This is how xplane 12 is simulating icing.
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Yep. Heavy icing not compatible with flight.
That stall horn though! Thought it was a parrot at first.
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you made my day
nah it’s one of those desert frog things. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HBxn56l9WcU
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FYI, I’ve opened a topic during SU12 beta about the regression of the aerodynamic impact. It has become a bug-report topic and now marked as “bug-logged”. Let’s hope they will get this fixed soon enough …
REGRESSION: Icing has no aerodynamic impact
Found out about this excellent thread thanks to @AlpineB4652 
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With the unbearable humid summer hell finally over now I am getting really excited for autumn and the romantic winter time. 
On some videos I have seem how awesome and super realistic the snow is falling on X-Plane aircraft and accumulating on it´s wings and upper part of the hull.
Important to have this too in FS2020 (or FS2024 please).
Plus I would love to see thick ice accumulation on the slats and the elevators and rudder and other parts of the airplane (not just colouring the slats in white but real half-transparent 3D ice when aircraft anti ice is switched off).
In it´s early days after release FS2020 had absolute awesome icing effects with the airplanes completely freezing over like it was the Asobo lead developer´s Peugeot in an icy January night, and also the airplane windows went completely frozen with the view getting refracted when looking through the frozen window until window heating is switched on.
The icing effects where already truly good looking and it was a joy to unfreeze an airplane with cold and dark cockpit parking in thick snow, have the completely frozen over windows defrosting with the window heating, calling the trucks with the anti ice fluid (this looked really good in GSX)…
Until a very dark day came when literally all winter and icing effects -------> 100% removed from the simulator.
Well I want this day reversed please, and also beautyful snow accumulation and freezing and ice effects really brought back into the sim to shine, and make awesome exciting winter ops possible.
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It would be nice to have the icing improved finally. Flight simming is not only about the eye-candy.
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Yet it remains eye-candy for the most part.
You’ll see it if you fly directly into a TS front. Some mild turbulence and that’s it. No ripping of wings, no airframe icing that renders the aircraft uncontrollable, no turning the aircraft upside down and flying backwards.
We’re a very long way from having a very realistic sim, where avoiding icing or harsh weather conditions isn’t just something for eye-candy fun but something that will cost you your sim-life.
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Are you seeing ice on your airframe?
I cannot seem to get ice to form, at all, no matter what I try. I’ve tried live weather flying in icing conditions and I’ve tried playing with weather settings; both result in no ice at all.
I’ve checked the Assistance Options and have toggled it off, to visual only to on and nothing works.
It used to work quite a long time ago, but now and I can’t get anything.
EDIT:
Ha! Just as I posted this, I’ve got some tiny bits of ice forming:
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As I’ve learned it can be easy for a dev to do something that removes the visual effects even if the sim is registering icing.
Nevertheless, the point still stands - icing is too slow to form and has too little impact on the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft.
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The Black Square Baron has great icing!
Yesterday I flew through a bunch of thick clouds and in seconds the windshield and other windows where frozen 
Lovely! Awesome! That is true Black Square simulation quality.
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Anyone know if the icing while sitting on the ramp at below zero in dry air gonna get fix? That is really annoying.
But it doesnt affect anything though
No news I’m afraid. There’s a #msfs:wishlist topic for de-icing ground services though:
Did you notice a decrease in lift?
on the ground at Saskatoon, -4c in clear dry air, no snow, no ice on the ground or on any other objects at the entire airport, yet by the time I’d get preflight checks done: aircraft was caked in ice.
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A few thoughts from a non pilot: First, as a fan of weather, as I understand it, icing is very conditional. It’s not something that happens to every plane on every flight just because its cold. It can be avoided.
So that leads me to the weather representation in the sim. Instead of clear skies, haze, and a wide variety of cloud types/conditions, we have presently clear skies or cumulus clouds that double as haze. and then there’s the ‘fog discs’ that hang around cities – not sure they have any effect on weather other than visibility.
In real life I think one could see (and have represented) situations and places where icing would be likely but in the sim its just “if cold and in cloud then ice” or apparently even on the ground if cold.
The atmospheric simulation needs improving before we should be overly concerned about the exact rate or amount of icing. And I also think they don’t want pilots dropping out of the sky after just a few minutes flight. If you fly the default C172 G1000 at 7500 or 8500 feet through cloudy/icy conditions for very long then your plane will drop out of the sky eventually. I know because it happened to me on a flight from Frasca Field to Indy Exec earlier this year. I think the idea of a slider for “real” or “less icing” or “no icing” is really good and probably best.
my .02
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So it turns out there is a variable available in the SDK called
icing_scalar
that should enhance the effect of icing on the aerodyamics of the aircraft. It is a default of one, but reports suggest a value of between 3.0 to 4.0 gets you somewhere closer to what should be expected. I’m yet to test this and need to see what (if anything) has been said about it in the dev forums.
yep , indeed , actually I’m using a value of 10.0 to get the de-icing meaningful and needed . I’ve actually suggested this in the TBM850 JF forum, as the 850 really lacks icing impact even further.
BUT , that’s hardly a workaround as it will only increase ice weight and the subsequent side-effect of additional weight. But what we really need it’s the impact on the airfoil , true reduction in critical AOA and increase in drag, so I avoided publishing it here to prevent this from being an “acceptable workaround” that is ok to skip fixing for now… which is the sad state of many other physical aspects.
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10?! Very interesting. This reminds me of the ground friction scalars - an incomplete solution. But maybe better than nothing. Thanks for the info.
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