I suggested this before, but people replied that this would be static weather. So they want live, dynamic weather, but without the difficulties of turbulence. Whereas I can understand that view, I’m not for it. Live = Live, la la la la la…
If the weather somewhere is too uncomfortable, there’s all the rest of the world to choose from.
What about this post then?
I invite you all to do the following simple test to understand why gusts are wrong in game. We will just evaluate here how wind behaves, not how realistic the turbulence or the flight models are. Place yourself at any windshock location heading aircraft to the north and set the following wind conditions:
This is a crosswind scenario where we are just static and measuring wind at that position and gusts are intentionally set against steady wind direction while both are still crosswind for the airplane control surfaces. The windshock stays stable with small variations in the wind strenght in this case.
Now just increase gust speed to 11 kts and observe what windshock does. Now it changes the direction several times per second as soon as the randomness injected by gusts prevails over the steady wind component.
Now repeat the same tests but using 100 kts + 100 kts winds for the first test and 100 kts + 110 kts for the second. You will see that windshock does exactly the same thing. So a x10 faster wind injects exactly the same randomness as a regular wind.
This is what is wrong in game because the wind speed and direction changes are basically instant. And that´s also wrong in live weather whenever METAR includes any gust speed which is faster than the mean wind speed.
What windshock does here is what your tail will face if you are flying north instead of being static, because in that case your plane will be facing the same superfast changing wind speeds and directions as well, as wind data in game is basically constant for several miles until next update comes. It has some artificial randomness that creates the illussion of a changing wind scenario, but METAR is just the one provided by the stations. That will create turbulence, sure, and that´s correct and it´s implemented in game. What is incorrect is that wind can change its speed and direction almost instantly, specially under light winds conditions.
This is what generates the never ending tail vibrations that you can see on GA aircraft in game, which does not match with the behaviour of those aircraft under real gusty crosswind scenarios because real wind simply can´t do that as the air masses have a lot of inertia and they still need several seconds to suffer the effect of the the changes produced on them by the flows of other air masses which are nearby. Only if the flow is generated by a considerably bigger mass then you can see faster changes (the case of the cyclones for instance) but even that extreme case still needs a few seconds to complete.
Cheers
There was a lot of turbulence and down and updrafts. It was pretty awesome but even though I have 40 dual hours in a real 172 I have never flown a plane into a hurricane so I am just going what was happening. At one point the plane was going sideways and up and down all at the same time. I was on autopilot but was being up and down drafted a 100 feet or more. Pretty exciting and somewhat scary. FWIW
Try it yourself then. I will if I get time…
Turbulence is off in clouds - at least its been for a long time. Many think the wind-gusts are turbulence. Its not. Turbulence should rock you around. I had wings level all the time. Stayed at exactly same altitude all the time.
Gusts only moves the plane around in the x-y-plane, without any roll or up-down-movement.
SU1+2+3+(4?) had good turbulence in clouds though.
I know they can tweak the weather serverwise, without us having to download anything.
If they have introduced turbulence I would be very happy 
Btw, from another thread:
“In MSFS you can fly in Hurricanes 90kts and more and handle it like a champ. They only added gust and thats it! What about what true simmers needs man? I literally was in the heart of Fiona enjoying the waves like it was a site seeing flight”
See posts 86+…
You beat me to it. Instead of this constant back-and-forth just give us sliders from 0-10 , will keep both camps happy.
As I mentioned before, there are differences between how live weather behaves, and what you can configure manually. It has a number of bugs where it doesn’t appear to do what you think it does. For that reason, I think all it does is show the interface to wind doesn’t work as it should. When I configured ground level gusting wind that matches the METAR exactly, the wind doubled in speed after takeoff, which is not what I saw with the live weather.
I don’t think you can configure wind layers, but IIRC if you add another wind layer with the same settings, then position this at a higher altitude, I think that may stop the wind from getting stronger in the space between those two wind layers. I’d need to retest that, but I believe that was how it worked.
tldr; Good start, needs some tweaking!
Wow, what a thread.
I tried a variety of airports and live conditions in the 152 and 172. love how alive the air feels now!
Current private pilot, and tornado chaser that’s been inside weak tornadoes, and also flown near supercell thunderstorms at close range in a 172 and 182, so do have quite a bit of experience with how quickly gusts can hit and change direction.
And yet, the gust frequency does seem a bit high in Flight Simulator. It’s not so much about how sudden the onset of a gust is, but the speed at which it’s constantly going back and forth. It feels like Asobo is attempting to emulate the general lumpiness of the atmosphere and all turbulence using only horizontal wind gusts, which is just one piece of the puzzle here. Whereas I’m more used to bumpiness up and down and getting a wing knocked up and down here and there, in Flight Simulator it’s just a constant back and forth yawing. It feels like a giant shark has gotten ahold of the plane and is swinging it side to side.
I imagine when they implement more of the vertical components for thermals/updrafts/downdraft that this is going to need some tweaking.
I can’t wait to do back to back flights in the sim and irl to compare.
Some bad:
The ground handling. Weathervaning seems way too strong, but we knew this already. Right crosswind 18G33 knots and takeoff was literally impossible. That’s pretty extreme and something I wouldn’t do in real life, but the stronger winds seem to be exaggerating Flight Simulator’s ground quirks.
KEEP IT AS IS. If you must do anything, provide an option to turn it off or something. Really enjoying the fact that you have to “fly” now.
There’s definitely some re-tooling that needs to happen with the lighter, GA aircraft. Was taking off with a C172 in a 9kn quartering wind and for some reason the weathervaning effect from the new winds had my rudder pedal to the floor just to keep the aircraft straight. It’s been a minute since I was in an actual 172, but I don’t recall ever needing to floor the rudder just to keep it on centerline, especially well under max demonstrated crosswind.
I’ve noticed that a few times now. No problems on landing, then when I taxi off the runway to the right, I’m needing full right rudder just to stay on the taxiway. I think the wind was 10kts. I was in the steam 172 as well.
The issue is 172. They changed the wind to be unlimited at ground with that aircraft. That limit has been in the sim since fsx. It must because of that. It’s in the flightmodel. Seb told us about that in a q&a. It’s only the 172 that has that.
And it wasn’t like that in SU9. I flew it, and the WBSim mod a lot, and don’t remember seeing this.
The 152 does it too. Crosswind controls, and ran out of rudder and brake and couldn’t hold centerline.
I was in it with the F-18 when it was just north of Bermuda and the FBW system was shaking like crazy trying to keep it straight, I was getting gusts 100+
Will test 152 too Will check in custom-weather without gusts.
Edit: behaves same without gusts in custom-weather.
Yes, there are gusts, but no turbulence…as said multiple times now.
Gusts only push the aircraft in the horizontal plane.
No wing roll, no up-/downdrafts.
You really think you could fly an F18 into a tornado irl?
Agree, hope to have all aspects of turbulence soon. And if we fly into it and may get that blacksceen saying structural damage and we need to restart the flight. That will make us learn to avoid them instead. Or we turn off damage and we can see the plane act like a leaf.
A simulator should be a learning tool how reality works. Yes, real weather can really be overdone but nobody can change that. We can avoid it.
I’m actually quite disappointed on this matter, yesterday I took off from an airport with surrounding CB and certainly got into some of them but the plane was absolutely quite, not a single turbulence effect. I hope they implement the correct characteristics of CBs and TCUs, windshears and the like - or an addon developer comes with these things like it used to happen in other flight simulators.
That’s exactly what’s happening in this simulator and it’s wrong. I only fly the Skyhawk and it’s impossible to control in some live weather environments.
