I suspect the lift at the aircraft uses a ‘keyhole’ sample of a small area of ground under the aircraft, regardless of how high the aircraft is. I think Asobo had an idea of sampling a patch so that you would feel the updraft of a wind hitting a building (quote) i.e. the sample area may be detailed but only a few meters across. Actually given a finite number of samples a much more effective strategy is to sample the ground across a MUCH larger area, e.g. with 15 samples it’s worth including samples from 5…10 km away, and bias your ground sampling significantly in the upwind direction. An incremental improvement on this is to widen the sample pattern as the aircraft gets higher. The effect on the aircraft is a combination of these samples taking into an account of how high the plane is. I know Asobo could radically improve their current simulation by adding these changes, but I’m not sure they’ll understand that the ground sample points don’t need to be evenly placed in a regular pattern immediately under the plane (this is good at 50 feet but pointless at 5000 feet, and I think Asobo is still doing this when the plane is at 25000 feet).
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