Has anybody tried to land at Montserrat (TRPG)?
With real weather, 09014KT, the VSI in the C172 on short final went anywhere from -1000 to +1000 in about 5 second cycles, impossible to stabilize or even close to staying on glide slope.
I’m not sure it’s so wild in reality (e.g. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/m_Ht_IPQUKI
I´m becoming mental flying GA in live weather, expecially being a keyboard flyer
You will get your turbulence settings in next su. They told in latest q&a they will add a ui for turbulence.
Tbh not sure it’s turbulence settings that we’re looking for. The right thing to do would be to make the flight model + weather as realistic as possible and only then consider adding more settings.
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But here on the forum i’ve seen real pilots telling it feels realistic as it is right now and i’ve also seen those real pilots that tells it’s not realistic. I bet the ”realistic” statement is subjective. I know the air can allways improve but they will never get to the point every single user is happy with the turbulence/air behaviour. Well, maybe if they implement large eddy simulation (les) or direct numerical simulation (dns). But that will not happen in a near future. That requires supercomputers to calculate. And that’s not even simulations that runs in real time and that needs to be done in a flight simulator.
In my own opinion it’s much more realistic now than before with only constant airspeed. But some feels it were more realistic with constant airspeed everywhere that to me felt more like flying a train on rails.
Maybe the full cfd simulation that is in r&d stage will improve the organic feel of air a bit.
Here’s an approach on a gusty day in the public beta - vast improvement and actually ploughs through all the short-phase bumping. The yawing is a bit wild ( and I’m not a Warrior pilot at all, so my actual flying is not great… )
And in the same day about 15 miles away here’s a practice STOL approach in the Wilga, which I haven’t had much practice with yet. This one is far more typical and I fear is a product of excess aero force overall ( other than perhaps parasite drag ) rather than just turbulence. There were some crazy up/downdrafts going on too.
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I appreciate you might not have real flying experience. I can’t comment about airliners, but for light aircraft currently in the sim, the sensitivity of pitch to gusts feels extreme. Also, try this experiment. Choose C172 and set crosswind 90 degrees steady 20 knots. It will be very very difficult to stay on the runway even if you apply maximum rudder. On the ground it will weathervane like crazy. I’m not very good at taking videos otherwise I’d show you. When you take off a wing will drop as though the wind was suddenly turned on. A few weeks ago I took off and landed in wind over 25 knots gusting 35 right across the runway in RL. The aircraft had no issues staying on the runway even after the nosewheel left the ground just purely the effect of the rudder was enough to maintain directional control.
Based on my fiddling with the flight model files, it looks as though the pitch moment of inertia is too low for some aircraft (it looks like there is more yaw moment of inertia than pitch). I haven’t done the maths and this could be true for some aircraft, but maybe they assumed constant mass density where in reality there is a lot of mass concentrated in the nose where the engine normally resides.
That’s on top of the fact that the chart of the wind that we see in custom wind settings is inconsistent with what it’s set to. It also allows gust settings that make no sense such as 15G10. What does it mean? In meteorological reports the first number is the steady/normal wind and the second number is the maximum wind observed over a certain period (I think it’s 10 minutes). So how can you set it to 15 gusting 10? Maximum wind being less than the steady component makes no sense.
It suggests that whoever was responsible for coding this up didn’t have a full appreciation of meteorology/how the wind is reported. It’s impossible to see in the sim how the real MeteoBlue weather is interpreted but it does make me wonder whether that’s correct. That’s something only the devs can confirm so I won’t speculate on this point further.
Another thing I would say is that generally whilst further away from the ground, outside of pitch stability during gusty conditions and some other weather oddities (such as abrupt large pressure changes), the flight model seems less far off than closer to the ground. Probably airliners have fewer issues of this kind as they’re generally heavier with a large moment of inertia.
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I just realized that the wing drop happens when you touch the ground as well. It looks as though some of the effects of the wind (or part of the wind) are turned on as the wheels leave the ground which causes the into-the-wind wing to get picked up. When you’re landing it seems as though the opposite happens. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from the fact that some at least rudimentary ground physics, simulating tire friction, the weight of the aircraft and lift before take-off, is necessary to get realistic behaviour during take-off and landing. And arguably these are probably the most interesting phases of flight for a simmer.
In reality what happens is that the wheels do indeed have less friction with the ground as the lift is increased. But as you go faster there is more airflow over the rudder and that more than compensates for the loss of friction between the wheels and the ground and gives you enough yaw control to stay on the centre line.
