Hi All,One of the best aviation reads ever will always be Ernest Gann's "Fate Is The Hunter". One particular passage describes his flying through "canyons" of clouds one late summer evening through the Hudson Valley of New York on his airmail route. Very similar to what I saw tonight looking northeast towards KSWF. Has anyone run across clouds or textures that do a good job of simulating towering CU's? We're talking cumulonimbus reaching 25+K feet or more in height and having that bubbly look to them, not just a straight up and blowoff. Being a meteorologist, I naturally care much about the look of the atmosphere. I understand what all the weather programs do in FS9 or FSX, but I'm more interested in that look that I described. Currently running FS9 but would consider adding FSX if I can get that look.Thanks in advance for some feedback.

For the weather, Active Sky. And for the clouds try "FS Elemental". It look something like this: That's me on FL310.

FS Elemental has a fair stab at that sort of thing for FS9. Here are some screengrabs I took a while back of an Air Hauler flight where I could not climb over a thunderstorm in a DC-3 and had to go through it (the cargo was quite badly damaged during the flight). The clouds are FS Elemental and the weather was a real world weather download via FS, with the location being between Moscow and Archangel. On the second to last picture you can see the kind of control inputs I was having to make just to try and keep the thing level, which gives you some idea how rough it was getting:The last picture is when I finally saw a gap in the weather and that's me turning to toward it to make a dash for that break. This was after a wild ride that lasted a long time over about 150 miles where the gyropilot was completely unable to cope and I had to hand fly it all the way. The storm developed rapidly and was a surprise since the pre-flight weather report had been relatively calm, but I later checked the weather after landing and estimated the cloud tops were hitting about 28,000 feet, so there would have been no way my DC-3 could have got above them. I gave up trying to climb above them when I saw there was no way over them at about 14,000 feet and I dropped back down to around 12,000 feet to give the engines a bit better chance, since the cargo load was quite heavy. It was one of the most enjoyable and exciting (if hard) flights I've ever had in FS (hence why I took some shots of it).This flight is actually the very one which prompted me to buy the Captain Sim Weather Radar add-on, as something like that might have helped me find a way out of this storm if I would have had it at the time!Al

that is cool! I think I will force some stormy weather and see what it looks like. ...I'm wondering now what some of those equator or mid-west storms will look like. :(

That's pretty nifty Alan...did you do that livery yourself too?Mark

Yup, actually it was a pretty simple repaint and is more or less a recolouring job on the default blue DC-3 paint with a few minor tweaks here and there. That's for my Air Hauler cargo company; I usually end up painting all the things in my virtual hangar that way as I quite like that mad purple colour :-)Al