Well, it’s unrealistic if we can land without issues in all type of weather conditions. I think they need to add a toggle for gusts to be able to land in all type of weather conditions, even hurricanes.
They add gusts everywhere, even if there is no gusts reported on METAR. That we never had in a sim before and makes the air feel like a fluid everywhere. Pre su10 we had constant winds all the time over runway even in hurricanes. Thats why it feels harder to land now when we have gusts after su10. The frequency can maybe be reduced, but only reduce it if it’s making it more realistic. Xplane 12 also have gusts where METAR not reporting gusts. That sim also uses forecasted data and makes it feel much more like a fluid.
This was beyond hard to land. I don’t recall the crosswind component but it was 22 kts, gusts to 28 according to allmetstat. Even if that were perpendicular to the plane, the 737-700 autoland should handle that easily, I would think. On final, I had close to 30 degree banking back and forth and the plane was blown at least 100 left of the centerline before touchdown. I’m all for gusts, but they’d have to be pretty severe to affect a heavy aircraft like this in that manner. Seems WAY overdone. On my return trip now. I’ll report on how my landing is.
edit: Can’t say I agree with a toggle that allows landing in unflyable conditions. If that were the case, flights would be cancelled. It just needs to be toned down. There were no conditions that prevented any aircraft from landing IRL at the time in Toronto, according to liveATC.
It’s the pilot that needs to cancel the landing if it’s too difficult to land. It’s the pilot that has the responibility to land safe. Well, i’m not argue about the frequency. It may need some tuning. I also reported too high frequency in the beta but i have no facts what is a perfect frequency. The frequency varies much depending on location and makes it hard to make it perfect for every user. The force of the wind may also be too strong in the sim but i’m not sure how to messure if 1kt in the sim has the same force as 1kt IRL.
I’m sure even if it would be perfect and as realistic as possible we would see complains it’s overdone.
Fly in the hurricane with a cessna 152 and see if it’s overdone. I bet there the forces of the air is way too less.
I don’t know, maybe they modeled wake turbulence from invisible AI aircraft and didn’t tell us. LOL. From about 10 miles out, my approach was steady. On about 3 mile final, it all went to ■■■■. Wings rocking back and forth, plane blown way off course. Given the current metar report at the time, the sim - in no way - represented reality. LiveATC pilots were reporting good conditions at the time.
Some simmers seem to think that difficulty Is a good proxy to use for the amount of realism in the sim, i.e., the more difficult the sim is, the more realistic it is. I don’t think that’s true.
I can see that it would be very easy to implement a wind/gust model more severe than reality and I presume that this has happened here. It’s all about how the max gust value is arrives at and it’s frequency of occurrence - and in my view it would be very easy to produce a rudimentary model where the frequency of the top recorded gust is too great and the distribution of variations within the mean recorded wind is also incorrrectly modelled - especially as METARS only produce measured data at a point 10m above the surface - so although ground friction is minimised there are still terrain effects that could modify the frequency/distribution…
It isn’t for the doubters of the model is MSFS to prove that it’s wrong, the onus is always on the model proponents to demonstrate its accuracy - quite difficult to do I think. I’m sure that the sim would benefit from a more subtle modelling of wind variations but currently my own considered opinion is that the model needs some tuning to make it more representative of the real world, given the obvious limitations of available data sources.
Of course you are correct that always having stable wind states is not realistic either.
But we have gone from one extreme to the other, and its not good. And it is pretty clearly not the intended situation. This is why I’m confused about the defense of it.
Should you have to do the pedal dance sometimes? YES absolutely. Should every flight be a pedal dance? No.
You have this very correct. I see this in auto racing sim too, everyone thinks realistic means hard.
While there are certainly way more experienced pilots on this forum than me, I can tell you that outside of my first few training hours as a student, nothing about it is particularly hard.
Days where it is so difficult that you are genuinely nervous about the outcome are exceptionally rare. Of course a large part of this is down to flight planning and pilots not being idiots and launching into conditions they can’t handle. (which is often the opposite of how we sim).
Flying is not especially difficult or physical, it is really not all that different from driving your car, just with more factors to keep in mind. If it was always difficult, then crashes would be far more common and all forms of piloting would be akin to being a stuntman, with only the most brave signing up to learn. It simply isn’t like that.
A gusty day can provide lots of challenges. But most days, you’re not bouncing all over the place. But bouncing all over the place is the normal situation since SU10 in MSFS.
I don’t like to seek out particular conditions (unless I’m seeking out bad conditions to do foolish things we can’t do in the real world).
Winds as light as you’re showing on that screenshot are all but unheard of here in the S.W. United States. It is uncommon to see daytime winds below 10kts where I am. At night it can be very still and stable. But very unlikely to stay that way during the day.
But Meteoblue reports all kind of winds depending on location/coordinate. Here is a storm out on sea. This type of weather i would plan to avoid in the sim.
I know that Meteoblue has world wide weather available. I use it for my flight planning in MSFS because I know that is where MSFS is getting a lot of its data.
The discussion here was about how MSFS is interpreting wind data.
Agree, i hope Asobo can make the gusts more smooth between.
I think this is the issue with gusts. But i’m not an expert in air behaviour. I just know the wind is never in a constant motion. It’s a fluid, never in a fixed state. I know gustfrequency is higher when we move through the wind and that they have simulated now already. When standing still on runway we have less frequency and while we fly in higher ground speed we should have more frequency.
Also smooth out updates of wind data to not suddenly be injected. That makes the wind maybe go from 1 kts to 30kts if the past METAR for example reported 1KT and the next 30KTS when maybe a local thundestorm moved over the airport IRL or something.
Same with Meteoblue data. That also needs to update i think 4 times per day.
Honestly that could already be what they are doing but since the gusts are happening so frequently they seem more abrupt.
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that they estimate the gust factor by taking the windspeed x 1.5, or something to that effect, so in a 10kt wind we could have gusts between 10 and 15, and those are probably run through some math to come up with a random amount of time between gusts, maybe something like a random value between 1 and 300 seconds. Or even a weighted random.
Anyhow I suspect some logic like that is already in the sim. But, I think somewhere a zero or more than one zero) is getting dropped, so now the random time goes from being 1 to 300 seconds, to 0.1 to 30 second, or even worse 0.001 to 3 seconds.
And boom there you go, instant washing machine ride.
I’m oversimplifying what is probably much more complex math in the sim… But my bet is that this is the type of problem that is occurring.
Yes, it’s a bit more complex though because the frequency changes depending on if we fly head wind or tailwind. And i get different results everytime i messure and plots the winds into a graph.
I think/hope Asobo is aware of the frequency issue. We reported it in the beta and there were much good feedback about it and they have also improved it much since the first beta release in my opinion.
Exactly it is off, like yes, it is normal for an airplane to rock back and forth in severe winds and gusts, but not to the extent that we are experiencing in the sim currently. The current situation right now is that it is way too overpowering and make it difficult to control the aircraft at times.
@Perrry trust me I have experienced landing in gusting conditions with crosswinds in a real-world Cessna 172. Even with a 25kt gust and a direct crosswind coming into Torrance Airport, I was able to keep my aircraft maintaining its track by using a slideslip and was able to bring it down to the runway on centerline many times. What the sim is doing currently is way to overexaggerated. You can tell it is because if you take a look at the airspeed indicator, GS, and TAS, it is bouncing all over the place back and forth very quickly. An aircraft IAS can bounce back and forth but not at the rate which is happening in the sim. For me it’s just a bit too much compared to the real counterpart. I do agree with you that wind is never stationary and always constantly changing in movement obviously, but not in the way the sim is depicting it.
