Post by Bill Von Sennet on Aug 22, 2008 22:17:26 GMT -5
Tom Goodrick
USING REAL WEATHER
« on: Aug 16th, 2008, 11:53pm »
uote Quote Modify Modify Remove Remove
The Real Weather feature of FS9 is one of its greatest features. If you have not tried using it, you have been missing something. Using it is easy. You don't have to know how to fly an instrument approach or even an ILS approach to use this feature. Clouds and variable winds are a big part of real flying. As a real pilot, you sneak a lot of looks at the sky during the day you will fly. You check the weather forecast and look at the sky and wonder if they agree. As you walk to your airplane you look closely at the sky. That's where you will be in a few minutes. Is it good flying weather? When you get into the air, you can see farther and may see some clouds on the horizon. At first a few clouds on the horizon strike fear into the student pilot's heart. I was lucky. During my early solo flying, I encountered broken scud layers while practicing in the pattern. I just kept going because i saw enough holes so I knew I could get down. It worked and gave me a sense I coud live with some clouds. But some places the clouds are hiding rocks or steel towers. So how do you survive as a real-world pilot? The first step is to learn how to do it safely. You can do that in FS9 with RW.
To get RW, select Weather under the World Menu and then select Download Real Weather. When you click on it, your system will try to connect to the Internet. Let it do so or help it if you have to. It connects to just a special site and does not use your Browser. (Somepeople like me cannot use their Browser at the same time as FS9. Don't worry. This will work fine.) The software goes to a special place operated by Jeppeson Company, a well-known aviation company with an excellent reputation. One thing you may not like is that Microsoft intervenes and quickly reads some data about your system. I have never seen evidence this will cause harm. The software downloads a short line of weather data from each airport with a weather station in the world. Then it arranges the data in a way that FS9 can use it. The entire process takes about two minutes on my rather slow dial-up system. But it would take you days of work to concoct an equivalent weather system for a 1000 nm flight using the methods of building weather manually. Then you would not get it close to "right."
What does "right" mean? It means if you look out your window, the weather you will see in FS9 at a nearby airport is similar to what you see out the window with a few exceptions. It will be weather you have experienced on the surface in the past 15 minutes. The weather at altitude will be a mathematical montage of weather reported by sets of stations and measured at altitude at least four times a day. Weather between stations will be formed by interpolation of data over the space between stations and measurement points. But weather is done in sections. Occasionally you will see strange things as you move between sections. Unfortunately nothing tells you the boundaries of the sections. It is not uncommonon to start a final ILS approach 8 nm out in weather above the clouds where you can see the lights for the runway. Then you pass through various clouds layers losing sight of the runway. Then finally, about a mile out the runway pops into view.
To fly RW without having to make an ILS approach, load the RW. Then use "Go To Airport" to place yourself at the destination. Look around in spot view. You might want to move out to 6000 ft from the airplane. Check visibility along the approach to the runway in use (most into the wind). When you determine that a visual approach can be made from a reasonable altitude like 2000 ft into your destination, then you are good to go on your trip. Pop back to your original airport and go. You don't have to have good visibility to take off, just to land. If your first choice for a destination looks bad, pick another until you find a good one.
The main value of RW is that it gives you a complex weather system all the way between the start and destination airports at all levels you will use (up to 51,000 ft). As you fly, the weather changes in various ways so it matches the weather reported at the airports you pass.
The usual way to use RW is just to get a file and fly with it. Your computer can be disconnected from the internet after you get the download. This works fine for practicing weather flying, for local flights and for short trips of up to two hours. For longer trips or for out and back trips over a period of 3 to 5 hours, you can either get continuous updates automatically, or you can get a second download half way through. There is a mode which reads updates the weather every 15 minutes and makes smooth transitions as you fly. For this you leave the computer connected to the Internet during the entire flight. I have used this on loong jet flights where I know the weather will change significantly during the flight. I may be going from one continent to another or from a norther city to a southern city in the winter with a flight starting in the morning and ending in the afternoon. We can expect significant changes in the weather due to the time of day as we fly such a trip.
