I find that it does, but as with everything in any sim, you have to be very disciplined to use the exact same processes as you would IRL if that is the goal… sims make it easy to ignore things, which you cannot do IRL (many try, and too many die in the process)
This goes a lot further than just weather (and a lot further than simming for enjoyment). For every session you do you have to define the goal of the session (nothing wrong with taking a spitfire for a low pass at heathrow, and nothing wrong with doing a deep training session focused on some specific outcome). The point is, decide what you want to achieve (including level of realism), and then be disciplined enough to stick to it!
If you plan an emergency procedure flow training session and then show up in pyjamas and find your rudder pedals have a loose connection but f- it I’ll do it anyway, you’ve already failed that specific session
Not sure about GAMET and SIGMET since they are by default forecasts, but since now we can have proper radar in airplanes, and the world map shows cloud and precipitation already, radar and satelite should be feasible (but it’d need to store some data which might be a HUGE requirement for all of earth
Metar view should be very feasible too, potentially with past metars available. Maybe TAFs?
These would go a long way to compare forecast to actual already
But let’s try and get proper ATIS as a starting point
A great compilation, Nijntje91. May I ask where you obtained these sheets? I’d like to look a little closer and the resolution is hindering me. It’s CTS syndrome (Can’t See S**t).
ATIS pretty much matches real life here in the Northeast US, and has for a long time (other than reporting wind in Feet/sec instead of Nautical Miles/hour).
Radar is already easily available for most places in the world. No need to store it, just stream it from MeteoBlue, or anywhere for that matter.
Did you click on it? It’s just jpeg’s, and they explode to browser width if you click on them. You can hit the download button and save them on your PC.
Be careful, though, some of the sheets are in those silly units
He flies in Europe after all
Well I made it myself. Problem is that it contains images which are property of the company I work for so I can’t publish the whole thing unfortunately. Maybe this would help, its actually part of a checklist I made and have used in real life commercial flying.
ATIS is good here for everything except clouds which are just random layers bearing no resemblence to the weather in the sim
Yes radar data is readily available from sources, but they have the IRL data which might be very different from the sim weather (since that is based on forecast weather, it doesn’t update in real time. Hence to have a proper radar loop you’d need to store the weather variables from the sim weather rather than stream them in, sort of simulated radar and sat from what the sim had over time.
At least that is my understanding, might be utter rubbish of course
Great, Thanks a lot!. It’s not that bad, and I can use it. Copyrights are there for a reason, but rest assured, I’m not gonna publish it and distribute 5,000 copies.. LOL!
I’m trying to get approval to publish the whole thing, its full of “handy” tables and sheets for quick reference. I used a couple of pictures of company aircraft so I can’t just throw it onto the web…
Understood. As I said, it’s all good info and much appreciated. I don’t think the general public realizes how much preparation goes into a flight, whether passengers, cargo or deadhead. All there so they don’t end up with an aircraft in their bedroom at 2:30 AM.
I don’t get the random lightnings anymore since it was fixed, so I am happy!
This all might sound a bit like I am moaning, on the contrary I am super thrilled to have a sim that allows this kind of dreaming at all!
Live weather is also really good for me, a very close match to reality (sometimes it lags a bit, and sometimes the forecast has a low confidence level (which meteoblue does report), but nothing the sim could do about that
All-in-all I am super happy with it
And apologies to @CaptMatto we’ve derailed the thread quite a lot! Back to weather prep
And another aspect of flying, besides aviate, navigate, comes communicate. Not sure a lot of people understand the 2-way communication and protocol that goes on before takeoff, during flight and on approach/landing. There are some good tutorials out there, but if you are using the sim to do communication, well, there you are. Three miles from touchdown, the sim ATC advises you to climb to FL190 and well… I’m landin’ on the taxiway… LOL!
Someone linked my post from a few months ago on MSFS weather Forecasting and Planning.
I am doing a VFR VR around the world tour and still use the same method described in my original post.
Last week, for example, there were IFR conditions over Greenland for several days, however, the model forecasted a short window of VFR weather of just a few hours over my route.
I took note of the forecast and planned my trip. Sure enough, I completed my flight VFR and the conditions forecasted were very close to what I found on the sim.
I was curious and went back to the sim a few hours later and the weather was back to IFR. Just as forecasted.
For those of you that are interested: here is my original series.
I read your post, those sources you are using for weather preparation are NOT official sources for use in aviation, although they can be useful. I personally use Windy often before departure to check the weather radar if I know there are storms around. But for max. realism you shouldn’t rely on them, just as you shouldn’t rely on them in real world flying.
Maybe I didn’t read your post thorough enough but you didn’t mention:
METARs,
TAFs,
SIGMETs / AIRMETs,
Surface Analysis Charts,
Significant Weather charts (SWC),
Upper Wind and Temperature Charts (UWT),
Low Level Forecast or GAFOR if available.
Those are the official weather products you wanna use in pre-flight planning, the rest is nice for reference or confirming what has been forecasted but you can’t use them as an official source.
Same goes for Skyvector, nice for reference nut not an official source. I don’t know how accurate the Skyvector info is in the states but if you use it for real world (VFR) planning in Europe you will likely plan straight through restricted or prohibited areas, CTRs, Class A airspace etc. as a lot of info is missing or old.
Talking about max. realism, did you have an alternate or would you be completely locked in by weather as soon as the window is over? As a general rule, the weather should be within limits from 1 hr before to 1 hr after for each route segment. I haven’t flown VFR in a long time, but what I always taught students is that you should check the weather on three levels:
Macro scale - study Surface analysis charts to get the “big picture”, the kind of air mass (continental / maritime / polar / sub-tropical etc.), wind directions, position of fronts and the weather normally associated with those. You can already built a pretty good picture this way, if something happens in flight, you know roughly where to look for alternates etc.
Meso scale - focus more on the route, get a good picture what the weather will be like like for the route to be flown including alternate. Look up significant weather and upper wind charts, low level forecast or GAFOR if available.
Micro scale - zoom more in on the airports you are planning to use, METARs, TAFs, think about local weather phenomena etc.
And of course, always have a way out! Its fine to use Meteoblue, Windy or other sources along the way but use them for reference only. I believe this is an official aviation weather source for the states, I use their chart often as it nicely plots SIGMETs so I don’t have to look it up on a map myself:
And then there is weight & balance, take-off and landing performance, creating a navlog, calculating fuel required etc. To fly with absolute realism, pre-flight planning likely takes a couple of hours. The airline I worked for before I was often flying a Single Engine Piston aircraft with an engineer in the back though Europe to fix aircraft which went AOG. I made my own tool to speed up the process, have flight plans ready, just needing to check weather and NOTAMs, add the upper winds and ISA deviation, print and go:
Most things can be prepared already well before flight so only wind, temperature and QNH needs to be added and done. The tool automatically calculates the wind effect, takes the correct TAS and fuel flow from performance tables and calculates everything automatically.
As a relatively low time private pilot in the US (230 hours), I use www.1800wxbrief.com for actual flight planning.
I rely on it pretty much solely for weather planning (it keeps a record of your accessing the weather for FAA legal reasons), but also work in weather underground and myradar and other sources. I have a great app on my android phone for metars and weather called “Flight Intel” by Nadeem Nasall. It’s super handy. Sadly, I haven’t found an equivalent app on Apple besides Foreflight, which, of course is a full EFB as opposed to this more informational app. It allows you to update the aviation data for free. I imagine it’s only useful in the US, though.
