For example, set your visibility to 1 mile (fog). The effect is pretty good if you're inside/under it. However, as you climb and increase altitude, the fog is now "under" you and somehow it only partially obscures the ground and is now almost transparent with all city/texture night lighting visible above. In real life, doesn't thick ground-level fog appear from above as a solid overcast?

It depends. Sometimes it does appear as solid overcast and sometimes it appears more transparent from above, usually depending on thickness. Remember that when you're down in it you're viewing it "edge-on" and may be looking through more of it than if viewed from on top. According to "Instrument Flying" by Robert Taylor, real instrument rated pilots have been known to have the airport in sight, cancel IFR to avoid having to fly the published approach, and then gotten down where they can't see the runway/airport due to the above effect, whereupon they've had to climb and refile to get back into the IFR system. If I recall correctly, a better way to do this is to request a (visual) contact approach. If it goes sour down low, one's still in the system.

It's messed up! Heck no, an overcast sky is not supposed to be translucent. It's ridiculous to try and make excuses for Microsoft's massive screwups with the 'improved' weather engine in FS2004. And for goodness sakes, don't anyone try and rationalize that MS has modeled some kind of complex fog layer. The MSFS2004 weather engine simply cannot model an overcast cloud layer from above. Below the overcast layer is fine in terms of realism but as soon as you climb through it you get transparent fog, it's always that way in any condition, completely unrealistic. For this reason, including the utter lack of wind and visibility transitions in MSFS2004, I'm going back to FS2002. I will happily sacrifice superficial eye candy for usuable, realistic weather which I can only get with FS2002.

I fully agree to your statement.Fog/cloud layers viewed from above are one mayor problem/bug in the FS2004 weather system.It's not a "transparent" fog but it looks more like a uniform filter laid over ground textures and this is certainly not "as real as it gets".I think this bug is so serious that it would even justify a patch (which - being realistic - will probably never come).Walter

>it than if viewed from on top. According to "Instrument>Flying" by Robert Taylor, real instrument rated pilots have>been known to have the airport in sight, cancel IFR to avoid>having to fly the published approach, and then gotten down>where they can't see the runway/airport Excellent book on IFR and I do recall reading about it. Unfortunately I don't have enough real IFR experience to judge whether FS9 does this sort of thing well.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg