Runway Light Technical Error

In real life the runway lights are only on between sunset and sunrise or in IFR conditions. In the sim they’re always on.

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Not always the case, especially in bad weather/fog

I’ve noticed since the last update that the lighting intensities are more realistic from range so that’s at least an improvement, but I agree, having all the lights on during the day in good weather is daft.
Did a flight in the sim yesterday that passed overhead an airfield I used a lot when flying for the military, West Freugh in Scotland, it’s now non operational with all of the runways having yellow crosses on them, funny thing is that the taxiway lights and runway end lights are still on and sim populates the aprons with aircraft that obviously can’t take off!

Another thing I’ve noticed is the approach lights being visible from absurd distances and angles, even in the early evening with a fair bit of light out. I hope they fix some of that and/or make the lighting more directional as in the real world.

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Nope. E.g. on a few military bases in Europe all the runway and approah lights are turned on if there’s any flight ops, regardless if it’s day or night, CAVOK or fog.

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Here are some relevant Wishlist and Bugs & Issues topics you may want to look at:

This:

This ( @xNate262x ):

And this:

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Probably training establishments, SAR, etc. I was a military and police pilot for 36 years so am aware of the exceptions. What I was pointing out was that it’s ‘daft in the sim’ to have runway lighting on for day CAVOK conditions at all airfields. To make it clear I’m talking about the sim here, not real life.

No. e.g. fighter airbases. The point is that calling it ‘daft’ is not appropriate IMO.
I prefer having runway lights during daytime instead of having none during nighttime :wink:

Yeah, with FSEconomy you also quite often fly to military airfields with closed runways and one can see in LittleNavMap that MSFS is actually aware that it’s closed (hence the yellow crosses) but still renders lights.
Probably a quite easy fix to add a rule when auto-generating lights, since each runway has the property that it is closed.

But there are SO many things they could improve on the autogenerated default airports, the runway lights aren’t on the top of my list…
What I miss the most is probably some apron lighting on the bigger airports - taxiing through the dark on a major airport is simply weird to say the least. But that’s off topic :slight_smile:

Your opinion, but I get the fighter Base thing though that’s a very narrow percentage of real airfields, but I think you’re missing the point I’m talking about the sim, not real life. Oddly enough my last police Base was at a very active military airfield in the UK which switched the runway lights off completely when ATC closed at 17.30hrs unless the military were night flying training. Leaving ourselves and the SAR helicopter to make our own arrangements for landing aids. Weekend day light hours no runway lights so I stand with my experience and opinion that having All the airfield lights on all the time in the sim is not realistic.

Yes, looking for the marshallers at Sumburgh on a completely dark apron can soon have you in the water!

I fully agree, but isn’t the way you wrote it now much more polite than calling it daft, especially when we know that the developers are reading the forum posts?

I’m not sure the word daft would be taken as offensive in anyway, but we seem to agree on the fact it’s not realistic.

I’m not a native English speaker and looking at the dictionary I would be offended. That’s why I replied so harsh.

Jeeezz…who cares about using a word like ‘daft’ to describe something.

Now that’s a daft reply.

Understood, your english is excellent by the way.
Sadly we British would use far stronger words than daft when intending to intensionally insult or offend someone.

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LOL, thanx for the flowers and the info.

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You’re welcome, happy flying.

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Same to you :slight_smile:

Testing since hours and sending zendesk reports…