They’re working for me right now, although it’s the first time I’ve ever used them.
Instead of using them productively, I’m doing to see what kind of trouble I can get into. I’m looking for a mission in here right now…
Edit: Yeah these layers are extremely buggy. Mine aren’t working again now. I suspect I’ll have to restart the game to get them back.
Hah, we did that last night! It turned out this all works the same way in free flight mode. Found a nasty system in eastern Montana and flew to the center of the low in ND. Shot a DME arc to an VOR approach using the TBM850 and the upgraded TDS GTNXi.
But to explain: at the time of this writing, free flight is also tied to the historical weather within the last 24h, bound to whatever time you launch your flight. Weather will only be truly real-time live if you’re flying at the current UTC time (so it might be nighttime). They need to divorce this as well - I actually don’t mind having the option to use historical weather in either mode, but we should be able to just force “now” weather in either, regardless of mission time/flight time, because that’s the easiest weather to find from multiple resources and some of us want to fly at a different time of day. It also jives well with those who want to use VATSIM, etc.
Give us the option, please!
That worries me, too. There’s so much noise right now and our complaints/reports/findings/suggestions don’t seem to get communicated well for various reasons (for instance, the bug report thread on this is a disaster but the way those have to be handled promotes noise).
I exited out to Free Flight and the Wind Layers were there, Then went back into Career Mode and they were working again. It’s just buggy atm.
Yep - and bugs like that erode trust, which is sorely needed right now. I hope they fix it soon!
Glad you got it working!
thanks for the work you have done on this @CharlieFox00 (and also those that have contributed) - Im finally starting to get some confidence back about if I can fly or not in career mode.
yup, the live weather service and the maps are pretty buggy.
I’ll have to often wait 20+ seconds for the map to ‘update’ to the wind.
and sometimes its losing connection to the live weather service, and doesn’t update.
and as other observe backing out to the main menu seems to ‘reactivate it’.
as for the red dot on the mission.
yeah this seems to indicate this mission is available at the time selected by the slider - and its for about an hour - and indeed within that hour window the weather can change.
so, I had a mission that at 12:00 was IFR, and at 12:45 switched to MVFR, and this was reflected in the mission briefing (both time and weather change)
(there is a bug here, the ‘tooltip summary’ does not update unless you move away and back)
so I guess the idea is the mission time shown initially (when slider is on live) is the scheduled departure, but it allows you to ‘delay’ the mission by an hour, and will use the time you have set.
so this is all really useful, means we can use the wind layer to give us an idea of conditions.
I think the real confusion here for most, is that the EFB doesn’t detail the weather for most small airports/airfields. just shows last updated as never and 0 knts.
it really should be populated with the data it is going to use for the mission.
another oddity is EFB maps have ‘checkbox’ for wind, but they dont wont, only the radar one does. not sure if this is a career limitation( is in in free flight?) , or a ‘yet be implemented’ feature.
one question…
has it been verified that the whole flight including the arrival airport is set as the departure time. e.g. if you have a 5 hour flight, the weather at 12:00 utc and 17:00 could be pretty different.
I guess this would be the simplest implementation… esp given you could increase sim rate to a point you push it past ‘real time’.
Fantastic question! It’s hard to note this with winds aloft because they often don’t change a ton over an hour or even two or three, unless you’re very near a front or low/high pressure center. However, I did note on at least two occasions, on longer flights, that the METAR for the departure airport matched the historical weather for that departure time, then 90-120 minutes later, the arrival METAR matched the weather for the arrival time. Again, little differences, mostly in temperature and maybe altimeter, but it was enough for me to conclude that yes, it does change during the flight. It would be good to get some verification on that.
Great observations, thanks - I think now that we know what it’s intending to do, some of this can probably go in as a bug report (please mods, do not log this thread as a bug report - I want to keep the discussion going, thanks).
100%. I think you can get some of this info from planner.flightsimulator.com, however I don’t believe it’s giving the full historical picture - it only seems to go back 8 hours or so and isn’t clear what the time base is (local, UTC, etc). Navigraph Charts also has about an 10-hour-ish lookback that works pretty well, but for a subscription.
Until those resources evolve further, for ops in the US, I highly recommend aviationweather.gov, which has an archive mode with a two-week lookback. If anyone has other resources with accurate historical aviation weather over the last 24 hours, especially worldwide, please feel free to share.
Thanks for your work on this. I enjoyed the stream last night, and I’m assuming you have past streams that detail how to use the aviation weather website; and I’ll check them out.
As clunky as the current UI is, I was able to use it today to plan some flights/missions and the weather behaved as expected.
Yay!
Its a very bad design, love the career mode idea but they have to change a lot.
I have to fly with low end planes to generate money and they force me into those “Tornados” of Wind without any Info. And if i want to choose the correct Runway the tablet just says 0 knots.
It just makes no sense.
The most important thing is to give me the possibility to fly in “Cessna Conditions”
unfortunately, this doesn’t have small airfields.
which, I do think is part of the frustration here - early on in career you are using small planes which are susceptible to winds, yet career has you going to tiny airfields with no weather info.
