I’m going to have to try this, I’m sick of just getting bounced around no matter what the weather during the day, especially in slow light aircraft. It really needs to be tuned down to about 25% with zero/calm settings and be more realistic according to any further weather changes. It seems to add this same auto-turbulence factor on top of whatever weather conditions you dial in. It’s just ever-present over any land textures, then dead calm over water, even over a small lake in the hills, or vice versa over a 100’ across flyspeck island in the ocean. Daylight+Land Texture=wiggle the plane all over the place. Pretty sure this went away at the beginning of SU10 then got borked when they messed up the textures/40th download.
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The reason it’s such a big issue is: (IMHO)
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For those of us who don’t fly “heavy metal” at 30,000’ or more, (i.e. those of us who like low-level VFR “sightseeing” flights in light GA aircraft), it’s beyond unrealistic all the way to “are you absolutely outta your mind?!” unbelievable.
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Turbulence is a fact of life and is something to be expected - like gravity - but the way it is currently modeled is totally unreasonable. If you were flying around and gravity itself periodically, (and seemingly randomly), changed direction and intensity, you’d be upset too since it would make flying almost impossible.
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It makes lower altitude VFR-type flying almost impossible.
Ref:
What I like to do while flying is to “go sightseeing” and look at things. IOW, I really don’t care about what things are like at 36,000’ - I want to follow a road, a railroad track, a canal, and go exploring.
In a way it’s kind of like hitchhiking in the 60’s - you’d pick a direction and didn’t really care where you ended up - it was the trip, not the destination, that was important. I often don’t know where I’m going to end up - at an airport somewhere? In a field? I don’t know and don’t care - just so long as I get home in time for dinner, it’s all good!
It’s bad enough that the terrain itself sometimes looks like something from The Twilight Zone, (The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) - Wikipedia), but the fact that the flight characteristics of the environment itself borders on the fantastic at times makes the sim much less effective than it could be.
I REALLY LIKE the scenery effects within MSFS, but the turbulence and the meteorological air-flow modelling - especially at lower altitudes - makes it less of a sim and more of a game of chance.
If I could somehow blend the flight dynamics of XP and the scenery of MSFS, I’d be in Hog Heaven!
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Pretty much all I do is Low alti in a range of aircraft from ultra slow to ultra fast and I don’t have any issue with the turbulence. It really does throw you around in real life, depending on the circumstances. It’s not constant, plus it varies drastically depending on the conditions. It really is random bingo.
When I used to train in parachuting in Australia doing canopy formation we would do three or four jumps from dawn until 10am or so, when the air was clean and calm as flat glass, then shut down till a couple of hours before sunset when it cooled down again. Turbulence was ferocious in the shut down window, and could easily cause you to wrap canopies. You could feel it start to kick in on the ride up, and know when shut down time was.
You might want to look at:
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If you use FS Realistic Turn off General Turbulence. It’s not needed anymore with the sim turbulence being much improved, and bumps it up to crazy level sometimes. Just use the sim.
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Change your weather preset. I don’t have issues with the Live Weather turbulence either, but you can completely control the weather conditions with a custom setting or preset.
If anything they should add some more settings so people can tune it a little easier than the current weather settings, to their own taste. That’s the beauty of sims, you can play how you like, realistic or not. Up to you.
I don’t think they should adjust it down on a global level though. They are in the right ballpark with it as it is now.
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I agree. Its way to twitchy all the time. Not like the real thing. Dont get me wrong. There are times when its nuts but not all the time and with such frequency
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How about they just fix it so its more representative of the real thing. As in a simulation of the real thing. Or not introduce it until its correct.
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I’ve been in the real thing, a lot. I don’t have a problem with it, and prefer what we have now to what was in the past - which was pretty much nada.
They should just add more controls to let people adjust it to their own taste. It’s a sim, but the baseline turbulence should be close to reality (even if it’s not 100% perfect) and let people adjust down from there.
It’s also a complex equation to simulate, so I doubt it’s going to be 100% perfect everywhere anytime anyway, so tunable controls is a more nuanced solution to cater to personal taste, reality based or otherwise. Adding a global strength modifier should be doable, I’m pretty sure.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people complaining about the sim turbulence are also using FSR with its General Turbulence setting on as well. They don’t mix well now, so turning that off globally is a good start.
