There have been some service updates to ASA with one recent or soon to be. Check out the Hifisim support forum here on AVSIM.Are you experiencing wind gusts with a significant crosswind on approach? Are you merging with the localizer at 45 degrees or more? I adjust with MCP heading the merge myself engaging APP when nearly on the localizer after having steered to the inbound heading. This reduces s-turns. I just read that some r/w aircraft have this problem on LLZ merges of more than 35 degrees.Can incorrect yaw damper operation cause this? I don't recall if on LLZ they function in the off mode or at any stage. I'd have to go back to the AOM.

I have the service update beta b431, as well as the ini tweaks to fsuipc and fsx.cfg files

413X3,You might consider getting REX (RealEnvironmentXtreme). In the 8 months that this has been on the market, there has not been one single post in the forums about this problem. I have flown the PMDG 747 all voer the world using the REX Weather engine and rarely if ever encounter this problem. I have seen it with the FSX real world weather engine however. The problem comes from I call the 'flickering" or "oscillating" winds that FSX produces. The 'flickering" winds is characterized by this: winds from one direction and strength followed by a brief burst from another direction and at another strength, repeating over and over again, sometims for hours on end. For example...290 at 9 kts for 0.9 seconds and 320 at 30 kts for 0.1 seconds over and over again, sometimes for hours. Often the pressure, temperature, and engine thrust flicker as well. If this is a crosswind situation, the PMDG cannot figure out what is going on and both the autothrottle and AP basically freak out. The speed starts to drop, usually, and the aircraft wonders back and forth across the course line. "Oscillation" is the where the wind direction and speed are oscillating very fast up and down within about a 10-15 degree range and 10-15 kt range. This oscillation is typically so fast it is difficult to read the actual speed, We are talking about changes many times a second. Again, if this is a crosswind, the PMDG, any aircraft actually, has a lot of trouble. In all fairness to PMDG, I have seen all my aircraft, payware as well as default, suffer to one degree or another from these issues with the FSX weather engine, not just PMDG's. Probably the more sophisticated the AP system modeling is, the more susceptible it will be to these kind of wind issues.The reason you don't see any posts in the REX forum about this is that these two problems are pretty well dealt with by the REX weather engine. In fact, in my near 500-1000 hours using this engine I rarely see this happen (although I do see it every once in awhile), whereas I see it on every single flight with the FSX weather engine. The REX weather engine is not perfect and as of today, still has wind shift issues where the wind changes suddenly, but the PMDG handles these well. There is a version 2 on the way soon which may be even better. Even these seem less with the REX weather engine.I should also add that I have been told by those that know that these wind issues are the result of very badly written FSX Simconnect coding, which all third party environment developers, including HiFiSim and REX, must use to interface with FSX and no one yet has figured out how to effectively deal with it. Pete Dawson of FSUIPC has come as close as anyone but even his solution is not the Holy Grail eveyone is looking for. The real solution probably is for someone to rewrite the Simconnect code. This, however, is a major undertaking and not likely to happen.Good luck, and you are not alone. I have struggled with these wind issues for a long time and nothing is more frustrating than having these wind problems but the REX engine seems to at least make them tolerable. I do not use ASX or ASA so I cannot comment on them other than to say the HiFi forum and PMDG forum are full of posts about this wind issue with the PMDG 747 and MD-11.Anyways, this has been my experience as an FSX user.

Bill, thanks for one of the best explanations of the problem I've read. I think FSUIPC bypasses simconnect in part of the wind smoothing process, but as you say it isn't able to completely mitigate the microslopiness. I'm ready to get REX but when I asked them about Vista64 compatibility their response was to tell me I needed to be a customer to get customer support. This turned me away... do you know this answer? Also, I notice simconnect has a tendency to slowly shift a prevailing westerly jet stream from out of the west around the compass to an opposite wind and flying from MEM to EWR I always end up with a jet blowing from either the NE or NS... does REX fix that?

I second Dan, great post, Bill. I have ASA with the new beta update couple with a registered version of FSUIPC with the wind limited to 8 seconds per 1 degree wind change. I haven't had a problem with the wind shift since. Occasionally I still have rapid pressure changes even with the limit through FSUIPC, which becomes a problem while flying at standard pressure setting and the plane constantly having to increase or decrease 20'-100'. Either way, it's a pretty rare problem.

I had this exact same issue yesterday flying from EDDT to EGLL using REX and the MD-11 and experienced the same type of issue flying the 747 from KSEA to KFCA. I did deviate slightly from the FMC programmed airspeed by adjusting from mach .820 to mach .840 in the FMC on the European flight. Both flights were at FL280. It is however almost a certainty if I use the "real weather updates" from FSX vs using the REX weather engine. At least with REX, it doesn't seem to occur as often.

