Wind and turbulence in the Career Mode is ridiculous

Bug Reporting Hub User Interface & Activities
, , , ,
259

Nope, I’m just a person who likes and deals with data and has a deep understanding of aviation and aviation weather. I know some folks don’t like to be called out on their lack of evidence, but without it it’s truly unhelpful. If that’s “antagonistic,” I’m sorry for you. But asking for evidence versus making unsupported claims? Hmm… seems I’m not the one with a narrative.

Also, I support that there are anomalies in career mode and the turbulence is high. All I’m asking for is location stamps. This thread is really noisy without data.

1 Like
260

Did another flight today across EU, this time taking off from the airport I was already at, with LIVE weather, and was able not to only point to an area I am on the Windy map, but predict the enroute weather ahead off me, and it was maybe a 2°C and less than 5kts off in my flight level. I could tell the wind will pickup to ~55kts and die down back to ~20kts, which it did right at the area it should have. Only problem began on landing. While I was expecting 10kts, was more like 20 down to 1000AGL, then down to 15. No extreme up- and down-drafts, no wind jumps, cloud coverage was pretty spot on with satellite data.

Might be because I’m in EU and our data are just better?
Approximation of my route. Winds were just like that, clear skies all the way except the part of north Austria, just like on the radar.

Screenshot 2024-11-30 182128
Screenshot 2024-11-30 1821281920×988 220 KB

Screenshot 2024-11-30 182310
Screenshot 2024-11-30 1823101920×993 260 KB

1 Like
261

I ended up resetting my career. After I passed the IFR test things just got wonky. Not only was I tearing up my plane with poor landings due to winds but Insurance decided to empty out by credit balance by charging me over 60,000 for one day. A day that I had not done much flying at all.

It is nice to once again not get pushed around like a feather in the wind on every flight. If that means I have to skip some job types that require IFR then that I will do.

I get that they are trying to be more realistic in career mode but let’s be honest career mode was definitely aimed at the more casual simmers who wanted more direction. People who don’t know how to deal with more extreme conditions in the sim.

Nobody should ever have to dive into career mode and go, “you know I can’t fly where I want to today because the weather was really bad and career mode will force me to deal with it.”

Live weather should be an option. The career mode already has a bad weather bonus system so let that bonus be the incentive for people to learn how to deal with the conditions when they are ready. But until then let them fly in good weather and just earn less money by missing out on bad weather bonuses.

3 Likes
262

I agree with this. Y’all are being thrown to the wolves. There was zero about weather planning in the career mode progression, yet here we are in November and folks are surprised they can’t take a 172 everywhere.

Weather is an extremely big part of preflight planning. Subsequently, there is a lot of “no-go” for light aircraft this time of year. That’s been my point.

Completely agree that live weather should be optional, but until it’s, here’s a tip - build your career area tall, not wide. That will often give you more options to avoid inclement weather. What’s happening to the north isn’t usually affected at the same time as the south, and vice-versa. Flying strictly along lines of latitude this time of year can keep you in the junk for hundreds if not thousands of miles.

2 Likes
263

Going back and reviewing this - was this in career mode, and was it in real time or did you use time acceleration? The “60 hours” and “across the USA” makes me think it was accelerated. I don’t know how live weather is supposed to interact when we manipulate time, but I suspect it won’t be right. Again, if we want them to squash the bug (or explain why what we’re doing is giving us the wrong weather), it’s really important that we give key datapoints. Are we comparing apples to apples, etc?

I just did a random sampling of several airports across the US, but in free flight mode, and it was pretty much accurate everywhere I tested, surface and aloft. If anything, the winds favored the side of being too light.

264

The problem is not the indicated winds, it’s the excessive effect on the plane. A 15 knot crosswind should not cause the plane to constantly yaw +/- 15 degrees; a fairly consistent crab would be expected. And the results are amplified when less than 1,000 feet AGL with the plane tossed around like a rag doll. It is almost always impossible to set up a stabilized approach and the turbulence will slam the plane onto the runway with a 2,000 FPM descent rate. I’ve even had my plane do a front flip when the sim generated such a strong gust from behind despite the system indicating a 15 knot headwind. The instruments do provide reasonable indications, but the sim is totally unenjoyable with the outrageous amplification of turbulence, particularly during landing. Basically the sim is not remotely reflecting what the instruments are reading in career mode. Free flight seems fine.

