Brief description of the issue:
Normally, when an aircraft gets iced, and you enable de-icing the effects it has should be the same if your flying normally or inverted.
However in this sim, when your iced and engine performance drops as indicated by the red AOA indicator, you can easily break free from it by flying inverted.
Here is an example demonstrated using the Aermacchi MB-339A.
Observe how when flying straight I can barely gain any altitude and the AOA (Angle of Attack) indicator gets an all red indication.
However upon flipping the aircraft, the AOA indicator goes green and climbing is easy.
Why is this the case ? Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:
With the Aermacchi MB-339A
With the Pitts Special:
Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered:
Climb up to an altitude to freeze you aircrafts
Enable de-icing systems
Observe how straight level flight degrades performance and drops the aircraft
Invert your aircraft and icing is no longer a problem!
Expected Results
I am no avionics expert so I’ll leave this to the experts. But I would assume that inverting your aircraft should in reality not have an effect on engine performance when iced ?
Gravity knows how to treat the bottom of the airplane differently from the top.
But if flipping the aircraft caused the ice to all fall off, then it should fly normally when back to normal
Yup, it should. I think by turning upside down, the downward force from the ice was reversed as well, so it climbed.
I hope you’re not taking my posts too seriously!
I recall the devs describing increasing the number of points that apply to the top of the wing in order to simulate the effects of wind turbulence and icing. I’m not sure but that might explain why aircraft inversion negated the effect, as the forces weren’t being applied on the bottom surface of the wings ?
Perhaps this is easy to fix, as upon inversion you need to gradually change the force points to the bottom.
But as long as this bug exists, I wouldn’t worry about icing conditions in the sim
The problem is though, that for those that experience this, these icing conditions are preventing climbing to altitude properly, if at all, in the big airliners.
So for them, it is an issue.
I mean icing until today was a serious issue for most people flying in colder weathers.
With this exploit you can almost laugh at “Icing”…
Coz with practice you can fly for hours inverted and trimmed for almost hands free flying, and be on the magenta line.
I have figured the art of landing most GA planes inverted and just flipping at the last 200 feet for wheel touch down.
Yes navigating inverted is almost as easy with practice. Up / Down / Left / Right becomes relative to the aircraft instead of relative to the world around you.
So while this bug exists, being an inverted flying expert has some useful benefits
Normally inverted flying is something fighter pilots train a lot at getting good at to dog fight maneuvers.
I wonder if fighter planes like the F22, have computers on-board that reverses the control scheme when inverted to make it feel the same for the pilot ?
This has to take the trophy for my favorite bug report
In seriousness though I think @TheSevenflyer is onto something. If the detrimental effects of icing on an aircraft is programmed, for example, as a “negative value of lift” of lift that is activated when icing=true, then when the aircraft is inverted, up becomes down and down becomes up and the aircraft nosedives into the sky.
I wish icing worked like this in real life. Then we would design aircraft with invertable cabins and intentionally fly into known icing for free lift and better fuel economy.
No, you are correct. This is not right, but a hilarious solution.
to dog fight maneuvers.
