Cruising north along the Jersey shore in my V35B using REX real world weather - mostly clear skies and calm to little wind. I'm maybe 10-15kts below the yellow arc on my airspeed indicator, trimmed out at 1,500 and just enjoying the flight, one hand on the yoke... suddenly I start to bump and rattle, and I sit up and grab the yoke to keep her steady, not overly concerned for a bit of turbulence. A second later I get a big jolt and my nose pitches way up and I'm like "crap this is serious" and I reach out - just as I grab my throttle lever to yank it to idle my nose drops, jerks back up and FSX determines my aircraft has been overstressed I was loaded up heavy with full tanks too, can't believe I was pushed around that much.

 

I'm betting this is A2A Accu-Feel's "clear air turbulence", which I have set to the default 50 for all three turbulence settings. Now the question I have is should I dampen down the turbulence setting so I still get rocked around but not enough to destroy my airframe, or should I not have been cruising that close to the yellow line? Although right there is the 160kts cruise speed for the plane.

 

A very disappointing end to a good flight :(

I've had similar experiences with Accu-Feel's turbulence setting.  Ended up ripping the wings off of a C208B.  I keep it turned down to about 10%.  Turbulence and winds aloft seems to have always been a bit of a problem with the MicroSoft flight sim series.

I've found the FSX setting for airframe stress to be way too sensitive. There have been times I hit turbulence and before I can do anything the sim goes belly up. I've turned it off.

Well I kept the clear air turbulence at 50 for normal occurrence rates but toned down the properties of the turbulence itself to 25. Made it through my 4hr flight okay - hopefully this'll let me be bounced around a bit every now and then without being destroyed (at least not within 3-4 seconds!)

Or can you change the max_indicated_speed in the reference speeds in the aircraft.cfg?

 

[Reference Speeds]
flaps_up_stall_speed    = 53.0                  //Knots True (KTAS)
full_flaps_stall_speed  = 48.0                  //Knots True (KTAS)
cruise_speed            = 115.0                 //Knots True (KTAS)
max_indicated_speed     = 163                   //Red line (KIAS)

 

Increasing the number should reduce the level at which FSX rips apart your aircraft (I think, I can't remember if this is the right param or not but I think it is). I think the only other thing that affects is the overspeed warning which a C172 wouldn't have anyway.