Live Weather is surprisingly accurate. Great online tool to preview wind

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I’ve been flying career mode for the last few days and, like many of us, once I completed the IFR training certification, and live weather became active, I thought the game was bugged out. Wind and turbulence levels seemed crazy. However…

Take a look at this great online tool for viewing world wide weather and specifically wind:

You can visibly see the wind levels, and over the last few days I’ve been comparing the wind from those maps to the wind I’m experiencing in game and it’s incredibly accurate.

For example, during my last flight I was flying cargo from an island off the coast of Japan to an airport on the coast in a Cessna 172. Reported wind on the above website said to expect 40+ km/h from takeoff all across the water, but it assured me that it would be down to 8 km/h when I reached the coast for landing. That is exactly what I experienced.

This also matches my experience over my last 15 or so flights. Another example was I was flying over France up towards Belgium. I’d checked the weather a couple of hours earlier and it was all sub 10km/h in land so I didn’t check for this specific flight that was taking me further north. On arrival at the airport it was 42km/h and 500m visibility. I was shocked, and to be fair it should have been game over, but by some miracle I landed it.

Surprised by the unexpected wind and weather I went to check the link above and sure enough it was reporting 45 km/h winds in that area blowing in off the sea.

I just wanted to share this great resource. It will allow you to plan where to fly and where to avoid. If you are in a GA aircraft and inexperienced, you’ll probably want to avoid any wind conditions above 15 km/h. I believe this is relatively consistent with real world recommendations for inexperienced pilots.

So for once, well done Asobo: live weather is working great at least as far as wind strength is concerned. With that said, inexperienced players and pilots really need an option to disable live weather in career mode. It’s a huge shock going from 5 km/h winds to 40+km/h.

Final tip: On the pre-flight screen, where you can go into free look mode, zoom down and around where you will be flying. You can actually hear in game how windy it is everywhere. If it sounds really windy at your landing airport, you can be fairly certain that is what it will be like when you get there. If it sounds calm it will be.

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Thanks for sharing your experience. This has been a fairly common theme in the past week - folks who don’t realize how weather works are complaining about strong winds aloft that shift closer to the surface, which is absolutely how it usually works. Your post almost needs to be a sticky.

How to interpret weather for simming is something I teach a lot on my stream and there many official resources you can find that will give you an idea of how it’s going to be. Part of the issue is that Asobo released the sim in November, a time of year which most of the population of the northern hemisphere is getting battered by strong weather systems. People are saying things like “it just can’t be this hard to fly” and I’m here to say that it is. November is absolutely the month in which I have the least real hours logged, followed by December.

However, the biggest problem in the sim right now seems to be that sometimes what it’s telling us in career mode isn’t what it’s giving us, and the ATC pathing is also reliant on that - so we get downwind landings, etc. And sometimes the turbulence is a bit overblown. There are also people in some parts of the world (UK in particular) that often seem to get different weather than everybody else is getting.

But in general, live weather winds in free flight mode are pretty spot-on, they have been for the last four years of the sim.