… so the time you need the information most, is when you dont have it.
add on to that, that many of us are new at this stage in the career, so having 18knt crosswind in a C172 is not going to end well 
Im in EU (and flying there), do you know if navigraph has weather for EU?
destination weather… yeah, I trying to compare determine how this is handled (e.g. is weather dynamic or static) but so far not found the a good test case.
I think theres various ways to find out whats going on , but they tend to require using a combination of career mode and free flight.
i.e. find a long mission in career, then go check the weather of the destination airport for both take off time and expected landing… and try to find one where the two different times are very different weather… then fly it.
(I wonder if multiplayer might make this easier - as presumably we all use the same data!)
my general feeling (as a dev) is free flight and career use the same model - career is just basically setting the parameters.
also whilst having a static weather (at time of take off) is the simplest implementation,
its not too tricky for it to be dynamic (to some extent) , so that flight time just moves thru historic data… and if/when it hits real time it just tracks real time from that point - very ‘doable’.
also Ive noticed sometimes (in career), mid flight I get warnings about live weather not being available, so it is attempting to get more data.
that said, it would need that either way I guess, as you are moving… and it cant’ cache the weather for everywhere you might go.
I just tested this out a little bit, here’s what I found:
It is definitely showing larger airfields in the zoomed-out views, to get the smaller ones you have to zoom waaaay in (entering them in the search bar works, too). Here’s a trio of airfields in southeastern Wyoming - KSAA is Saratoga, an airfield with an AWOS and METAR, WY11 is a private airport at a ranch with a long paved runway, and 96WY is a private strip with short turf runways. Note that 96WY doesn’t really show up until you zoom in, but it’s there.
Here’s the current METAR at KSAA as displayed in the flight planner (also pointing out that the current isogonic line in that area is 9°E, but the value used in the planner could be from an older survey):
Clicking on “more details” we get this, which matches the METAR:
However, if we do the same at WY11, which doesn’t have a METAR, but is only 22nm away from KSAA at a slightly higher elevation, we get this:
Note the discrepancies in temp, wind, and altimeter. I highly doubt it’s off by that much. Now, I’m not at a computer and can’t test whether these are the conditions currently portrayed in the sim, but I encourage anybody to do so, comparing against the latest weather in flight planner when you do so, of course.
Further, this is what aviationweather.gov is putting out there for current temp and wind forecasts in that area. Note the surface temp is roughly the same, and the winds are gusty out of the south.
And for the sake of comparison from ForeFlight, here’s the hourly weather forecast at WY11:
Definitely not 14°C (57°F), nor 1 knot winds. I’m willing to bet the sim will have stronger winds, but again I can’t test right now.
In the end, this jives with your conclusion that the non-METAR airports aren’t displaying the right weather in the flight planner - they’re displaying something, but I’m curious to know whether the sim is doing the same and if so, where is it getting that info for the spaces in between reporting stations. More testing needed! 
Thanks so much for your input, very appreciated!
I am so glad it’s working for you! That’s the goal!
Just here to say how incredible is to read such a deep and detailed analysis. I really hope their QA Team have guys like you. Stunning work. 
i guarantee this is exactly what is happening. it’s peak Asobo. remember in msfs 2020, when clouds were at the wrong altitude for months because Asobo were using height above ground level instead of height above sea level? they’re fully capable of making absolute newbie mistakes like that.
if you compare the results from the Garmin 1000’s Wind #1 and Wind #2 options, you’ll find that they are give opposite results. one is a vector, the other shows the head/tailwind and crosswind components. one is the reverse of the other. i have no idea which is correct.
It’s very possible. Testing is needed and I really haven’t had time this week and probably won’t much in the next two, unfortunately. It’s also a little harder to correlate winds aloft, which are forecasted vs a METAR, which are fairly concrete observations (and implemented as such in the sim).
I think the best way would be to find an area of stable winds aloft, check them in flight using the aircraft displays and against the forecast at the various altitudes, then go check them somewhere on the other side of the 0° magnetic declination line. Like, do them at 10°E variation, then go to an area with 10°W variation and see if it’s also off, but in the other direction. Do it a couple time and that should be fairly conclusive, either way.
i agree. not only do most airstrips in Career Mode have no lighting whatsoever, but also many of the planes (Pilatus PC-12, for one) have broken landing lights. Asobo likely know this and want to avoid it becoming a glaring issue.
some small airfields/airports are there but not all (at least in the EU)
e.g. LEGG, LEFN
these are in game, but not on website.
so, Im not sure criteria for what is in planner.flightsimulator.com and not, but quite a few missing from what Ive seen (at least around the EU where Ive been flying mostly)
Hmm, what are the names of those airports?
Could it be this problem?
so, LEFN is a small airfield that owned/used by the forestal fire service.
I think they just refer to it as called Hernán Valle (local village) - but has a different name in the sim.
indeed as per your post, it may be they are identified by satellite, and then given a fake code.
however, back to this post… the issue really is, for these kind of airports, they should be inferring the weather. even if they don’t have data.
the sim is already inferring weather (from closest stations?) when you fly there, so should be reporting that weather.
as before, I think one issue here is… when you start out, its often these airport you are going to be flying your C172 in and out of early on.
(I dont think even with medium cargo or private charter ive ever be sent to a ‘big airport yet’ in career mode)
