Changed. Thanks for the suggestion.
This is definitely most noticeable when climbing in a jet at high altitude… I’m almost exclusively flying the CJ4 at this point and when heavy while nearing the cruise altitude (like FL410/430/450) if you go into a cloud layer it takes a significantly more amount of time to climb. Also, when several layers are encountered during the climb it is very noticable how much more time it takes over the duration.
IAS 200 to 140 or less in cruise level flight in the DC-6 when going through cloud layers. You cannot leave the cockpit to make yourself a coffee. That is annoying.
This happens to me too in all aircraft. Voted!
Yup, I’ve noticed this as well while flying my DC-6! Noticeably slower through clouds.
Hopefully it’ll get fixed…
100% this should be looked at.
As ive mentioned before. the performance decrease it due to a downdraft.
1: DA62X, 60% power, no clouds: 136 KIAS, 160 TAS
2: DA62X, 60% power, 100 clouds: barley keeping 10000 feet and stalling
As you can see on the left, there is downdraft in massive clouds, up to around 820fpm.
If this is realistic or not. No idea, i haven’t flown into clouds like that.
Well now I’m intrigued. We need an aviation expert here, because as far as I know, downdrafts should only influence vertical speed and not airspeed.
Anyone care to explain more? @SkipTalbot perhaps?
Also, it seems like all clouds in the game generate those “downdrafts” we are talking about here, which is wrong.
do you not understand how planes in moving air masses work?
I’m ready to read your explanation, instead of your smarta** comment, thank you.
imagine driving uphill, but the hill is going down.
does that make me an aviation expert?
I still don’t understand how a downdraft pushing you down from above decreases your airspeed. Could you please try again?
I mean, the speed decreases in the cloud even if you’re descending… that should be exactly the other way around, right?
I guess it is a camera issue, see previous reply below and try it for yourselves. Whether or not that has something to do with downdrafts is unknow. But the fact that just by moving the camera out of the cloud resumes the airspeed to normal clearly indicates this is a bug.
If it’s the game’s attempt at a downdraft, an autopilot or hand flying pilot attempting to maintain a fixed altitude or vertical speed will make the aircraft “climb” through the descending air, and that’s what would make the airspeed drop, not the downdraft directly itself.
All clouds should definitely not have these downdrafts, nor should the drone camera have any influence over this. I’m guessing there are multiple issues going on here. Perhaps there’s an oversimplified cloud model with exaggerated effects that all clouds use, which wouldn’t surprise me given the lightning and icing behavior. Perhaps the “aircraft location” the simulator is using to calculate aerodynamics is set to the active camera location, and not the physical location of the aircraft?
One other thing: Dense clouds are very turbulent, since they are formed by ascending hot air and descending cold water droplets (and air). This clash of air currents cause a lot of turbulence. Airfoils get less efficient and are very hard to model in these conditions in real life aircraft. Thus, a plane flying in turbulent conditions loses speed due to the loss of its aerodynamic efficiency.
Try flying in the other turbulent air modeled in the sim, that is on top of accidented terrain with medium to high winds, areas like mountain ranges or cities with many large constructions (photogrametric cities). You’ll notice that the plane loses airspeed as it enters these turbulent (with no clouds) conditions.
Alright now I get it. Because the downdraft is pushing you down and you want to maintain your altitude, you have to compensate by lifting the nose up which lowers your airspeed.
And I absolutely agree that not all clouds should have these downdrafts in them.
I played around with custom weather with the aircraft debug window open and it seems clouds that are around 25k feet thick generate updrafts and when you increase their thickness, it starts going the opposite direction and they start generating downdrafts. You can test that yourself in the dev mode.
I also think the drone camera is somehow “de-linked” with the aircraft, so if you fly away from the clouds, your airspeed increases.
Yeah, I noticed it in another way: When flying an airliner at cruise altitude over precipitating cloud layers, if I go to the drone camera and drop to the precipitation layer or below, I see the precipitation. If I change to the cockpit camera abruptly, the weather radar displays the precipitation condition at the previous drone altitude until the radar dish completes a sweep.
So, you are right, the atmospheric conditions seem to be linked to the camera position, not the airplane position. For a programming point of view, this makes a lot of sense. In fact, having two different atmospheric conditions calculated simultaneously (one for the plane and another for the camera) would obviously impact the performance of the sim.
In a different point of view, if I’m using a drone camera, which is completely not immersive at all, I believe I forfeit the right to complain about not immersive atmospheric calculations.
This came up in the Dev Q&A session today. The devs said it was excessive drag from the water in clouds (not a downdraft). Anyway, the good news is it’s claimed to be fixed for SU6.
I heard that! Totally made my day. I know the progress is slow but it is so great they are listening.
But normal rain doesnt slow you down in fs20.