If you are not comfortable flying an ILS, there are several ways to learn. First pick an airport near your home that has a full ILS - both a localizer and a glideslope. The localizer guides you by direction to line up with the runway and the glideslope guides you along a sloping line as you lose altitude regularly (about 300 fpm) to the runway. Pick any airplane you are comfortable flying that has the instruments required for IFR flight (heading and attitude indicators and an ILS receiver (Nav1). Stick to that one airplane until you are a pro at ILS landings. Move to other airports with full ILS capability. You can also turn on a visual aid that displays recatangles along the path for you to fly through. They make it much easier to fly the ILS becaues you do what ever you need to to keep the airplane passing through the center of each rectangle. I use these when landing in dense fog or slow with zero ceiling. Just make sure you are at landing speed when you reach the last rectangle. This gives you the ability to go anyplace anytime (at least in FS where the thunderstorms will not kill you and your wings will never ice up from real weather.)
One of the drawbacks to RW is that it often will set rain instead of snow. It will even do this when the surface temp is 25F and will not give you surface ice. There will often be sharp changes in winds even at high altitudes as the interpolation breaks down in certain conditions. Keep "Crash due To Structural Failure" turned off. It is unfortunate that nothing in FS RW will cause you to lose control and the things that will break your airplane are generally not realistic. It is not realistic to see a sudden shift on 180 degrees in wind direction with a high constant wind speed like 50 knots or even 100 knots. You'll notice this but you will not lose control. Instead of varying direction by itself, they should vary the speed componenst which would result in more reasonable directional variation. Any airplane would break if a 50 knot headwind suddenly became a 50 knot tailwind. That cannot occur in the real atmosphere except in a tornado.
flaminghotsauce
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #1 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 5:56am »
How good we have it these days! Downloading real weather for the simulator and having it reproduce what is outside the window as accurately as it does... priceless.
I keep thinking about the future of flight simulation. Imagine what computers will be able to handle in a decade or so. A flight simulator will come that will have us flying over photo-real land (which can be done today, although an arduous task), weather will be far better than it already is.... The weather simulation could take up an awfully huge processor setup all by itself. But there's already multiple core, multiple processor machines produced today that, if the software could properly access them, would do a tremendous job. It's only going to get better, too.
I used to have a great situation saved at KIRK that included heavy clouds with multiple layers, some wind, and some rain that was just merely a RW download but it was fantastic and I had set it up to be the default flight. I changed it I guess and lost that weather scenario. I haven't captured it again since then. Once in a while, while driving at work, I'll see some of that and I have wanted to call home and have someone boot my computer, simulator, and walk them through it, so I can save the situation.
"Barring all differences, they're identical!"
BudsBud
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #2 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 10:36am »
RW weather has been one of my favorite things about FS9. I almost always have it on because in the real world you can not fly without being aware of the local conditions as Tom has said.
One of my first flights from our local airport, KMCO, we had intermittent local thunder storms in progress. I was making an approach on the downwind leg when a large lighting strike crashed just out side of my window and about the same instant I was blasted in the headphones with a loud thunder clap. It was absolutely unreal how close to the real thing this RW is in the simm.
But the downside is what Tom called attention to, that of sudden wind shifts at altitude. They wont bend your bird but they do throw you around a bit.
JohnL
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #3 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 1:54pm »
If you have FSUIPC www.schiratti.com/dowson.html, you can set it to "slow down" any wind strength/directional changes, though I think you need the "all-singing all-dancing" payware version to do this.
As I can't/won't fly while my current PC is hooked up to the net, I use FSMetar personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/fsmetar to provide RW. It's freeware and I've been using it since FS98, and have a library of Metars (most of 2007 at 4-hour intervals), so if I want some unseasonal RW it's no problem.
« Last Edit: Aug 18th, 2008, 1:54pm by JohnL »
JohnL (bgad017)
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #4 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 5:42pm »
I can get "unseasonal RW" if I want to break out of the winter blahs. I have saved weather files over several years, getting several in each month. I am more likely to tire of the heat of summer so I select a day in December.
I do not understand what having the metars does for you. What do you do with them? Is there a way of feeding the data into the same routines that interpolate between stations to get weather for a cross-country? If the use of Metar files directly gives the same result as getting RW, what is the advantage? I have to think getting RW is at least easier. I may end up with a lot of weather that I don't use but it costs nothing of significance in time or memory.
One thing I do if I am hoping to fly in some "interesting waether" is to get an RW download after studying a weather map. Then I go looking for the type of weather I want to fly in - a hurricane, a bunch of bad thunderstorms with tornadoes, a snowstorm, etc. I have found some very strong winds that made it impossible to operate from ground to air or air to ground. You can still fly through them. I have seen 50 knots on the ground and well over 100 knots in the air.
« Last Edit: Aug 18th, 2008, 6:55pm by Tom Goodrick »
flaminghotsauce
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #5 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 10:49pm »
Well, Tom, you're in luck! Another tropical storm this way comes. May go all hurricane on 'em.
