Turbulence -- excessive or real world realistic

I used to fly in South Florida which is totally flat. On a summer day, I got turbulence sometimes that would loosen the filling in your teeth.

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Iā€™ve been wondering about this because it seemed extreme at times to me but not having very much real life stick time I donā€™t know for sure. Iā€™ve even been watching some Youtube videos and such to get a sense of it.

I was flying yesterday (real life) and it was calm winds and not crazy warm (17Ā°C), but it was sunny and there were fair weather cumili. So the ride was really bumpy the whole hour of the flight. But that was in an ultralight (3-axis), I assume a 172 youā€™d feel it somewhat less. It was not unlike my flight in the sim with a similar ultralight.
In fact it seemed a little worse irl, but maybe that was because I was physically there :sweat_smile:

Maybe the sim exaggerates in some cases that I have not yet encountered myself.

As far as Iā€™m concerned:

  • It can be like that sometimes (even with calm winds and flat terrain)
  • It can also NOT be like that, and butter smooth instead or anything in between, depending on many variables
  • When not using Live Weather, it should be possible to do with the weather what you want, including removing thermal activity or other turbulence
  • Heavier aircraft should not bump around the same way an ultralight does
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I think that there is a problem with the SU9 changes, but it is dependent on the conditions. My first flight in the Baron saw huge jerks left and right. However later flights in the other light aircraft and the turbulence was realistic. I always fly with live weather, so I think there is something that is exaggerating the turbulence, but only under some weather conditions. This would explain why some people have no problem but others do.

In real life some days will be bumpy, some days smooth, some days a mix of bumpy and smooth, all depending on a bunch of variables such as season, terrain, weather, altitude, aircraft type, etc, etc.

But now in MSFS all flights will be bumpy,ā€¦which is not realistic, but will probably appeal to rally car sims enthusiasts, which I am not.

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We can set weather, time and which colour aircraft we fly. Surely setting ā€œrealismā€ around turbulence is a reasonable parameter to have a choice with regardless of who thinks what is enough or too much. Itā€™s a ā€œsimulatorā€ and a ā€œgameā€ depending on your preference :wink:

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The spray planes in the NSW cotton country just west of here spray at night so they can get right down on the crop. Too much turbulence any other time of day.

When your summertime temps are approaching 40C by breakfast time you get that. Your going to get turbulence even on a clear day with no mountains in sight when it gets that hot.

That said flying on a clear morning where OAT are down under 20C you should not be getting much turbulence.

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There seems to be a strange idea that a calm day means absolutely no bumps of any kind whatsoever, which is not how the atmosphere works, the number of flights in which not a single bump from the atmosphere is felt must be a miniscule proportion. Interesting to see the claims from people playing the game that the turbulence was unrealistic, and then we get an actual real-life report that there was significant turbulence in that area. I also donā€™t recognise at all the reports of small planes constantly jerking about on a calm day, I get almost completely smooth flight.

That difference between peopleā€™s perception of what turbulence should be and real life conditions is my concern with this whole issue. The risk is the developers respond to complaints about turbulence when the game isnā€™t actually doing anything wrong, and then dial it down making it all very vanilla. Some users of the sim seem to not get that wind is supposed to make flying difficult.

Try a take off out of Mexico City in real life, I recently flew out on an A350 on a day with no wind and not a cloud in the sky, but the convection is enough that we were getting a good shaking about and I heard a few screams. Now imagine that in a Cessna.

Maybe there could be an option to set to zero turbulence if people want, but I donā€™t think this should be default, the sim as a whole still vastly underproduces turbulence. There is no turbulence in clouds, you can fly a Cessna into a hurricane, no wind gusts in live weather so landing is far too easy etc etc.

Please donā€™t ruin this just as weā€™re at last possibly starting to get a bit of atmospheric immersion in the sim. There is still a long way to go. Otherwise itā€™s google earth with a cockpit image bolted on.

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Yes, since even people with lots of real-life experience do not seem agree whether or not itā€™s exaggerated, a user setting seems to be unavoidable. My problem is that I have no such experience, but still want to know that what I get in the sim is realistic.

EDIT: Come to think of it, the amount of turbulence is a ā€œworldā€ thing rather than a ā€œplaneā€ thing, so it may not be so easy to make it user controllable, after all. If you fly with others, everybody need the same world to fly in.

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You could always just enable the slider if Multiplayer is off.

My experience is turbulence is part of life in light planes, but as a passenger in the heavy stuff you are less likely to bounce around at every bump, they have inertia a light plane lacks.

Also the way the turbulence in a light plane effects you varies - sometimes you and the aircraft get bumped around together so the effect is more outside the aircraft, other times it is a teeth jarring shaking around inside the cockpit.

The final point that gets missed here is sim pilots tend to fly low altitude VFR in conditions where no sane real life pilot would consider taking off in a Cessna.

