It would be good if certain objects within the sim can stay or at least become visible at much longer distances, windsock being one of them.
Circuiting most airfields the windsock is not visible until I get rather low to the ground which is very unrealistic, it would be good to be able to see it fairly far out or at least when over the top at around 1.5/2k feet above.
This is very annoying specially for VRF flying and bush trips.
Oh yeah, not being able to reliably do a VFR entry into an airfield like we can in the real world in a flight simulator is pretty, um, not great.
I’m sure it is seen as a minor issue. But if you don’t have good basics then what have you got? A poor foundation. And a poor foundation is anathema to aviation IMNSHO!
A lot of small airfields (in Germany at least) have a white landing “T” symbolising a plane and indicating the direction of the landing depending on the direction of the wind. It is visible during the hours the airport is operated and the “T” is maintained during those hours by whoever is at the airfield. You sometimes even can see them in the sim when they made it to a Bing satellite Image as a flatened white thing in the grass likewise sometimes even glider or other planes.
Exactly, and those can be seen easily, wind socks can’t be seen that easily in real life. I don’t recall ever navigating around the pattern based on locating a wind sock in real life. Most places have a FISO telling you runway in use and wind or indeed there is a signaling square. On approach I never look for a wind sock, who cares where the wind is from, just respond to what ever the aircraft is doing.
I remember watching a video by Kelsey from YT’s 74 Gear. He explained earlier in his career he had gotten in to the habit of contacting the tower for wind checks before every landing. The PIC asked him “Were you ever planning on not landing there?”, or words to that effect. He never called ahead again after that.
I’ve got better at judging the wind based on my crab angle. Assuming ATC didn’t mess up, and assign me a tail wind landing, I can tell which direction a crosswind is coming from.
Not in France for example, where it’s very often unattended field, only air-to-air communication, most of the time no-one in the pattern, no signal-area/square and obviously no ASOS, AWOS… etc So, it’s very common for private leisure pilots to fly overhead and seach for the windsock.
Yeah but France is France . They can’t even speak English on the radio so what do you expect. Without joking, you are right, I went to places like that as well, not as often as we were training people to become airline pilots so we mostly flew to bigger airports. I don’t remember from what altitude you can reliably spot a windsock though in real life.
My personal minimum is roughly between 1000 ft to 1500 ft above ground level (depending on weather condition, easier if there’s wind to raise the windsock, depending on the quality of the window and the pilot’s skill )
Here’s Les Saintes (TFFS) from 1’400 ft. Good luck to catch the windsock.