"Barring all differences, they're identical!"
BudsBud
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #6 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:17am »
Ok so we now have a …small TS moving up on us here in central Florida.
I thought it would be interesting to fly through the thing in RW as a real hurricane hunter does.
Pooo nothing but light rain 15 – 17 knts winds.
I was disappointed to say the least. I know as storms that we have through here this one is pretty weak but heck I expected much more
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #7 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:47am »
You have to get lucky in that high winds must occur at a reporting station within the past 15 minutes of your download. Sometimes winds aloft data are good for storms but often not.
I have two files, one yesterday afternoon and one just a few minutes ago. I'll go looking through them for winds and hard rain.
Allen_Peterson
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #8 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:28pm »
Thanks for the encouragement to use Real Weather, Tom. I downloaded RW and then went to my local airport (KCOE) and looked around. All I could see was clear sky and sunshine, so I didn't think RW was working. Then I realized that the real weather in Cd'A really was sunny with not a cloud in the sky.
I took off and everything was still clear around the area, so I went to NWWW to check it out. I had previously flown up to NWWC in clear weather. This time it was different, clouds down to about 3000' with some of the higher peaks poking up through the clouds. I flew VFR to NWWH at 2500', picking my way up through valleys and around peaks using the GPS map. You're right, it does add a new dimension to flying! I saved the flight after landing, hopefully the same RW file will be used when I continue on to NWWD.
I still have a lot to learn about IFR, ILS, etc.
A couple of questions:
1. Where does the sim put the RW file?
2. Does the sim overwrite the old file the next time RW is downloaded?
3. If I find the "current" RW file I assume I must at least rename it save it. How then do I use the saved file in another flight?
Have a good day.
Allen
Ed_Burke
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #9 on: Aug 20th, 2008, 3:11am »
Hi Allen, just wandering by and saw that I can answer your queries. RW is indeed a great thing.
1.... C:\Documents and Settings\name maybe\My Documents\Flight Simulator Files" For each flight
there are two files, a .FLT file and a .WX file You can rename the .WX file to replace any existing
wx file so that is one way of getting the weather you want.
2.... It sure does.
3.... If you save a flight with the 15 minute update you are also saving the instruction to continue with
15' updates. You will have a short, sweet flight before the wx changes to the current conditions.
Your saved file is still where you left it but it's no use for an extended flight.
The shot is to save a 'static' weather situation with a name that pins it down. My saved flight name
looks like this....... wx080313frontalYBMC ........ or something similar which reminds me why I fancied
the weather and where I was. The 6 figure group is YY/MM/DD which ensures that the files are listed
chronologically.
To fly in that weather simply load the saved flight. You are then free to change aircraft if you wish or to drag the
aircraft in world/map view to the airfield of your choice should you want a new start. You have saved a snapshot
of weather world-wide so poke around and have some fun.
Ed
ED B
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #10 on: Aug 20th, 2008, 12:17pm »
Yes... what he said.
But to keep it simple, I only save flights with the fixed weather - a single RW download. Where your system stores the .FLT file, it will also store a corresponding WX file. It does this anyway, even if the file is Clear all Weather. So when you elect to resume a flight at that saved condition, you will get the weather. But you can change the aircraft and the airport for the next flight. You'll still have that same weather file.
If I am making a flight of about two hours out and then returning, I get the RW at the start and then get RW again before doing the return flight. That gives me enough variation in weather to match pretty well what I would see in real life.
If you save the flight named "BEST_DARN_FLIGHT" you will find two files in the storage directory: BEST_DARN_FLIGHT.FLT and BEST_DARN_FLIGHT.WX. You do not have a choice in naming the RW file differently. Fot this reason I have a bunch of flights named similar to "Aug 20 08" with a note in the commentary saying something about the weather.
You may also see that flight plans (.PLN files) are stored in the same directory. This is so that you can save a flight with a specific flight plan and it will be loaded when you load the "Flight", in addition to the weather.
If I want to send you a flight I have saved because of the weather, I would zip the pair of files .FLT and .WX. You would put those files into your directory with the other .FLT files. But I may have saved the flight with an aircraft you don't have. You'll get an error message. Just continue with whatever aircraft you had selected from your hangar and it will work all right. To avoid this I usually try to save flights with default aircraft.
