There is a long-time and widely recognized flaw in our beloved simulator that makes most planes difficult to handle on the ground under windy conditions, often referred as the weathervaning effect (references below). But unfortunately it fails to get attention.
The issue in brief: a real plane tends to weathervane into the wind, but this effect is overly exaggerated in MSFS. This makes planes very difficult and sometimes impossible to handle crosswind on the ground, even with moderate wind speed. This affects taxiing but also takeoff (difficult to keep the centerline) and landing (same problem as soon as one touch down).
This is a serious and very annoying problem for the realism of the sim. There have been lots or discussions about it (links below), and also several posts in the Wishlist. But somehow they fail to get attention they deserve.
I think that doesn’t reflect the extent of the problem.
Maybe it doesn’t get much attention because simmers that don’t fly in real life can’t be sure about why this happens: they might think this is normal, or that there is a problem with their settings, etc. Or because discussions are often technical and sometimes controversial. Or there are too many threads already in the Wishlist:
If you feel concerned by this problem you might consider joining one or all of these threads. And if you’re seeking for more information on this topic, here are a few other posts that might be of interest:
Above all, I think it would be beneficiall to have a single entry point for this issue in the wishlist, so that it can one day gather enough interest to make its way into the roadmap.
Does anyone know how we could proceed ? I assume that this is not the first occurrence of having “almost-duplicates” like these.
A vast majority of ground handling characteristics are remarkably difficult for Asobo to deal with en masse for one simple reason - they can be (and should be) tweaked and adjusted by devs in the flight models. Things like lateral friction, steering sensitivity, weathervaning, the impact of crosswinds, how quickly a plane feels like it’s “flying”, effectiveness of the rudder to crosswinds - all dev flight model adjustable. So what you get is a massive mixed bag of talent, experience, and knowhow going into these dozens of aircraft. Some devs know how to use the cfgs and the new-ish ground handling numbers (along with all the rest) to their benefit and others do not.
The problem is, in a lot of cases, ego gets in the way. A dev can’t successfully replicate how a certain plane does this or that, so they go immediately to “sim limitations” or “blame Asobo” when it’s entirely a thing they have under their own control, whether they know it or not. And once they start saying “sim limitation”, it gets repeated over and over until everyone believes it.
Personally I’ve modded dozens of planes to have proper crosswind handling, tested to book limits, and comparing to my extensive IRL experience.
I’m not saying there’s no room for improvement from Asobo because there certainly is but a vast majority of the issue does not lay at their feet.
For what I’ve read in some posts by people who seem to have seriously looked into the problem, I understood that the available modeling parameters do not solve the fundamental problem and only allow for the implementation of empirical workarounds that remain imperfect compromises.
But I get your point about the responsibility of modelers and their relative competencies, and indeed some of them undoubtedly manage to deal with this issue very well (like A2A’s Comanche).
However the major reason that let me think that there is something wrong in the engine itself, is that all the stock aircraft I have tried suffer badly from this issue. Including very popular ones like the C172, for example.
I know that default airplane models are not the most sophisticated ones, but they are still reasonably good in general, and I can’t understand how they can suffer from such imperfections by the simulator’s own designers…
So anyway there is something important to fix by Asobo, whether it’s the engine or the default models.
I agree that the weather vaning is too pronounced. From memory (Jorg I think) acknowledged this in an early developer brief.
He explained the issue was that each tyre had only a single ground contact point which did not allow for any ‘directional friction’ from the tyre itself. He had said at the time they were looking to increase the number of contact points per tyre which was hoped to alleviate the problem. This was supposed to be released with the aerodynamic updates for the C172 at the time. I am not sure if this ever happened, or whether it fell off the radar.
By following one of the Wishlist threads you highlighted above, namely ‘Crosswind handling on the ground’ I added the following lines to the bottom of [FLIGHT_TUNING] in the flight_model.cfg of the aircraft I commonly use and I can now do normal strong crosswind take-offs and landings. Brilliant!
