while flying through stormcells, big cumulus clouds, strong thermals or just having bad weather in general:
possible loss of control
if a certain wind speed exceeds the maneuverability of an aircraft, that’s how it should be simulated (please no more sugar-coating)
realistic turbulence behaviour
realistic up & down draft strength (there is a lot possible in real life)
wind shear, gusts, microbursts, hail
rain / snow physics effect on the airplane (worse lift, greater drag)
Hypoxemia & Oxygen system
In real aviation it’s vital to check the weather and weather forecast / API to make a decision which route you take or if it’s even possible to fly.
It’s not necessary to do this in MSFS because everything listed above is simulated only to a certain extent, just visually or not at all.
It would make flights much more lively and fun in general if you would consider to simulate realistically the dangerous side of aviation. So here is the Wishlist topic.
Yeah, all I ever seem to get is clouds and (ice) rain/snow. Anyone ever seen hail?
I think this may be partially implemented already. In an earlier version of the sim, I could barely climb over the trees near my local airport in a C152 during heavy rain. I’m not far from sea level. I’m not sure whether temperature or something else could’ve been the real factor though.
Making the sim be able to realistically model these things would mean a HUGE amount of additional code that would make the whole simulation way more complex.
Even the most modern and most advanced professional simulators do not model real extreme weather. Not only because there simply is not enough data to do it correctly and modelling it in simulators would give false muscle memory to pilots, but also because it does not matter a lot. If you fly into a moderate downdraft close to touchdown you are going to crash. No training will prevent that.
This MSFS, and it s aimed at an audience of a few million people. Tweaking it to handle extreme weather makes not a lot of sense. Teaching people to avoid it like the plague does make a lot of sense as that is what pilots do. This is a flight simulator. Intended to simulate what it is to fly an aircraft.
If you see a huge dark cloud, higher than it is wide. Do not go there.
If you see a lot of lightning, go somewhere else.
That is what real pilots do. That is realism. If you get into bad weather it is because somebody, somewhere made a mistake.
There is nothing wrong with making it more complex. That should be the goal right after making it stable.
By that logic we shouldn’t have any up & down drafts at all, because it’s ‘‘not 100% accurate’’ it gives people false muscle memory, in a simulator where we don’t even have force feedback
It would make a lot more sense, having the possibility of bad weather occurence gives the million of people a lot more excitement.
There is no reason for a simulation which aims to simulate aviation to ignore that fundamental aspect.
Just because no simulation did it correctly somewhere else doesn’t mean Asobo/Microsoft can’t do it.
But people make mistakes, but if you don’t simulate it they wont know
Ive landed during storms before and have experienced pretty much all of these things - definitely space for improvement but I cant really think of another sim that does it better. Keep in mind, my experience is almost totally in airliners, not GA (though I have done some fun landings in the Kodiak).
I’ve had some intense landings in Salty747, FBW A320Neo, Aerosoft CRJ-700, and Justflight BAE-146 in storms.
I’ve played a lot of sims over the years and have not found these to be easy landings - if you’ve already mastered perfect butter smooth crab landings in max live weather crosswinds in this game then color me impressed.
Some of the things like gusts were in the sim, got disabled and now gonna come back maybe. Up and down drafts also were in the sim much stronger and got limited, now reworked with thermals for an basic implementation.
Not all of the listed above are completely missing, some are just too limited in terms of realism, just that everybody can have a chill flight no matter the conditions.
What I’m trying to say is a lot of this is too far away from beeing realistic if you end up with an small ga airplane in an big cumulus cloud and have almost no effect, while in reality it would throw you around, for example.
Asobo mentioned some sort of advanced CFD simulation in the future and I created this thread so people can vote for more realism or they don’t vote if they should leave it more arcade like, like it is right now.
Just in case somebody wonders how it looks like in X-plane, not saying this looks realistic in any form. but having any effect in bad weather situations is better than non (msfs). There you have a reason to look at the weather API instead of flying straight through the storm with almost just visual effects.
I tested very heavy rain with a custom Rain preset and the C172 G1000 seemed to suffer some severe drag upon takeoff. Still unsure what feature of the sim is actually causing that behavior.
Well, having been in the business of making aircraft more complex for over 2 decades I can tell you that simply does not compute.
A real airline pilot is part of a two men team. Highly trained, highly educated. Rested, sober.
Now I have the utmost respect for our customers, but a single guy with a $70 simulator, a $60 aircraft and a lot of youtube videos is simply not the same.
As we increased the complexity of DLC we saw sales numbers drop. And cost of customer support rise. 9% of our Airbus customers tell us our autopilot does not work because they simply do not understand the autopilot has two modes. If we tell them it is explained in the manuals, they say 'it does not work as in a 737’. And demand their money back.
That is why less complex products sell way better than complex products these days. They sure do not get the attention and forum posts, but they sure bring in the money. Aerosoft is arguably one of the biggest publishers and I am 90% sure you do not know what our best-selling products are.
Many customers have bought a product they were not fully capable of using. And I do not blame them at all. As said, an airliner is flown by two people who both paid at least $150.000 to get trained. I always find it rather disrespectful towards pilots to claim our customers can their job.
It would also be neat to have some thunder and lightning when flying through storms 
