Just wondered about the settings for FS20 re realism. Until recently I had crash damage disabled, only because I have still been getting used to flight simming again. Anyhow I thought I would just test the sim with the C152 and Redhill - a grass runway. Normal landing has the stall warning just go off as you touch down, no issues, then I tried hard landing, a few feet off, no damage, so a higher landing with two bounces, no damage. I did crash into the trees to make sure it was working.
So how much leway do we get for landing? Anyone know?
Keith
Not sure exactly what the sim uses to detect a crash. Iâm guessing itâs several things - g forces, contact points, etc.
However, âdamageâ isnât binary irl. Heck, a hard landing could produce viable damage, but could also just wear something faster, which could be considered on a damage spectrum, but technically isnât. Stock aircraft, to my knowledge, donât do that at all in free flight (there is no persistence) and in career, itâs kind of all over the place. So weâre back to binary whatever, which is going to mixed in terms of realism.
I prefer to turn damage off - I know when I land hard enough to âcrashâ and donât need the sim to tell me, along with all the other nonsense that causes it to detect a crash.
Crash detection is also surprisingly resource-intensive. Like you I never bothered.
Mathijs
And having watched a lot of real world students fall back to earth more or less gracefully I can tell you that the common GA trainers are actually quite tough.
Basically at least for the Piper Cherokee family, if you can still roll off the active runway and steer the aircraft without too much trouble, odds are she survived another carrier landing.
Especially the earlier Cessna aircraft with tricycle gear were a little less forgiving if the initial hard impact was followed by a bit of wheel barrowing onto the nosewheel, or worse an initial touchdown on the nosewheel. That often lead to crumbled firewalls etc.
On one particularly hard landing of a C172 however I do recall did manage to literally damage the left main gear leg. But we honestly thought she also would have paint scratches on her belly, because the legs moved out that far.
Bent firewalls are all too common in the 172. That theyâre not easy to see with the cowling on makes it even worse. Fortunately, Iâm tall enough to lean over and peer into the engine compartment through the oil filler access door. 
A friend of mine purchased a C172 that turned out had a bent firewall. It flew fine and also showed no signs of problems until he brought it in to our trusted A&P for her first annual inspection his possession.
Knowing his skill set i doubt that he caused the damage, so quite likely the previous owner had done it and then decided to get rid of her rather than repair it. Unfortunately the prebuy was done near her old homebase somewhere in the midwest before she moved to CA.
OK thanks. In the real world, yes the Cessna was very hardy, I know our flying school C152 had a lot of hard landings (me included), so I am not surprised the sim has some leeway. I just wondered how much, I have yet to crash on landing with the cessna - but I am trying. I did not know it took âresourcesâ from the PC - is that an issue then?
At the whole MSFS is not realistic at all⊠If you like realism go to x plane 12 , Prepar3D all this have licenses for flight pilot trainingâŠ. MSFS dont have âŠ
I was on a United B727-200 back in the summer of 1986. We were landing in KDEN on a hot afternoon. We hit the runway so hard the pilots taxied to the maintenance hanger. We were bused to the terminal. No announcment was made by the pilots. And they never opened the cockpit door as we deplaned. I guess I wouldnât either if I had made that landing. The flight attendant was great though. She told us over the PA to make sure we picked up our teeth off the floor before exiting the aircraft. Planes can survive quite a bit before they break apart or crash. But I honestly donât know what triggers a crash in these MS sims.
A hard landing that leads to a detected âyour aircraft crashedâ in MSFS is triggered by exceeding the âImpact Damage Thresholdâ (in Feet Per Minute) that is set by the aircraft developer for all contact points in the flight_model.cfg.
I took the example of the A2A Comanche, where this is set to 4000 ft/min (about 20 m/s) for the gear and 1500 ft/min (about 8 m/s) for all other contact points. This seems to be too high and it might be that A2A integrated their own hand coded crash detection.
For the freeware C172 by Bagolu the values are 1500 ft/min for the main, and 750 ft/min for the front gear which seems reasonable. The other contact points have values between 350 and 700 ft/min, which also seems OK.
The FBW A320 has 1200 and 800 ft/min for the gear, the other contact points only 100 ft/min (0.5 m/s) which means, as long as you land hard on your wheels, all is OK, but dontât touch the ground with other aircraft parts. Arguable, an A320 will not be damaged beyond repair by a tail strike of 0.5 m/s, but as we have no detailed damage model (after the 9/11 events the MSFS has been stripped of all visual damage modelling), with crash detection on you will be remembered that something went wrong.
So it absolutely depends on the aircaft developer if and when you get a crash message.
Ok cheers.
Look like I dont need to try and crash on landing then!
Keith P