« Last Edit: Aug 20th, 2008, 12:33pm by Tom Goodrick »
USING REAL WEATHER
« on: Aug 16th, 2008, 11:53pm »
uote Quote Modify Modify Remove Remove
The Real Weather feature of FS9 is one of its greatest features. If you have not tried using it, you have been missing something. Using it is easy. You don't have to know how to fly an instrument approach or even an ILS approach to use this feature. Clouds and variable winds are a big part of real flying. As a real pilot, you sneak a lot of looks at the sky during the day you will fly. You check the weather forecast and look at the sky and wonder if they agree. As you walk to your airplane you look closely at the sky. That's where you will be in a few minutes. Is it good flying weather? When you get into the air, you can see farther and may see some clouds on the horizon. At first a few clouds on the horizon strike fear into the student pilot's heart. I was lucky. During my early solo flying, I encountered broken scud layers while practicing in the pattern. I just kept going because i saw enough holes so I knew I could get down. It worked and gave me a sense I coud live with some clouds. But some places the clouds are hiding rocks or steel towers. So how do you survive as a real-world pilot? The first step is to learn how to do it safely. You can do that in FS9 with RW.
To get RW, select Weather under the World Menu and then select Download Real Weather. When you click on it, your system will try to connect to the Internet. Let it do so or help it if you have to. It connects to just a special site and does not use your Browser. (Somepeople like me cannot use their Browser at the same time as FS9. Don't worry. This will work fine.) The software goes to a special place operated by Jeppeson Company, a well-known aviation company with an excellent reputation. One thing you may not like is that Microsoft intervenes and quickly reads some data about your system. I have never seen evidence this will cause harm. The software downloads a short line of weather data from each airport with a weather station in the world. Then it arranges the data in a way that FS9 can use it. The entire process takes about two minutes on my rather slow dial-up system. But it would take you days of work to concoct an equivalent weather system for a 1000 nm flight using the methods of building weather manually. Then you would not get it close to "right."
What does "right" mean? It means if you look out your window, the weather you will see in FS9 at a nearby airport is similar to what you see out the window with a few exceptions. It will be weather you have experienced on the surface in the past 15 minutes. The weather at altitude will be a mathematical montage of weather reported by sets of stations and measured at altitude at least four times a day. Weather between stations will be formed by interpolation of data over the space between stations and measurement points. But weather is done in sections. Occasionally you will see strange things as you move between sections. Unfortunately nothing tells you the boundaries of the sections. It is not uncommonon to start a final ILS approach 8 nm out in weather above the clouds where you can see the lights for the runway. Then you pass through various clouds layers losing sight of the runway. Then finally, about a mile out the runway pops into view.
To fly RW without having to make an ILS approach, load the RW. Then use "Go To Airport" to place yourself at the destination. Look around in spot view. You might want to move out to 6000 ft from the airplane. Check visibility along the approach to the runway in use (most into the wind). When you determine that a visual approach can be made from a reasonable altitude like 2000 ft into your destination, then you are good to go on your trip. Pop back to your original airport and go. You don't have to have good visibility to take off, just to land. If your first choice for a destination looks bad, pick another until you find a good one.
The main value of RW is that it gives you a complex weather system all the way between the start and destination airports at all levels you will use (up to 51,000 ft). As you fly, the weather changes in various ways so it matches the weather reported at the airports you pass.
The usual way to use RW is just to get a file and fly with it. Your computer can be disconnected from the internet after you get the download. This works fine for practicing weather flying, for local flights and for short trips of up to two hours. For longer trips or for out and back trips over a period of 3 to 5 hours, you can either get continuous updates automatically, or you can get a second download half way through. There is a mode which reads updates the weather every 15 minutes and makes smooth transitions as you fly. For this you leave the computer connected to the Internet during the entire flight. I have used this on loong jet flights where I know the weather will change significantly during the flight. I may be going from one continent to another or from a norther city to a southern city in the winter with a flight starting in the morning and ending in the afternoon. We can expect significant changes in the weather due to the time of day as we fly such a trip.
If you are not comfortable flying an ILS, there are several ways to learn. First pick an airport near your home that has a full ILS - both a localizer and a glideslope. The localizer guides you by direction to line up with the runway and the glideslope guides you along a sloping line as you lose altitude regularly (about 300 fpm) to the runway. Pick any airplane you are comfortable flying that has the instruments required for IFR flight (heading and attitude indicators and an ILS receiver (Nav1). Stick to that one airplane until you are a pro at ILS landings. Move to other airports with full ILS capability. You can also turn on a visual aid that displays recatangles along the path for you to fly through. They make it much easier to fly the ILS becaues you do what ever you need to to keep the airplane passing through the center of each rectangle. I use these when landing in dense fog or slow with zero ceiling. Just make sure you are at landing speed when you reach the last rectangle. This gives you the ability to go anyplace anytime (at least in FS where the thunderstorms will not kill you and your wings will never ice up from real weather.)
