Real World Weather Tips

[Steve Waite]

Here's a tip for creating IF10 plans intended to be used with real world weather programs.

When building plans leave the IF10 weather set to ON and set the Departure Winds and the Destination Winds near to the real world weather reports.

Building the flight with the winds set in this way forces IF to use the corresponding runways, when the real weather metars load up. Don't forget to switch IF10 Weather to OFF before setting off in the flight.

[alpha117]

Top Tip


Thanks

Clive

[Don Quixote]

Sorry for digging up this rather old thread. Anyway: Would it be possible, for a potential future update, for IF10 to gather weather information for creating the flight plan without having to enable the IF10 weather engine? This would be great for users of other weather addons.

I absolutely love the "Detailed briefing" feature (seriously, it's awesome) but having to turn the weather engine on and off every time to get weather information in the briefing is a bit annoying.

[Steve Waite]

Not at all, thanks for bringing it up. The service pack version [sg] (now in final preparation) completes the original design spec of this stage of the app, which was to get the offline weather simulation, and the rest of IF10 running as intended. Better integration with other weather engines and real world weather downloading will have to wait for future versions. There's lots of interest in new features and versions, development will continue.

[Don Quixote]

That sounds great! It's good to hear that IF10 is being developed further.

[Steve Waite]

I'm now finalising the version [sh], which includes added functionality for FSX-SE installs. Then a P3Dv2 version will be provided soon as possible after that, this is a different program with a new purchase price to be decided.

After that I will start work on the long anticipated improvements to the current IF10 version 1, and will take it to version 2 in a new product.

There has been some confusion as to what IF10 weather is; it's not downloaded from the weather servers, it's procedurally generated from an algorithm, it is fictional weather, and also it is set up to enable custom weather systems and winds for practice flying. Several weather engines available attempt to implement real weather in FSX. IF10 provides an interesting fantasy weather situation, no matter what time of day or location.

The winds aloft in IF10 weather do not need support from FSUIPC wind smoothing. Winds implemented correctly in FSX have superior wind smoothing to FSUIPC anyway, and it is not true that FSX winds are faulty.

More weather features are planned for IF10 mkII, but this is some way off yet.

[nikaslan]

Hi Steve,

Any idea about the following situation:

I set up the weather as in the first post, build the flight plan with the right active runways, start the flight, but in the meantime winds change and another runway is now in use at destination airport.

How can I set up another approach on the fly?
I'm flying the Q400 and use the sg >augmented version.

BTW which is the recommended/realistic IF10 planning setup for the Q400? Should I use 'Computed approach' or FAF/IDF in the 'Mission' page? Also 'Approach waypoints' included or not?

[Steve Waite]

And also, if we fly to an airport with secondary runways, and make a plan with approach, how can we know what runway we will be given clearance to, since it could be either when we get there. That's flying real world weather for you.

Even so it would be nice to have other plans made, along the route, or before the flight, to alternates. This has been asked for several times and may make it into a version of IF10 in the future.

Remember that realistically, IF10 is currently geared to offline play, and hooked into the life-like procedurally generated fictional weather IF10 generates, to overcome exactly these problems in a simpler way (for the rime being).

[nikaslan]

Ha, and I was thinking all others probably had already a working solution to this..

Ok, about the Q400 now. I thought the above could be resolved by creating a flight plan from say IDF to FAF and then assigning custom SID and/or STAR according to local weather conditions. Is this logic valid?

[Steve Waite]

Yes, irrespective of what routing is contained in the plan, we can usually load whatever approach we desire in the GPS or FMS. With the >augmented AIRAC enabled, this makes the plans between SID/STAR transitions of the most likely departure and approach (without AIRAC enabled the plans go between most transitions anyway). Even then, we may only arrive to find the wind changed, and we would be routed onto another STAR, with possibly another transition to the one we made the plan to in the first place. If we set up the flight with IF10 fictional weather the winds will be in the directions forecast, but still does not mean that the IF10 planner successfully predicts the arrival (or departure) runways 100%, although does a god job especially since the sim is not needed to be running to make the prediction. AI traffic can put you onto alternate runways to those predicted.