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That’s a hot desert environment and horrific turbulence is normal.
In a mixed-use environment with a lot of open green spaces, turbulence should not be that big a problem.
Over NYC in 100° heat? Yup, turbulence is expected - but even then it’s not so bad as to make flying dangerous.
Live weather, custom weather, (with everything turned off), it doesn’t seem to matter. However, the “FS Realistic” settings might be worth a look. I will try that and report results.
Whatever the reason - it appears that the modeling of both weather and turbulence is highly system dependent and I think there should be a way to tune it to your particular system and/or skill level so that the sim is flyable in anything other than dead-of-winter at -20° C.
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Where can I find that?
Um, no. Coastal Australia, even inland by a good distance, is not a “hot desert environment”.
We get it everywhere in Oz, just like everywhere else, depending on the conditions.
It most definitely is. Fields, heat, moisture, clouds, everyone comes out to play, and bingo…turbulence comes to say hello. Many other methods of turbulence as well. Dark fields, light fields, buildings with big shiny roofs, car parks++. We haven’t even talked about wind yet.
Ask a glider pilot?
Not might be, it is part of the issue. FSR is a great app, but some settings don’t play nice now with the sim and also it varies from plane to plane.
Settings, Disabled Effects (works globally across all presets), check General Turbulence. Some planes also react very strangly to this recently, I suspect due to it not being compatible with CFD planes. The recent updates of GotGravels Savage Carbon/MonsterTruck mods are really overamped by this once you push the MP.
Worth reading the FSR manual.
Turbulence is part of flying. You’re not zipping through the vacuum of space, you’re in a dynamic physical environment that’s in constant motion and can easily throw small, medium, and large objects around for a number of different reasons. You want zero turbulence? Fly at dawn with zero wind!
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What about within the stock sim? (I really don’t want to clutter/destabilize the sim with a lot of extra stuff)
As someone who almost exclusively flies VFR in this sim, I can confirm that VFR works fine for me and there is not in fact any unexpected difficulty to flying from turbulence for me in live weather, at any point in the last year, in US west coast areas such as Los Angeles or Portland.
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I’m not sure what you mean. In any event, just turn off the FSR General Turbulence as described, it’s not needed anymore and just adds more as a result. The rest of FSR (apart from the screams, groans, vomits etc) are still excellent to add immersion.
FSR is a payware add-on that I don’t have as I don’t need the extra features and complexity.
Is there a way to do this in the stock sim?
In that case, best to fly at dawn with zero wind. 
FSR adds a lot, well worth it despite a couple of small issues like this.
I can also confirm VFR works well, I use VR while flying in VFR a lot. If anything I’d that there isn’t enough turbulence in convective clouds…
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Note I fly in the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon on the US west coast and have never had any troubles with turbulence in GA planes. I think the people having trouble are having some other kind of problem with wind? (My theory is that they fly when the wind is very strong and IRL would not have been flying, but I don’t know if that’s right.)
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Sure. It doesn’t bother me either, whatever the weather/tod. It seems reasonably accurate to me, depending on the conditions. Expectation management is part of it, you need to understand the conditions and the likely level of turbulence you will encounter. Just because there’s no clouds doesn’t mean there’s no turbulence either.
In fact, I went stormchasing to get some more! Stormriders! 71 kt+ Tailwinds available now
That ride was pretty interesting, and it did vary a lot in intensity depending on the patch of the storm you were in, from calm to real rock n’ roll.
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Solved…soon?
TURBULENCE
A new assistance option allows to reduce the intensity of turbulence.
3 settings are available: Realistic, moderate and low. At a realistic setting, turbulence is fully modeled, and the air will be very rough in some weather conditions. At a low setting, vertical winds and gusts still exist but their variation is much more limited with a low pass filter and even in stormy weather, the flight will be quite smooth. Moderate offers an in-between setting.
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When I fly, winds are set to zero with no clouds, no adverse weather, at midday, so there is zero chance of winds being an issue unless the sim ignores my specific settings to disable winds - which would be another problem.