I was flying this evening in a Citation X. I began my climb to FL490 but when I got to about FL310 I noticed my airspeed dropping quickly. I did the ol' shift z to discover I had a 100kt tail wind! It took forever to climb to my cruise altitude. There were times my IAS was only 135kt which at my weight was just shy of stall speed. I ended up at FL500 and to get there I could only climb 1000 feet every 5 min. After leveling off I was cruising on at mach .88. Is there a way to counteract that tail wind so the climb goes much easier?

Constant tail winds shouldn't affect the plane's performance, except that ground speed should be 100 knots higher. The plane just floats with the wind. Such strong winds (and stronger) are a constant presence in real transatlantic flights for instance, so it usually takes longer to fly one way than the other.Anyway, you shouldn't monitor IAS as a speed indication at the flight levels, but rather the Mach number, and don't expect solid perfomance at FL500.-

As Oyvind says, tailwind or headwind has no effect on the aircraft climb performance. Only on the groundspeed (and by mathematical result, the effective climb angle which has nothing to do with what you're seeing on gauges)IAS should only be monitored up to about FL25 or so, then Mach meter above that. Sounds like you've got a heavily loaded plane. No bizjet zooms straight up to 50K. They climb in stages - called `step climb` - and will only reach the highest levels as fuel burns off.Suggest a search in the forum on step climb. Much useful informationAllcott

There could be another aspect you aren't considering:As said, the a constant tailwind will not have a direct result on your actual aerodynamic performance. If you were within weight limitations, there should not be a problem to achieve those higher levels.However: if the tailwind increased suddenly (which is pretty unrealistic), and your airspeed dropped, the following happens: your induced drag (drag which increases as speed decreases) will play a very big role and you could end up "behind the power curve"! At that point, you need much more thrust simply to maintain level flight and climbing or accelerating might become impossible! So what can you do? Descend a little bit to increase speed! Once you have regained your lost speed, you should be able to climb to your intended cruising level.Regards,Mark

By any chance, were you using ActiveSky V Enhanced and have installed the latest FSUIPC (3.51)? Some users, myself included, have seen similar problems with rapidly changing winds affecting IAS with this combination. Peter Dawson has issued a couple of test versions of FSUIPC (3.511 and 3.512) that correct this issue. You may want to check this out at the ActiveSky Support Forum here on AVSIM.Dale

The tailwind issue you describe is a well-known bug between windows xp, FS9, your video driver and system hardware. It's not described on the Microsoft knowledge base nor is it discussed on the AVSIM forums because the problem is just so deep seated. To resolve this problem, you will have to entirely delete everything on your hard drive, then open up and reset all of the memory modules, low-level reformat, and reinstall everything. Unfortunately the bug has to do with the computer clock, too, so if all of these tasks aren't done within a six hour time span then FS9 gets locked out. Good luck.

>The tailwind issue you describe is a well-known bug between>windows xp, FS9, your video driver and system hardware. It's>not described on the Microsoft knowledge base nor is it>discussed on the AVSIM forums because the problem is just so>deep seated. To resolve this problem, you will have to>entirely delete everything on your hard drive, then open up>and reset all of the memory modules, low-level reformat, and>reinstall everything. Unfortunately the bug has to do with>the computer clock, too, so if all of these tasks aren't done>within a six hour time span then FS9 gets locked out. Good>luck.While humorous, some people may actually not know any better and try this. Please don't post such absurd suggestions to cause someone a lot of grief.

Or at least put a bloody smiley in there, somewhere! :D :D :DAllcott

That was not a serious recommendation?? I just finished refor... uh... oh boy...Whoops.

lolYou guys are cracking me up this morning! Thanks for the wakeup humor. ;-)

Forget about indicated airspeed and look at groundspeed. A tailwind is a good thing :) Groundspeed is shown on the default GPS and on other gauges as well. I can't remember exactly where in the Citation it is shown.

Thanks for all the help(most of you). I'm an Electrical Engineering student so I've had a lot of physics and I didnt think that the tail wind could be a hinderance to the climb. Thanks for confirming that. I think what it was was I was not practicing the step climb. The way I got up to FL500 is I had to descend out of FL390 for FL360 and pickup speed. After that I simply climbed in 1000ft increments every 5 min or so. I'll definately look up the step climb and try to learn something! Thanks!

Getting into a 100Kt tailwind would not have any effect on your IAS provided its gradual.If you are climbing into a Jet stream and you go from 10kts tail wind to all of a sudden 110kt tail wind.. your indicated airspeed is going to drop by 100kts and you would stall.