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Delighted with the new turbulence model. Real life GA flying, as I have experienced as a passenger, is often an exercise in keeping the plane level, whilst the surrounding air is trying to blow you around like a paper dart. Flight simming in FS2020 up till now has been a bit of a sterile, somewhat easily controlled experience.

To suddenly find it totally necessary to concentrate on keeping the plane headed where you want it to go, is IMHO, the injection of realism I didnā€™t even realize I wanted.

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I donā€™t. We are so used to just getting in the sim and clicking ā€œFlyā€. How often do you check the weather for where youā€™re flying? Do you know how many clear, bright, sunny days have moderate turbulence airmets in real life? A lot. There are plenty of ā€œbeautifulā€ days in real life that I donā€™t fly because of forecast turbulence.

Welcome to real flying!

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The reality is that even a small GA aircraft has usually more than a ton (mass) and you donā€™t blow around such a mass like paper. Thereā€™s also such a thing as dynamic mass so that for example there could be an acceleration in one specific direction and going quite some way in that direction. For an acceleration back and forth the mass/system has some system specific frequency. For me it looks like that there is often a frequency just too high meaning that the airplane can go back and forth due to gusts but not with such a high frequency. Hopefully what I wrote makes sense as English is not my native language :grin:

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Thank you for the welcome to ā€œReal Flyingā€ :sunglasses:

Really looking forward to it

Not finding it excessive. It seems to respond to season, time of day and cloud layer. On a clear windless day this time of year the atmosphere is usually anything but smooth. It doesnā€™t seem to be affected by snow cover. When the ground is covered by snow there shouldnā€™t be any convection at all.

I uploaded a video here which showed only light ā€œchopā€ during a clear, windless day. Iā€™m not able to reproduce excessive turbulence some are referring to. I didnā€™t even had my joystick with me when I made this video and I managed totally fine with the arrow keys on my keyboard.

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Thanks @ Nijntje91

Your Video looks like it has a quite reasonable level of turbulence ā€¦ one would not want any less !!

What is strange, is that I am now finding that the more I look at it, (the more I run the sim ?), the less the turbulence seems to be excessive, especially when I start actually measuring it is X, Y Z position velocity & acceleration.

That, and the fact that my Sim now seems to have some other strange issue, since coming out of beta, has resulted in the need for a 100% Fresh Install of MSFS ā€¦ seems one can never really avoid that with each SU, if one wants a stable system ā€¦ at least, this is what I am finding.

Even if this corrects issues, I still support a Turbulence slider, that can both reduce and INCREASE the default turbulence, according to the needs of ā€œSIMULATIONā€.

After all, just about EVERY other weather conditions can be Preset and Simulated - why should Turbulence Level be an exception ?

ie Sometimes you might want to Simulate very high Turbulence, in a certain weather profile, in a specified part of the world, in a specified season, in a given plane.

After all, itā€™s a SIMULATOR, not necessarily a Representation of the current Real World.
That is one of many functions a SIMULATORS has - ā€œSIMULATIONā€

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ā€¦ and here is yet another topic where pro pilots ans simmers canā€™t seem to agree on whatā€™s needed. Just like the topics on the c172 out here.

When nothingā€™s implemented: ā€œAsobo needs to implement this or that, because: realism!

Asobo implementsā€¦

Pro pilots and simmers:

  • itā€™s off: far too high
  • itā€™s great, immersive!
  • itā€™s off: still too little

Haha. How can we ever expect the sim to be(come) perfect when perfection appears to be a very subjective scale. Even the rl pilots are having discussions. Which is very educative for me, but impossible to implement by the devs.

No offenseā€¦ just an observation!

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Perhaps this can be baked into assistance: easy-real world settings.

I respectfully disagree that it should be added to weather settings - once you start divorcing weather phenomena from real behavior/expectations, what are you simulating? Martian atmosphere?

I am concerned because people said the planes didnā€™t fly straight after MSFS was released. Now how hard was it to bring left yaw back? Yes its a slippery slope argument, but not beyond imagination.

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who knows @trex5365 ā€¦ thatā€™s for the Asobo ā€œDesign Teamā€ to decide.

If anyone here wants to start making these decisions, maybe they should apply for a job at Asobo ā€¦ Its not as if they are not looking !!!

I was thinking of this very topic last night. I was flying around KFHR (Friday Harbour) and the nearby islands. Some of those islands are really small. I was in the JPL 152 and flying at around 1000ā€™. The wind was nearly calm (2 - 3 kts ) and it was close to sunset with scattered clouds. What was very noticeable to me was that if I was over water, there was no turbulence. The second that I went over even a piece of an island, I was getting bounced around. The second I was back over the water, calm. I realize that this is trying to simulate thermals and/or orographic turbulence but neither would have really applied in the situation I was in. I went in to the weather and removed the wind layer and the flight went calm. That little of wind really should not have an effect, especially one that is completely limited to being over land, even a piece of a small island. The modeling is a little too aggressive in my opinion.