2 Likes
265

I feel this. The turbulence is amplified in career mode. I think it’s interacting with the terrain too much.

Before I go further: the turbulence is much harder to qualify/quantify than the wind. The only effect we can really measure is the effect on our vertical speed and yaw rates. It’s a bummer to try to express in a meaningful way because it’s fairly subjective and we simply can’t measure it with our butt-o-meter as we do in real life.

But case in point: last night I was career-mode simming over the Sierras in a 172, at about 2,000’ AGL and a 6-knot wind. I was getting bumped around pretty good. Not awful, but noticeable - maybe light to occasional moderate. However, as soon as I was over the lake, it was smooth as silk. The forecast winds over that area last night were 10 knots or less all the way up to FL300.

Now, in reality, the mountains do often bump you around quite a bit, and the lake, being a giant, smooth, heatsink tends to smooth the air out. But not at the wind levels we were seeing, not at this time of year. It takes daytime heating, mixing, and fairly strong winds.

That said, I’ve had a few strong updrafts in other missions that were nonsense, for sure. But I have yet to experience what you’re describing, which sounds like severe to extreme turbulence.

Concur that it’s better in free flight.

I honestly think it’s a byproduct of the same-old problem with light wind having too much orographic effect and the sim’s “realistic” turbulence mode being overly strong, but unfortunately locked-on in career mode.

But the comments I’ve been making are also in regard to reports of unrealistic winds, so we’re juggling a few things here.

1 Like
266

Possible solutions:

  • Provide the option to disable “live weather” in Career, for a reward/XP decrease, and use the “few clouds” preset instead.

  • Make the Career Mode generate missions only where the weather is within our current aircraft’s wind limits.

  • Generate missions anywhere but make a warning that the current local weather is outside our current aircraft’s wind limits.

  • Make it clear what weather is at the departure and destination airports. Currently there’s only a weather icon (like a Sun), temperature and VFR/IFR designation. Wind data would be more important. Also, “UKWN” is not very helpful…

4 Likes
267

Great suggestions! Can I add: there should be an educational aspect - show people how to read wind observations and forecasts.

269

Teaching someone to read weather forecasts is fine if they actually have weather for all airports. Too many times I’ve gone to check the METAR only for it to be blank, TAS to be blank, no winds for the runways, etc.

This is of paramount importance because many of the approaches require accurate barometric pressure values which we don’t get without being IFR so that we get it from ATC.

2 Likes
270

I’m not getting my hopes up too high, but I just completed two consecutive cargo transport missions that went perfectly. Plane reaction to the indicated winds was as expected and there were no abnormal movements during the landing process. Maybe they rolled out a hotfix for the issue. I’ll give it a try in freelance mode tomorrow and hope it wasn’t just a fluke.

One weird thing I’ve noticed is I get a bad weather bonus on every cargo flight. That’s strange. I would think bad weather would be on at least three star difficulty missions.

271

Absolutely. In career mode, we don’t know what truth is in the sim. In fact, sometimes it seems to be multiple “truths.” They’ve got to get that straightened out.

Maybe it has to do with whatever “truth” it thinks it’s following.

Either way, it’s hard to say - we don’t have a lot of data to go by. Hopefully the devs have some telemetry they can use to figure it out.

273

Definitely overblown in “realistic.” Turbulence is messy in the sim for reasons I explained above: it’s really hard to quantify. What one person describes as being beat up in a boxing ring means something else to another. My comment earlier was serious - continuous moderate in a real-world small plane is exhausting. But what you’re describing sounds much worse, like severe.

There are obviously conditions that can produce that, it just depends on the environment. But it’s hard to correlate that with whatever is going on between the sim and the real world.

274

Here is a real life 20Kt crosswind in a cub. You will note, that swaying side to side, and rotation side to side is present. However, in the game it is SO much worse than this, even with a smaller or non-existent crosswind.

Further, the crosswind’s effect on the plane does not throw it off course to the point of needing to point like 30-40 degrees off axis just to go straight. In the game you do. Also, you see as he gets very close to landing it eases off, and once on the runway it almost all but stops. This is also not the case in the game. My personal experience is that it actually gets worse as you approach land, not better.

