Has the icing system completely been removed from the sim?

Greetings fellow ace pilots,

since a few weeks (or even the whole winter) I am asking the following question to myself:
Is there ANY icing simulation left in this sim?

No matter what weather I activate and how high I set the humidity and how cold it is - there is ZERO icing effects on any airplane anymore.
In the awesome beta version of the sim the airplanes realistically iced even in autumn or spring when flying in great height exactly on top of a cloud layer.
Airplane windows iced in a cool-looking way when I set the weather to snow or freezing rain on the ground.

Now none icing effects ever occur, absolute ZERO no matter what circumstances and even when flying for an hour in Alaska or Canada with -25° Celsius, it is absolutely unnecessary to switch on any aircraft ice protection systems … because there is no more icing existent!

Was icing removed from the sim?

No icing ever on any airplane, I can fly wherever I want I can have freezing snow storms and minus 20° Celsius - icing effects no longer exist and occur under no circumstances anymore, no matter how long I fly through clouds or right above on cloud layers where airplanes should completely freeze over.

ZERO icing on the cockpit windows, no ice or snow at all on the airplane - ice and snow effects are no longer existent in my Flight Sim!

I have an old and modified by myself version from January 2021 of this weather mod installed to have some more impressive cloud formations, is this the culprit? Is my icing system broken because of this mod? :frowning:

I’m not near MSFS over holidays so I’m unable to test.

In the accesibility options (from memory) you can set icing I believe to On, Visible Only or Off. Are you sure it’s not disabled as these options were all set to easy in the last patch.

There is a setting in the assistance options under “Failure and Damage” with three different positions. Off, visual only, and on.
Yours may be off.
If it isn’t, did you try removing the addon and then trying?

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Troubleshoot using the base stock unmodded game and stock unmodded Asobo airplane.

  1. Temporarily disable Community folder (you can do this by renaming it) or move the mods to another folder outside the game.
  2. Load the game and then load a stock unmodded plane and then do the icing test.
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Icing is still very much there;

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Same problem. For the past few weeks, no more ice.
Thanks to those who suggest settings. I will test.

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Definitely getting icing in every plane I’ve flown recently (EMB-110, Warrior II, couple others) I’m not sure about stock aircraft.

People misunderstand airframe ice, and this is a good example.

Ice doesn’t form at temperatures this low. By the time the air is that cold almost all of the water has already frozen and fallen out of it.

Ice happens most at temperatures near freezing, where water in the air can be liquid, but then come in contact with supercooled metal of the airplane and then become ice.

Once you get well below the freezing point, it just doesn’t work. It is realistic to not pick up ice in deep sub freezing temps. It is also realistic to not see clouds too much in deep sub freezing for the same reason, water vapor can’t exist, and falls out as snow, and leaves no moisture in the air.

Anyhow, the most extreme ice formation should happen in humid air right around freezing (0c). Colder doesn’t get you more.

There are a TON of variables to this basic example and I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than me will come along to call me an idiot… But, I’m not teaching a class here, just giving you the basics.

try setting the surface temp to near freezing (colder aloft) with some humidity or precipitation. If you get into a cloud in temps around 0c I think you’ll see some ice accumulations.

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Fly in to some cloud at low temp just above zero ice still forms on screen and airframe .

Couple of notes:

This is unrealistic anyway. The visual effects look like the aircraft has been parked overnight in freezing fog, I would expect my car to look like that in the morning. Icing on an aircraft in flight doesn’t look like that. Besides, even windows not prone to ice accretion, such as cabin windows also ice-over. When turning on windshield heat, all windows de-ice, also those not equipped with heating. Also for icing to occur you need supercooled droplets, snow won’t cause ice accretion.

At -25C I wouldn’t expect much ice accretion anyway. You will find most severe icing around 0C SAT, at -25C supercooled droplets don’t really exist anymore in the atmosphere. Cold air can’t hold much moisture in the first place and secondly, moisture in the atmosphere will freeze solid even without freezing nuclei present in the atmosphere.

I can see you are flying the CRJ, which is pretty well equipped for flight in icing conditions. Where are you expecting ice accretion to exist on the airframe? The default MSFS planes pick-up ice even on non-frontal surfaces like side of the fuselage (cabin windows for example), side of the vertical stabilizer and top of the wings. Icing only occurs on frontal surfaces, windshields (without heating), leading edges, spinners, propeller blades, fan blades etc.

In severe icing conditions the supercooled droplets might not immediately freeze upon impact and flow back passed the leading edge a bit, but nothing like in MSFS. In short, ice builds up at wrong places and looks completely different in real life. Its a Micky mouse implementation, no icing effect is more realistic than the current icing effect. I think the Asobo devs took a good look at their Citroen or Peugeot in the morning and thought, that’s what icing looks like on an aircraft in flight :joy:.

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Strange the CRJ700 and the PMDG Cloudmaster seem to have no icing effects. Other planes ice perfectly fine, just as I like it :slight_smile:

I have tested icing with the Mooney M20 Ovation and the “ice rain” preset, and it was fine.

Let´s hope this get patched to have the CRJ and Cloudmaster also freezing.

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Maybe these devs have implemented a more realistic icing effect. If you are interested in realism its not a big loss without the icing effects. On an aircraft equipped for flight in icing conditions, icing is a non-event most of the times, there won’t be any ice accretion when operating anti-icing and de-icing systems properly. On an aircraft not suitable for flight in icing conditions, just stay out of icing conditions! You don’t need to have some unrealistic icing effect telling you to escape icing conditions, you know already you shouldn’t be there :joy:.

