I posted this also in Active Sky Support Forum.I am throwing in the towel on Active Sky. I was cruising at 16000 in a pretty cool business jet, and all of a sudden I got hit with a down draft that caused me to loose 6000 feet and I lost total control of the jet and couldn't recover with full back pressure. After about what seemed like 30 seconds, I was able to recover. What is that all about?ERRATIC WX BEHAVIOR. I was also porposing for no reason. No A/I traffic in front of me on landing.. What is this all about!Thanks for the frustration!Barry

Ever heard of turbulence, microbursts, etc. etc.?The things you describe happen in real life too. They might not be all that common (though sudden drops at altitude happen more often than you might think), but they do happen.

"Thanks for the frustration!"Tell me, how much did you pay for it? You know, the other day I received an email from a user regarding my landclass assistant program. The poor baby was complaining that he had to search for the FS2000 Terrain SDK....god forbid, I didn't include a link in my documentation (unintentional on my part) and he had to do some work. I told him where he could go--and yes, he does frequent this forum quite often.My point--issues can be found with freeware. We don't get paid for it. Sometimes, odd things happen that can cause us to be frustrated and give up. Fine.... Just show some class, and don't make a public spectacle about it. That there's a support forum at all for a free utility I find quite generous. That freeware authors don't always have the answers--sometimes we're just too busy with our day jobs. And to add to Jeroen's post, I was flying to MN four years ago, and just past Colorado Springs, hit some clear air turbulence. We lost 5000 feet in seconds--tray carts floated mid air, along with flight attendants, drinks, and one unlucky passenger who had a severe hip bruise from crashing into an armrest. It happens....

I did have one instant flying a Cessna in real life and I think I lost 100 - 300 ft at the most... Not 6000 ft. This is not realistic to me.Again it is back to FS Mateo for me!Besides I want to get the FS Flight Max gauge and it works with FS Mateo.Barry

Barry,To add credibility to your posts, should you not know that it's FS mEteo..?ChasW

Thanks Chas..Correction FS Meteo... Slip of the Keys... Sorry it must be my daughter's phonics training from a few years ago sticking...:)Barry

Correction: FS Meteo... Sorry for the slip of the keys...Barry

I get radar returns in FS FlightMax with both FS_Meteo and ActiveSky wxRE on my computer.I have both programs and in my opinion ActiveSky wxRE is the better program. Now I only run FS_Meteo when I'm flying outside of North America because it has worldwide coverage of Winds Aloft; a feature that will be implemented in the next upgrade of ActiveSky wxRE.

6000ft can certainly happen.I doubt you were flying at FL350 in that Cessna, and a Cessna requires a lot less lift than an airliners...A sudden 10% drop in lift at 2500ft might be recoverable in 600ft in a Cessna, that same percentage drop at FL250 taking 10 times as muxh altitude to recover from.

Yeah I remember watching a story on the news where a Brazilia actually did a barrel roll when it lost liftr and a passenger was able to get video footage of it. The video footage wasn't all that good because they were being flipped and it was overcast outside so you really didn't see anything. But they lost a great amount of alt and the effects put them in a barrel roll which was recovered but not before a nose dive. scary stuff I'm sure.Kil~

I just want to say I like WXre for the most part. I do get a problem while flying outside the US. It seems the winds aloft are simulated and it seems no matter what direction I am flying it is either a headwind or 90deg to the side. Sometimes if it goes from the side to a headwind I get overspeed. Also I still get vectored to the wrong runway for landing. Those are my only problems but for the most part I like it. If anyone has an answer to my problems feel free to educate me. Thanks Andrew

There was a thread about this recently somewhere..someone suggested this could be caused by a difference in the reporting of two adjacent stations..sort of a virtual windshear, perhaps? JamesJ

That's 42000fpm!! :-eek Hopefully they had their seatbelts on.

In FSUIPC, did you apply any of the weather smoothing techniques? Check the shear and gradient adjustments.Now I'm not a user of that portion yet, but I did notice that various weather modifying interfaces are available on its control panel.As to real sudden drops, as a passenger in a jet airliner flying from over land to over Lake Erie, westbound in winter clear air bright sun, I experienced a severe sudden altitude drop with hardly a cloud in sight to give a clue. Coffee over the shirt routine, stewardess in somebody's lap, etc.