FSUIPC SETTING?Reading the posts above, I decided to buy the registred edition.Now I am at the point off filling in the settings in fsuipc. ButI wasn't aware of the huge amount of settings.Is someone who uses ASA + FSX + PMDG MD11 willing to tell me what the best settings are regarding the weather settings? (there are 3 different fields reagarding weather with several options, I found out)Regards,GoofEHVK

Thanks Bill, but wind shifts are a thing of the past for the most part with ASA. the issue it has with the pmdg airplanes is turbulence only. and only with pmdg airplanes. so something in the way pmdg circumvents the fsx flight model probably gives this bad effect of loss of control with sudden turbulence

Thank you for your comments. I want to assure you that REX works fine with Vista64, at least according to the many users that are using this system and have reported on it, including some beta testers that actually use this OS. Many users are using it and report no problems. That is not to say that some users don't have difficulties, but these tend to be either user error, system specific issues, or small setup bugs with the program that probably will be ironed out with REX2.0, most, if not all of which have workarounds currently. There is even a REX W7 subforum, although not W7 is not officially supported yet, where users report that the program seems to works fine. I myself don't have have Vista or W7. I would sugest that you head on over to the REX forums and have a look, then decide for yourself if it works with Vista64. If you do have problems, it seems that the customer support is prompt and effective for the most part. The support issue you referred to has to do with piracy and people getting support that don't even own the program (if you posted in the support part of the forum, that is). If you posted that question in the discussion part of the forum, it is likely that users would have responded. Or better yet, just do a search.As far as wind directions go, I have not seen unusual wind patterns like going across the Atlantic and having easterly winds or things like that as a general rule. I don't know specifically about the flight you mention above. I can say that when I have encountered what I thought were funky winds, like northerly or northeasterly winds just offshore of Canada when on an eastbound crossing over the Atlantic, a quick check of the weather maps show a low right there and so those winds are, in fact, most likely correct for that area. Flying further over the Atlantic a little further past this area and the expected westerly winds return for the duration of the flight. I also generally have the expected winds aloft when crossing the US. I can't say that I cross check the winds I see with official sources for every flight I do, but I haven't been struck by what I thought were utterly unrealistic winds. Anyways, I just deal with what I get. This is a $40 simulation after all and I don't expect a $40 program to a be perfect simulation of what are in fact very complex processes going on in the winds aloft over the entire planet. Don't forget, you have aloft wind speed and temperatures to deal with as well and these are just as complex as the wind direction. If you want these to be perfect, I'm sure the Weather Channel or NASA or NOAA has a great program they could sell you for $10,000 or more that would do a much better job, although still probably not perfect. What I do expect for $40 is that the winds I do get to be generally correct, add to my sense of realism when flying, be easy to use, and not have the program itself render my aircraft consistently unflyable. This I get with REX.I want to reitereate here that REX is not perfect and you will have wind issues of some kind in all likelihood, including some of the things that I outlined above every once in awhile for who knows what reason and they are frustrating for sure. However, these wind issues that I have had do not seem to significantly impact the flyability of the PMDG 747 and certainly are not frequent enough to generate the kind of hoo ha seen here, as so elegantly captured by the original poster's thread title, and in the HiFi and other forums regarding this aircraft. I don't have the MD-11 as we don't fly that aircraft at united-virtual.com but I have to imagine it is the same. If there are issues with REX and these aircraft, there have been essentially no comments at all in the REX forums about this issue, even though many REX users fly these two aircraft as well as many other kinds of jets based on the number of screenshots I have seen in the screenshot forum. This is about as honest an assessment as I know how to say.I have been working very closely with the developers to try and make sure that they know about these wind issues as well as wind speed and temperature aloft and understand the consequences of them to us users. I can assure you that they are doing everything they can to mitigate them even more than they already have. If these issues are solvable by outside developers, and they may not be, we should see the results in the next version of REX, REX 2.0, which is a free upgrade for 1.0 users by the way. I have been flying the REX2.0 beta for some time now and the one thing that I am sure I am allowed to say is that many things are improved over 1.0, in particular, the weather updates now gradually load into your sim almost seamlessly rather than freezing your sim for 4-5 minutes. REX2.0 is not out yet as it is still in beta testing, mainly as the developers make sure that they have exhausted every possible solution to these remaining wind issues. If they can't figure this out, then it is likely it is just not going to be completely solvable from outside ACES and we are just going to have to live with it until ACES gets their act together.What I can say though, as an REX user, is that along with the weather engine, at the least you will get some very amazing environment textures if nothing else and for many people these textures alone have been worth the cost of admission. I have to agree with that sentiment. REX does work with any other weather engine that you want to use, so those of you that have the AS engine already can easily compare and contrast these two engines along with the FSX weather engine and choose the engine that works best for you and the way you fly while at the same time still having the great REX clouds, sky and environment textures.By the way, I want to also say that I do not have, nor have I ever had registered FSUIPC in use so that my comments about REX and PMDG are not impacted by that. This is something that I haven't needed, have thought about but just haven't gotten around to spending the $40 necessary to test this out. I have no idea how these two programs work together but maybe the combination is the cat's meow. Maybe some other users that have tried this can comment on that. Based on the comments I have seen from AS users though, it doesn't seem all that encouraging.EDIT: I have now just seen a number of other posts appear before this one after posting this one while responding to Dan. My apologies for things said again. I was not talking about wind shifts per say, which most aircraft seem to handle reasonably well, but with what people often call "turbulence" for want of a better term. The two terms I was talking about above that I think cause this "turbulence", "oscillation" and "flickering", I see with the FSX weather engine all the time and immediately cause the PMDG 747 to start wandering all over the course line and cause other problems with the autopilot...still. This seems to be the same problem AS users are reporting with the PMDG747. But most of my payware aircraft have a problem with this. I was flying my LDS 767 back from Europe to the US using the FSX real weather and about halfway across the Atlantic encountered bad flickering and the LDS 767 had a real hard time. The Wilco 737, while using the FSX weather engine, could not maintain proper air speed while on autopilot when I encountered bad "oscillation" at cruise while over South Africa nor could it properly maintain course when I encountered a particularly nasty incarnation of the flickers half an hour later. The PMDG does seem a little more sensitive to these issues than other aircraft, but they all seem to suffer from it to one degree or another. I can't imagine that this has anything to do with PMDG "circumventing the flight model", whatever that means, but the way the PMDG and other model's AP systems try to respond to these rapid changes in the data within the local wind field. Look at it this way...imagine you ask me a straight forward yes or no question that you need the answer to like right now and I respond with yes, yes, NO, no, maybe, YES, yes, yes, no, MAYBE, etc. three times a second for the next half hour, only two out of three answers you can actually hear. What is the answer? Yes? No? maybe? the average? the one said most often? the one said loudest? what about the ones you missed hearing? Is whatever you think the answer might be actually changing over the half hour it took to give it to you? This is what the autopilot has to deal with and the results are...well... kind of what you might expect...turbulent. AS and REX each have their own way of dealing with it and I was simply saying that this "turbulence" issue as it relates to the PMDG 747 is not that big of an issue with REX. This is why no one is 'begging" PMDG to fix issues with the REX weather engine......yet.Either that or what you in the original post, Dan, and all the other AS users are (were) talking about is a completely different problem from what I am talking about. In which case, I wish you the best of luck in solving it and thank God I don't have it. :(

