Wind in FSX

[DogTailRed2]

No, not the sort of wind that accompanies your festive sprouts.
I'm contemplating turning wind off in FSX because I've no way of being able to understand it.
In real life you can feel wind. You can feel it pushing you. You can see it's effect on trees, water, smoke, windsocks and you get verbal feedback from ATC.
But in FSX it's a sort of invisible force only detectable when you start to annoyingly drift of course. Or when you try to land and start to crab without any real way of anticipating it's effects.
So would it be more realistic to turn it off?

[Dev One]

I find it better than FS9, at least from the cockpit point of view as it does seem to randomly upset the aircraft where one does have to correct the aircraft attitude. FS9 always seems to move it, but it goes back to its previous state without any input from the pilot. I do however set it for quite high turbulence levels as well as sharp windshear to get it to somewhere near real flying, where one is always inputting joystick & rudder to keep the aircraft on track & height.
Take of & landing can then be a bit more of a challenge.
One can always reduce the stability levels in the aircraft.cfg to make it more lively as well as the reality setting.

Keith

[petermcleland]

Wind is mostly controlled by FSUIPC...In FS9 it can remove all crosswind effects in the last part of the approach unfortunately, spoiling any attempts to practice the art of crosswind landing. Don't know what happens in FSX! I like MS FLIGHT best for crosswind landings which does not have FSUIPC. I have forgotten now how I got crosswinds to work in FS9 but you could always try disabling FSUIPC by disabling its .dll file in the Modules folder by just renaming it to "FSUIPC.dll.dis" Then you can always put it back again later.

[Dev One]

Re: Crosswind landing in FS9, I do FSUIPC, but the free version, so nothing is setup for winds etc. I've just tried a 90° crosswind at 16 kts (no gusts) & had to put in about 10° nose into wind in the glideslope at 70 to 75 mph, touchdown 60 mph. This is in my WIP dragonfly. Must check it out in FSX later.
I just use FSUIPC to interface with AFSD.
Keith

[DaveB]

There's always Accu-Feel from A2A though I can't vouch for how realistic this actually is or how it might help. Personally.. I find it exaggerates certain FSX conditions to such a degree that I often turn it off but there are numerous settings that can be fiddled with for Air, Ground and Sea (the latter for float planes). Can't remember how much it is off the top of my head but I don't think it's excessive. Have a look and see what you think Oh.. it doesn't work for helicopters btw.. only fixed wing

ATB
DaveB

[airboatr]

One fun thing to do with wind is, set it at about 55 to 60 knots and land small GA on buildings or whatever.
I believe i remember a multi fly or two with some here.

Cheers

[adysmith]

It is not so much the surface wind as the upper winds and temperatures that seriously annoy me.

I use Active Sky which is an improvement on basic FS9 for weather but at Concorde cruising levels there should be an almost universal 5 knot westerly wind, not 65 knots at FL540 as I have seen on FS sometimes, so I have to remember to disable upper winds before I fly Concorde.

The temperatures, on the other hand, despite ticking the "force constant temperature aloft" box are an utter nightmare. Active Sky loads weird weather from "locations" with codes like $249 half way across the atlantic which changes the OAT to the extent that Concorde either goes into a zoom climb or, worse, plummets to regain Mach 2.

Converting to FSX Gold imminently, will see if that is any better.