Early on in my tenure with MSFS, which would have been fall/winter of 2021 with the Xbox release, I used to experience icing conditions and severe icing on my aircraft.
I had some crazy sketchy flights over the Sierra Nevada Mountains in some of the default aircraft with no anti-ice/de-icing equipment and it was exhilarating, nerve wracking and fun all at once.
I’ve really not seen ice on my aircraft like that in a very, very long time.
Am I just missing it, because I’ve happened to fly in conditions that have allowed me to avoid it or have the ice accretion effects greatly diminished since that time in ‘21?
What are your recent experiences with icing conditions and ice accretion in the sim? Is it still happening?
There haven’t been a ton of icing conditions in the past several months at the GA altitudes I normally fly. With fall/winter approaching, there will probably be more opportunities and a larger sample size.
I did pick some up doing some flight tests in the 310 last spring at around 16,000’. Anti-ice easily got rid of it.
I’d like to see some condensation, even frost on the inside of the windows in cold conditions, clear weather included. IRL, I’ve had to scrape it off with a credit card while the engine was warming up, haha.
Icing went the same way as lightning - from too much to too little.
And if you do pick some up, it won’t have much effect. As others have demonstrated before even with 100% icing, a C172 will still keep flying. Not very well - there is some impact on performance,- but really with icing that bad it should fall out the sky.
Yes - me too. Being able to recognise and mitigate icing risk is an important part of planning and decision-making. Just the same with weather cells and the way we can fly light GA aircraft through violent storm cells with no ill effect. If Microsoft wants 2024 to be as real as it gets, then they are going to have to address these issues, which are, after all, really basic aspects of aviation.
There’s an in depth analysis in this Wishlist Topic (you might want to vote for it too, given what you’ve put in this topic lol)!
If you read the linked post and the following 4 replies (down to my own reply about the C208) it explains the issue and how to implement a workaround by creating modded .cfg file:
Me neither, I don’t like that it is now virtually cosmetic only, e.g. you can fly the C208 at MTOW through icing, accumulate 100% ice, and still keep a positive climb rate!
The level of care that went into the prop and CFD physics along with all of WT’s avionics improvements to move further and further towards AIRAC compliance and then the subject of this thread, huh, what?
Why not put the icing in with the easy, medium, hard difficulty settings of the sim rather than just nerf it to near pointlessness.
Agreed, I’m a strong advocate for end users having the choice with stuff like this (like with the METAR weather injection, I’d like to see a toggle for that too so everyone is happy!).
The icing scalar is already present, so all the ‘Icing Difficulty’ setting needs to do is apply a multiplier to it, i.e. Hard: 1x, Medium 0.5x, Easy 0.25x
Hopefully Asobo has something planned for icing in MSFS2024, along with the other weather improvements!