One of the drawbacks to RW is that it often will set rain instead of snow. It will even do this when the surface temp is 25F and will not give you surface ice. There will often be sharp changes in winds even at high altitudes as the interpolation breaks down in certain conditions. Keep "Crash due To Structural Failure" turned off. It is unfortunate that nothing in FS RW will cause you to lose control and the things that will break your airplane are generally not realistic. It is not realistic to see a sudden shift on 180 degrees in wind direction with a high constant wind speed like 50 knots or even 100 knots. You'll notice this but you will not lose control. Instead of varying direction by itself, they should vary the speed componenst which would result in more reasonable directional variation. Any airplane would break if a 50 knot headwind suddenly became a 50 knot tailwind. That cannot occur in the real atmosphere except in a tornado.
flaminghotsauce
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #1 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 5:56am »
How good we have it these days! Downloading real weather for the simulator and having it reproduce what is outside the window as accurately as it does... priceless.
I keep thinking about the future of flight simulation. Imagine what computers will be able to handle in a decade or so. A flight simulator will come that will have us flying over photo-real land (which can be done today, although an arduous task), weather will be far better than it already is.... The weather simulation could take up an awfully huge processor setup all by itself. But there's already multiple core, multiple processor machines produced today that, if the software could properly access them, would do a tremendous job. It's only going to get better, too.
I used to have a great situation saved at KIRK that included heavy clouds with multiple layers, some wind, and some rain that was just merely a RW download but it was fantastic and I had set it up to be the default flight. I changed it I guess and lost that weather scenario. I haven't captured it again since then. Once in a while, while driving at work, I'll see some of that and I have wanted to call home and have someone boot my computer, simulator, and walk them through it, so I can save the situation.
"Barring all differences, they're identical!"
BudsBud
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #2 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 10:36am »
RW weather has been one of my favorite things about FS9. I almost always have it on because in the real world you can not fly without being aware of the local conditions as Tom has said.
One of my first flights from our local airport, KMCO, we had intermittent local thunder storms in progress. I was making an approach on the downwind leg when a large lighting strike crashed just out side of my window and about the same instant I was blasted in the headphones with a loud thunder clap. It was absolutely unreal how close to the real thing this RW is in the simm.
But the downside is what Tom called attention to, that of sudden wind shifts at altitude. They wont bend your bird but they do throw you around a bit.
JohnL
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #3 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 1:54pm »
If you have FSUIPC www.schiratti.com/dowson.html, you can set it to "slow down" any wind strength/directional changes, though I think you need the "all-singing all-dancing" payware version to do this.
As I can't/won't fly while my current PC is hooked up to the net, I use FSMetar personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/fsmetar to provide RW. It's freeware and I've been using it since FS98, and have a library of Metars (most of 2007 at 4-hour intervals), so if I want some unseasonal RW it's no problem.
« Last Edit: Aug 18th, 2008, 1:54pm by JohnL »
JohnL (bgad017)
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #4 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 5:42pm »
I can get "unseasonal RW" if I want to break out of the winter blahs. I have saved weather files over several years, getting several in each month. I am more likely to tire of the heat of summer so I select a day in December.
I do not understand what having the metars does for you. What do you do with them? Is there a way of feeding the data into the same routines that interpolate between stations to get weather for a cross-country? If the use of Metar files directly gives the same result as getting RW, what is the advantage? I have to think getting RW is at least easier. I may end up with a lot of weather that I don't use but it costs nothing of significance in time or memory.
One thing I do if I am hoping to fly in some "interesting waether" is to get an RW download after studying a weather map. Then I go looking for the type of weather I want to fly in - a hurricane, a bunch of bad thunderstorms with tornadoes, a snowstorm, etc. I have found some very strong winds that made it impossible to operate from ground to air or air to ground. You can still fly through them. I have seen 50 knots on the ground and well over 100 knots in the air.
« Last Edit: Aug 18th, 2008, 6:55pm by Tom Goodrick »
flaminghotsauce
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #5 on: Aug 18th, 2008, 10:49pm »
Well, Tom, you're in luck! Another tropical storm this way comes. May go all hurricane on 'em.
