running through the whole product is some honesty about what a forecast can and cannot promise. A “forecast, not a promise” panel appears on the home page and again in the finder, reminding you that storms weaken and move, winds shift, visibility changes, and that MSFS Live Weather may render the situation differently from any forecast.
Once you have settled on a route, a SimBrief handoff carries it into the planning tool most simmers already run, the same one that added dynamic weather avoidance last year.
For now Bad Weather Finder is an independent, non-commercial release, and parts of it still wear early version numbers. It arrives into a busy field, so its future probably rests on how well the forecasts hold up in practice and whether the challenge-first flow earns a place in people’s routines. If you have ever gone looking for a storm only to land in disappointingly good weather, it is worth a look. Bad Weather Finder is free and live now at badweatherfinder.com.
