I’m not sure why you’re responding to me like that. In my post that you replied to I was attempting to ask for a more realistic weather simulation so pilots could actually see weather that should probably be avoided. But I also suggested it would be good to create a slider that made those dangers not an issue for novice pilots.
FS2020 already has icing effects - at least on the C172 G1000… last time I checked anyway.
It appears to me we are in agreement.
The other thing with icing is it needs to be more black and white in regard to the interface between clouds and precip. To date, the “hit box” for a cloud is kind of nebulous and icing occurs well away from where I’d expect it. This is part and parcel of the issue with clouds being too transparent anyway.
It would be nice to see it form correctly on probes and other protuberances first and be able to differentiate rime and clear icing both visually and accurately as to where they’d occur in the atmosphere.
We can’t adjust the rate at which ice accumulates, and it used to be much faster than it is now. What we can tweak are it’s effects, and 400% of what it usually is is a recommended value. You will notice its effects then.
i think, like many things in the sim, it’s partially implemented
i have experienced frozen static ports and windshield icing
i “may” have experienced carb icing but i’m not sure since i couldn’t replicate
i have never yet experienced airframe icing and loss of lift
I definitely did way back in my earliest time with the sim, so winter ‘21/‘22.
It was an awesome experience sweating out flying over the Sierra Nevada like a stupid dope with zero anti/de-icing equipment.
Experiences like this is what makes a simulator so fabulous.
Unfortunately, I have not experienced it since.
Yeah, as @NixonRedgrave said, I definitely experienced it. I was flying at 7500 or 9500 feet from C16 Frasca to Indy exec during wintertime a couple years ago and my autopilot was on and the plane kept getting more unable to maintain good airspeed it seemed and then it just fell out of the sky. I almost didnt make it but recovered at a couple thousand feet and just flew at low altitude the rest of the way. It was awesome actually.
very interesting point this
even though i was a sporadic sim user since launch day, i only became a full time user since around mid 22 (when i finally got a proper pc) and i have never experienced airframe icing so maybe its one of those things that we lost along the way?
I believe it was tamed due to complaints(?).
oh the humanity
I think a lot of the complaints were along the lines of what I explained above, where you’d see the entire windshield icing over (first) with clear icing, at a very high rate, despite being nowhere near a cloud or precip. In that case, both the manner and the place in which it did so were unrealistic. Whether or not that was mistaken for a general complaint about overagressive icing and thus broadly nerfed is debatable.
Right, and perhaps the icing mechanic is(was) too simplistic to be able to be adjusted in nuanced ways to prevent that from happening, so it ended up dialed back across the board.
so, has anyone experienced dangerous airframe icing recently? say, in this year?
No, actually i think once like 2-3 years ago xD
Yeah, a few years ago people were complaining icing was accumulating too quickly and had too big of an effect. Unfortunately the people that were complaining had little to zero real time in icing and just felt it was “too much” so Asobo nerfed it. Yes, it was glorious before-hand. It wasn’t heavy enough but it was better. Post-nerf, the most impact you’ll feel is somewhere around 10-15% performance loss at “full”/100% ice.
We still can get a heavy impact from icing but it takes changing every flight model to keep up with the nerf. There’s a line which @hobanagerik has mentioned a few times called “icing_scalar” in the flight model. It’s a line I’ve come to change in every single one of my 150+ aircraft mods. Through many thousands of hours in IRL icing in all conditions and with extensive testing in the sim, I’ve settled on putting this to icing_scalar = 4. I would honestly love to go higher but as we can still get moderate icing out of cloud, I’ve settled on a happy medium. Can I emulate my real life experience of icing over in 5 seconds or picking up a solid 4 inches of ice in 30 seconds in Severe conditions? No. Unfortunately not. But icing_scalar=4 is a happy medium
4 means 400% which is purely the physical impact the icing has on the airframe. Unfortunately we have no current way of changing catch/accumulation rate but this helps. At 4 / 400%, you’ll start to feel an impact at about 25% aircraft icing. At 50% you’ll feel a major performance hit. At 75% plenty of aircraft will not be flyable. It’s enough in most/all aircraft to force you to remember your anti-ice toys.
Of course there are exceptions to this, such as a certain big jet with the windshield icing effectively de-icing the entire airframe, but generally 4 works great.
I think I took issue with this and to be fair I should’ve quoted that at the time to be a bit clearer.
I get this, but I’d imagine if you’re a novice flyer who started up the sim for the first time it’s doubtful that you’d have realism settings at “Ultra Realism” where icing has an actual impact, and if you did decide to throw yourself totally in the deep end you’d have to expect the consequences of that.
I agree it has icing effects but I also agree with the others that they’re too weak to the point that if I’m feeling lazy on a cross country flight, and there’s a large cumulus system in front of me at icing altitudes, I often go straight through it instead of going down or descending knowing there will be little effect to my plane - I’ll visually see something but performance wise there is little impact, and that’s a pity.
i wish they would have done things differently then
inform the user “you just crashed because of icing” and make “disable ice accretion” a selectable option
but don’t wipe it out completely and for everyone
Absolutely. Or a second slider much like turbulence. Icing effect: off, low, medium, high, realistic. Something like that
Well, unfortunately no surprises, zero improvement in FS2024… well at least with the default TBM.
Left the TBM flying in hard IFR stormy weather for more than an hour, iced up like an ice cube but still zero effect on airplane performance.
This time it’s even worse, we can’t debug the sim in the devmode as everything is blocked due to an “encrypted aircraft”… can’t see the sim icing parameters or weight… 
i was hoping for realistic icing
do we know if its seriously planned at least?
Icing is essential part of aviation, so I sure hope they’ll implement it as well as effects of contaminated runway and taxiways, be it water, snow, ice or slush.
It would be cool, if during a turnaround your plane gets covered in snow (if it’s snowing) and then you either de-ice the plane or take the consequences trying to take off.
Also carburetor ice is so common problem, that it should also be simulated.
They named this FS version “limitless”, so who knows, maybe this is doable in new sim.