"Barring all differences, they're identical!"
BudsBud
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #6 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:17am »
Ok so we now have a …small TS moving up on us here in central Florida.
I thought it would be interesting to fly through the thing in RW as a real hurricane hunter does.
Pooo nothing but light rain 15 – 17 knts winds.
I was disappointed to say the least. I know as storms that we have through here this one is pretty weak but heck I expected much more
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #7 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:47am »
You have to get lucky in that high winds must occur at a reporting station within the past 15 minutes of your download. Sometimes winds aloft data are good for storms but often not.
I have two files, one yesterday afternoon and one just a few minutes ago. I'll go looking through them for winds and hard rain.
Allen_Peterson
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #8 on: Aug 19th, 2008, 10:28pm »
Thanks for the encouragement to use Real Weather, Tom. I downloaded RW and then went to my local airport (KCOE) and looked around. All I could see was clear sky and sunshine, so I didn't think RW was working. Then I realized that the real weather in Cd'A really was sunny with not a cloud in the sky.
I took off and everything was still clear around the area, so I went to NWWW to check it out. I had previously flown up to NWWC in clear weather. This time it was different, clouds down to about 3000' with some of the higher peaks poking up through the clouds. I flew VFR to NWWH at 2500', picking my way up through valleys and around peaks using the GPS map. You're right, it does add a new dimension to flying! I saved the flight after landing, hopefully the same RW file will be used when I continue on to NWWD.
I still have a lot to learn about IFR, ILS, etc.
A couple of questions:
1. Where does the sim put the RW file?
2. Does the sim overwrite the old file the next time RW is downloaded?
3. If I find the "current" RW file I assume I must at least rename it save it. How then do I use the saved file in another flight?
Have a good day.
Allen
Ed_Burke
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #9 on: Aug 20th, 2008, 3:11am »
Hi Allen, just wandering by and saw that I can answer your queries. RW is indeed a great thing.
1.... C:\Documents and Settings\name maybe\My Documents\Flight Simulator Files" For each flight
there are two files, a .FLT file and a .WX file You can rename the .WX file to replace any existing
wx file so that is one way of getting the weather you want.
2.... It sure does.
3.... If you save a flight with the 15 minute update you are also saving the instruction to continue with
15' updates. You will have a short, sweet flight before the wx changes to the current conditions.
Your saved file is still where you left it but it's no use for an extended flight.
The shot is to save a 'static' weather situation with a name that pins it down. My saved flight name
looks like this....... wx080313frontalYBMC ........ or something similar which reminds me why I fancied
the weather and where I was. The 6 figure group is YY/MM/DD which ensures that the files are listed
chronologically.
To fly in that weather simply load the saved flight. You are then free to change aircraft if you wish or to drag the
aircraft in world/map view to the airfield of your choice should you want a new start. You have saved a snapshot
of weather world-wide so poke around and have some fun.
Ed
ED B
Tom Goodrick
Re: USING REAL WEATHER
« Reply #10 on: Aug 20th, 2008, 12:17pm »
Yes... what he said.
But to keep it simple, I only save flights with the fixed weather - a single RW download. Where your system stores the .FLT file, it will also store a corresponding WX file. It does this anyway, even if the file is Clear all Weather. So when you elect to resume a flight at that saved condition, you will get the weather. But you can change the aircraft and the airport for the next flight. You'll still have that same weather file.
If I am making a flight of about two hours out and then returning, I get the RW at the start and then get RW again before doing the return flight. That gives me enough variation in weather to match pretty well what I would see in real life.
If you save the flight named "BEST_DARN_FLIGHT" you will find two files in the storage directory: BEST_DARN_FLIGHT.FLT and BEST_DARN_FLIGHT.WX. You do not have a choice in naming the RW file differently. Fot this reason I have a bunch of flights named similar to "Aug 20 08" with a note in the commentary saying something about the weather.
You may also see that flight plans (.PLN files) are stored in the same directory. This is so that you can save a flight with a specific flight plan and it will be loaded when you load the "Flight", in addition to the weather.
If I want to send you a flight I have saved because of the weather, I would zip the pair of files .FLT and .WX. You would put those files into your directory with the other .FLT files. But I may have saved the flight with an aircraft you don't have. You'll get an error message. Just continue with whatever aircraft you had selected from your hangar and it will work all right. To avoid this I usually try to save flights with default aircraft.
« Last Edit: Aug 20th, 2008, 12:33pm by Tom Goodrick »