I agree the flight model of c172 is not good. And the ground physics could be improved much. Besides wind could be 15g10 but then the “gust” should be called “lull” instead.
https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Wind_lull
I’m just telling options is good. Because some wants calm air in live-weather everywhere even if the air is realistic simulated.
I want everything in tubulence unlimited and i know some agree and then some wants everything limited and that is fine by me as long as we have options.
I only have a PPL and fly light aircraft. The video everyone is referring to is a heavy aircraft. I’ve not flown a heavy and therefor I cannot comment on how realistic that it is. I can therefor only comment on light aircraft and right now it feels very wrong; especially in level flight.
The GA planes are designed to be both statically and dynamically stable which means that when trimmed out, the plane will practically fly itself in stable air.
An upset, like a gust, usually will creates a yawing motion, which then causes the airplane to go into a bank and is usually offset by applying opposite bank. On the other hand, a thermal will lift the airplane like an elevator. There could be some pitch movement which in an updraft, feels like the tail is being lifted causing the nose to pitch down a bit, but definitely not 10+/- degrees nose pitch up that I am experiencing in MSFS.
Therefor when I fly in windy and gusty conditions, the only control input that actively need to I apply is bank, to keep the wings level. In my plane, the controls are so well balanced and I am able to do this with 2 fingers on the yoke.
On release, the sim felt good. I’m not disagreeing that there were some issues with the FM, but 90% of the time, the aircraft reacted they way one would expect. With the current state of the sim, my “muscle memory” is causing to break the immersion due to how fake it feels. I think thats probably the best I can describe it.
This has been ongoing since roughly SU10 and I find myself logging on less and less. I’m really hoping the slider will fix it, so I can go back to practicing my flights using real weather prior to making the real one.
Edit:
@MetalSalmon3852 I think you and I are saying the same thing 
I do agree that the calculation of inertia (or the lack there of) is also a huge part of the ‘on the rails’ feeling.
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What you have shown looks really promising. Is this the JustFlight Flight model update Beta (not MSFS)? Any indications of when they will release the patch?
Not a clue - they have the Fokker regional jets and the RJ and the 146 update and the Tomahawk being worked on at the same time as well as these you can get the beta FMs just by asking them, if you’re prepared to give some feedback.
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Well, i think the aircraft flightmodels need some tuning after those sim updates.
And maybe the weight needs to be looked at or something. If an airline feels realistic it may be the mass that is wrong? Are we sure 1kg of mass in the sim is equal as 1kg of mass in the real world?
Parasite drag seems ok, or at least people are generally setting aircraft up to glide reasonably well. That seems about all that’s ok though…
If we could find a way to reduce gravity then we could test the general FM behaviour with 10x mass, but I’m not sure if there’s any way of an end user doing that.
I wonder why some aircraft in the sim feels heavier than others? For example the fenix a320 feels much more heavier than the default a320. I wonder what the devs do to make it feel more heavy if they use same weight from the real aircraft specifications.
@Perrry
I think it has actually have some thing to do with simulator speed settings but than assigned in some airplanes cfg file.
Like if im in a full headwind i feel like all of my c172 is in a slowmotion feelin like drag attitude
And when turning out to wind direction tailwind my airplane seems to speed up
All surrounding outside the airplane while im in cockpit seems at normal speed.
I suggest you take a look my video on YT to see what i mean
I think they do
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One thing that stuck out in my landing vids up there - and is something I’ve been mentioning since forever, it feels like - is how much absurd turbulence trees cause. Mostly noticeable in the Wilga but also even in the Warrior when it’s close to the airport, trees seem to cause giant lumps in the air. Trees are not transparent to wind, but on the other hand they’re also not solid buildings…
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I noticed this too. A bit odd. Did you try this with both steady and gusty wind?
Im not that much of a weather guy but i was looking for a good surf (lol) but what i did was i setup multiple winds on ground/sea level even drag one under and one further above with less gust and
opposite winds , 4 layers total. Just to to experiment with current and waves but still flyable when i noticed this behaviour, but in game it was struggling and i’ve noticed it afterwards and more if you look at the foam then in some part of the movie you can see some gusts over the water i believe when i changed from wave settings from low to high i will try to get this part of video clear and upload for your topic. The effect it gives is really cool
Ah OK I reread what you said and if you just mean that the groundspeed is dependent on wind then yeah that’s correct behaviour.