When starting take off, if there is some wind blowing, effect on plane is the opposite one. If the wind is coming from the right side, normally you need to use right rudder to stay in the middle of the runway. Bug is that you have to use left rudder!! The same is when wind comes from the left side, you have to use right rudder(and not left as the normal move is).
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Hi @kspiros and welcome to the forum !,
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The sim has the correct behavior, if wind comes from the right you need to provide left rudder input to compensate and inverse when wind comes from the left.
Have a look at that topic: Crosswind - Rudder Direction
For sure other topics and videos on internet talk about how to control an aircraft on ground with cross wind.
Depends on several things, but the general weathervaning effect turns the nose toward the wind. That said, the weathervaning effect is over-applied in many cases, especially on tricycle-gear aircraft where friction and contact points usually override free-weathervaning. Some aircraft developers have applied fixes that counter this, but it still is generally overdone.
For instance, due to left-turning tendencies found in single-engine prop aircraft, we usually have to use right rudder at low airspeeds and high power settings. With a strong left crosswind, it adds to the effect and we need even more right rudder. With a strong right crosswind it can negate the left turning effect and require a lot less left, maybe even neutral rudder. But I’ve never in real life had to use sustained left rudder to maintain the centerline on takeoff. In the sim I often do, but it varies from aircraft to aircraft.
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I agree that some degree of weathervaning is expected, and that it can sometimes be overdone in the sim. However, what I am experiencing seems to go beyond an exaggerated weathervaning effect.
I ran a series of controlled tests to isolate the cause, and the results are quite consistent:
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The behavior only appears when there is a crosswind component.
With wind aligned with the runway (for example 060/2 on RWY 06), the aircraft tracks perfectly straight during the takeoff roll. -
As soon as I introduce a crosswind component, the aircraft consistently drifts in the wrong direction — i.e., against the wind.
Example: RWY 06 (heading 060), wind 100/6 (right crosswind). The aircraft drifts to the right, which is physically incorrect — it should drift to the left. -
I repeated the test with opposite wind direction:
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Wind 150/15 (from the right) → aircraft drifts to the right
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Wind 330/15 (from the left) → aircraft drifts to the left
In both cases, the aircraft moves against the wind direction.
- This behavior is consistent across different aircraft:
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PMDG 737-800
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FBW A320
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I disabled all assists (including auto-rudder), and the behavior remains unchanged.
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I tested with separate control mappings:
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Rudder only
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Steering only
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No duplicate axes
The issue persists in all configurations.
- I also tested both live weather and manually defined wind — same results.
Given these tests, this does not appear to be just an overdone weathervaning effect. It looks more like the lateral wind component is being applied incorrectly (possibly inverted) during the ground roll.
Also, the effect becomes more noticeable as speed increases, especially near V1, which suggests a problem in how aerodynamic side force or ground interaction is modeled.
Have you or anyone else observed a similar “against-the-wind” drift during takeoff roll?
You could be right that there’s an integer flip or something involved in the ground friction model.
If you’re able, have you tried this in dev mode with debugging windows open? This will show the lateral forces being applied. Wouldn’t the cfd streamlines also indicate this to an extent?
The tell-tale (homonym pun intended) would be if the tail doesn’t just get pushed downwind (causing the nose to pivot/weathervane) but gets “sucked” upwind.
There’s still a much older (5 years), unanswered question I had about the size of the tail surface possibly being parsed incorrectly by the flight model and therefore being over-effected by wind. Maybe that was fixed in 2024 - I haven’t done any flight modeling since launch.