I think turbulence is way too strong in the game and needs to be dialed back. If I had to judge by the video and what I see in the game in similar conditions, I would say maybe as much as 50%. Wind has too great of an effect on either all planes, or small planes. I don’t know if they use object oriented programming like they should and it’s just an algorithm for all planes or they code each plane individually (which would be bad practice). The net effect is that small planes get brutalized in the sim.

My personal theory is that they are balancing everything around airliners and they think that dialing it back would make airliners feel no turbulence, wind, or gusts. There is a thread from airliner people that they want more cloud turbulence, so no one is happy atm. I would argue this means their algorithm for its effect on planes is poor then, and needs to be updated. Turbulence should work for all planes, and the algorithm should not be such that you have to compromise what size planes you want to balance for.

On top of all of this, you see some gusts, but it does almost nothing to the cub in terms of lateral or vertical movement. Planes are heavy, they don’t move a hundred feet in a single gust outside of hurricane conditions or something that extreme.

If we could control how much wind affects planes, the turbulence level, and the gust/drafts levels, I would change them to be more realistic and not feel bad about it at all. The devs need to allow us to control it because I think that no matter what people think real is, everyone has a different opinion and locking it is silly because then you are locked to what some developers who probably never fly planes think.

TLDR: Real casual private licensed pilots can land light GA craft in a 20kt crosswind without risking their lives to an extreme degree.

5 Likes
275

This is all true and nobody is doubting what you experienced and that it was severe. What I’m still curious about is what the sim was picking up from real-world weather at the time that was making it so severe. I’ve had plenty of moderate turbulence in the sim, but I haven’t had anything that I’d consider severe (to the point the aircraft is even momentarily uncontrollable). And I’ve flown in some pretty gusty winds.

Geographic information might help pinpoint what was happening on the ground in the real world that was injected into the sim and delivered to you.

276

You already get a bad weather bonus which can be a decent amount and should be enough extra incentive for those who want the challenge.

What I don’t understand is how I can fly a mission with 0 winds and few clouds and still get a relatively small Bad Weather bonus.

277

This is a pretty good example of mostly continuous moderate in a 172. Completely doable - but fairly tiring if you’re beating up a pattern in that.

Wind here was a quartering headwind with gusts. Some local mechanical turbulence off the trees, but mostly eddies from general ground friction.

Severe will have moments of uncontrollability, lift you out of the seat against the straps, can knock your head into the bulkheads.

Crosswinds don’t necessarily mean turbulence, and turbulence doesn’t even necessarily come from wind, though there’s usually a correlation. I’ve been bucked around a lot by thermals on a hot summer day with no wind at all.

Again, it’s important to try to communicate the environmental conditions to correlate what the sim is inputting and outputting. If folks communicate winds aloft as surface winds, it’s hard to make the connection (edit: and replicate the conditions for testing, which is helpful for debugging).

1 Like
278

This is a reminder that this thread is meant to serve as a bug topic, not a discussion topic. If you are experiencing this issue, please feel free to report your findings using the following template. In addition, if you find workarounds or processes that helped resolve the bug for you, please feel free to post about it, as it may help the team’s investigation. Outside of this, please use an existing or new topic in the appropriate Discussion Hub or User Support Hub to discuss/assist others with this bug.

All other posts will be removed.

:loudspeaker: For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:

Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
•

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
•

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:
•

1 Like
279

Thank you Hester! The babbling has gone too far!
Since it got drowned, I’ll post it again:

Possible temporary workaround, at least in EU:

1 Like
280

I have confirmed that setting the live weather setting to off on the screen before you do your walk around, but after accepting the mission on the globe, will result in weather that is consistently sunny, a 2-3kt crosswind, and as mild turbulence as this mode can offer on the realistic setting. It’s still nutty turbulence for an extremely calm day, but it’s much better than what we have normally. I have done this on 5 freelance missions so far and the results have been the same every time all over the United States.

So we can work around this atm, just stinks we can’t fly in realistic weather unless we want to deal with the bugged weather :cry:

Just make sure to turn the setting back to live before accepting another mission or the game breaks heh. Rinse and repeat.

2 Likes