I am on a vista 64 system and REX works like a champ. REX is worth the purchase and frankly the best FSX money I have EVER spent. Keep in mind that with Vista and the strange user permissions issues that sometimes come up( I am a local administrator on my host but I still install everything by right clicking on the app and selecting "Run as administrator") that you may spend time trying to work through those. Then again, 9 times out of 10 it installs fine for vista users. The guys who developed REX have always been available on their forums and in some cases they have given their IM information to people so they could help them through the issues. Also they are very responsive.

Guys, I don't know the answer - I know Vangelis and Damian from HiFi were talking at one point about the issue, but I don't know what came of it. I'll try to research it and post back...

Thanks, Ryan. Looking forward to read what you found out. Phil

Ok guys, Here's what Vangelis says is the best way to attempt mitigate the issue. (this requires registered FSUIPC)Active Sky Advanced is currently just triggering FSX's default turbulence modeling - Vangelis says it's extremely unrealistic and results in regular + or - 2.0+g acceleration excursions in all directions. These are what mess up the autopilot (as they would on a real aircraft) and there's nothing inherently wrong in our aircraft's coding. APs aren't designed to deal with that kind of extreme turbulence. Most actual turbulence you experience in a real airline flight is nowhere near 2g.So, the way to try to fix it is this:1. In your FSX.cfg WEATHER section, set the variable TurbulenceScale=1.000000 to 0.5000002. In ASA Options/Wind Options, check Enable Direct Wind Control and Smoothing3. In a registered FSUIPC.ini, set the variables TurbulenceRate=0.5,2.5 and TurbulenceDivisor=50,50,100,100Try that and see if this solves or lessens the issue for you guys.There may be a more permanent solution to this in the future, Vangelis offered to help program a realistic turbulence simulation into ASA but scheduling hasn't created time for it to happen yet.That's all we know at this point - FSX unfortunately screwed the pooch as far as turbulence and wind/pressure shifts go.

Thanks Ryan - will give it a try when I get back from my vacation and let you know how I make out.Mike

I'll give that a try in their next release as DWC at in beta431 gives winds aloft as surface conditions at the moment lolI don't use DWC for that very reason at the moment but will next release.Just hope I can find the options in FSUIPC.... Shame really as it works well in fs9 but then less complex and loads more info and time to sort it out.John Ellison

Ryan & Vangelis:Many thanks for your response. Is there any chance that that info could be stickied? I have not yet tried it but shall give it a go on my next PMDG Outing, and if if it does work, then I am sure it is something that might require revisiting from time to time by many of us. Kudos also to Vangelis for offering his assistance to HiFi. Hopefully he will find the time soon.CheersPaul