Besides, you should be able to fly an aircraft through snow showers without icing accretion, your Cessna 172 will completely ice-up now when its snowing in MSFS. I have thousands of hours as a flight instructor, flying single engine piston aircraft, sometimes through icing conditions (inadvertently), and turbo-props and jets through Scandinavia and the Baltics in icing conditions. Icing just doesn’t look like that on an aircraft in flight. Pretty? Maybe. Realistic? Not at all.

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Icing like the weather will never be as to anyone’s likening. Too much icing to little icing no icing not realistic icing looks great icing

No it’s still there. The problem is there is no way to turn it off. You still get it when set to off and it still affects performance of the aircraft when set to visual only. It’s been broken like this since release and as usual Asobo don’t do anything about it.

Hi, I have tested various temperatures and settings. -25°C is sometimes used to create some extreme arctic settings for the Everts Air Alaska cargo version of the PMDG Cloudmaster.

Yes of course because when testing icing I have all de-icing and defrost systems switched off, also the cockpit and cabin heaters for maximum immersion and realism to see if the plane freezes over :slight_smile: It should have a satisfying icing effect, it must be an exciting battle against the weather when the de-icing systems are switched on after having a frozen aircraft. Seeing how the windows slowly defrost and having the ice on the leading edges melt is a pure joy because in this case it is perfectly working realistic de-icing simulation.
I would love to see only the ice on the windshield melt with no other parts defrosting when turning up the cockpit heater in the Airbus CRJ or Cloudmaster (on the EICAS there is even a cockpit temperature readout), but this feature is not yet implemented.

No I think the icing effect FS20 has now looks very realistic, and is a good mixture between great adventurous visuals and pure eye candy, and realism.

In the early Flight Sim Beta days it looked like a car on a january morning, but now we have only the windshield and leading edges prop and some other parts of the airplane cluttered with ice.

Icing is an interesting topic because in the eighties various planes crashed because of ice accumulation on the round shaped upper side of the wings and the leading edge, SAS Flight 751 lost both turbines because this ice went into the engines after breaking off). When flying I especially love the battle against the elements, against the cold, and I love to use a weather radar to fly around thunderstorms and turbulence.

No, not at all, it should be realistic, not necessarily pretty or “eye-candy”! Its called a flight simulator for a reason. Asobo should make the sim as realistic as possible and stop listening to what people want. Their solution is a slider for everything so everyone can tune stuff to their liking, they should make it true to life. This is how it is in the real world, take it or leave it.

It is completely possible to fly through clouds below 0C SAT and not picking up any ice. As said before, most severe icing conditions are around 0C SAT. Icing is hard to predict, don’t expect any significant amount of ice when temperature is far below 0C. Neither is this a battle in real life (usually), windshields and probes should always be heated from start-up to shutdown, icing conditions or not.

Based on the the pictures you just posted I can say with absolute certainty and based on real life experience that its a joke. Icing does not look like that at all, especially the windshields and side / cabin windows icing over like that is totally unrealistic

As said before, apart from flowback, ice does not form on the upper side of the wing. Depending on configuration and speed (angle of attack) ice may form aft of protected leading edge areas, but certainly not directly on top of the wing. When I fly around in the TBM I still see icing directly on top of the wing, side of the fuselage and vertical stabilizer. Not realistic at all.

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Anyway… can you request deicing on ground ?

No…

So what’s the point to implement icing worse than my broken home freezer if you maintain ice off your airframe and can’t turn around after landing because it looks like my freezer after a few seconds when engines are turned off…

I can confirm that in a recent flight I did from LOWW (Vienna, Austria) my FBW 320nx was icing up just sat on the ground! Had to turn on the window heat!

Also in the climb thru clouds I did get some icing on the outside of the aircraft, however it cleared itself eventually with EAI and WAI on. It certainly still exists and they haven’t removed it.

I just thank god it’s not as bad as it was when the sim was released and you got a completely white frozen aircraft and there was nothing you could do about it except to remove the ice in the developer mode menu! :joy:

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The iceing edge was way too strong at the beginning. Now it is much more realistic. An Airplane wont look like a snowball in the skies skies by iceing within when anti ice is activated. minutes, especially not, when anti ice is active. I like it, how it is now. Seems very realistic.

They did what every honorable Frenchman software developer would do: Transfer what the thrustworthy Peugeot looked alike on a cold December morning straight onto their l’ordinateur.
And I still think it looks awesome :slight_smile:

But I found another possible problem: Icing on the ground (while cold and dark, while parking or taxiing) is no longer present in the sim.
In the early Flight Sim 20 Beta days… when everything in the sim was PERFECT (except some spikes in the terrain) and GeForce 3090 graphics cards really had to sweat while rendering (non-downgraded and non-optimized graphics without pop-ins and pop-ups everywhere on mountains and scenery) pure photorealism, and upgrading the computer was pure joy because of the new state of the art flight sim… the aircraft windows had this cool icing effect.
The aircraft was freezing over when taking ten minutes or longer to prepare a cold and dark cockpit, start the airplane and taxi when severe snowfall or ice-rain weather had been set.
This was awesome!

Now there is no icing effect on the ground anymore existing… no matter how long the cold and dark aircraft is parking in the ice rain or falling snow.
Icing occurs while flying only - and in clouds only.

This should be patched to have the airplanes again having fully freezing over when parking half an hour in Alaskan ice rain and going through checklists and loading the freight and starting the engines… :slight_smile:

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