Cessna 172SP Performance

[Mountain Man 142]

Sure, that's the escape method. But it breaks immersion to have to pause the flight and go into the weather menu like that.

 

Well, the other option is to simply crash which would maintain immersion but can be a bit unsatisfying, especially on a longer flight.

[Paraffin 2,197]

As far as the scenario I flew last night, and given that I handled the flight as best I could, despite not interpreting the weather in time, would a better course of action been to fly around the affected area, since my aircraft was not capable of handling the icing issue?

 

It's tricky in X-Plane, because you don't have the real-world option to divert (reverse course) and fly out of the icing conditions you've flown into, while maintaining the same altitude.

 

The way weather works in X-Plane, it's a horizontal layer centered on your plane. So if real weather injection is causing icing, those same conditions have been injected behind you, as well as in front. You can't turn around and fly out of it. All you can do is descend or climb (if you can), and hope for a change in temperature when you hit a new horizontal weather layer.

[Murmur 3,941]

It's tricky in X-Plane, because you don't have the real-world option to divert (reverse course) and fly out of the icing conditions you've flown into, while maintaining the same altitude.

 

The way weather works in X-Plane, it's a horizontal layer centered on your plane. So if real weather injection is causing icing, those same conditions have been injected behind you, as well as in front. You can't turn around and fly out of it. All you can do is descend or climb (if you can), and hope for a change in temperature when you hit a new horizontal weather layer.

 

We had the same discussion some time ago. :-) When using default X-Plane weather (real weather or not), it's not that way. You can actually do a 180 turn and get out of icing conditions, in the same way you can get out of clouds or out of a turbulence area. I don't know about 3rd party weather addons like xEnviro or RWC though.

[Jimm 437]

We had the same discussion some time ago. :-) When using default X-Plane weather (real weather or not), it's not that way. You can actually do a 180 turn and get out of icing conditions, in the same way you can get out of clouds or out of a turbulence area. I don't know about 3rd party weather addons like xEnviro or RWC though.

I had a similar thought, but opted not to respond in fear of being berated for being inexperienced.

[Paraffin 2,197]

We had the same discussion some time ago. :-) When using default X-Plane weather (real weather or not), it's not that way. You can actually do a 180 turn and get out of icing conditions, in the same way you can get out of clouds or out of a turbulence area. I don't know about 3rd party weather addons like xEnviro or RWC though.

 

Regarding that discussion -- if it's the one I remember, about thunderstorms being drawn on the weather map as discrete objects? -- are you suggesting that icing works that way? If that's what we're talking about, then I'm trying to understand how there could be a "clump" of discrete lower (or higher) temps and precip that could occur inside that horizontal layer, and that you could fly out of at the same altitude.

 

Especially because temperature is universal in X-Plane. It doesn't exist at different values horizontally or vertically in the air. It's one value, either set by the user in the weather dialog ("Temperature at Nearest Airport") or it's read from the METAR.rwx file as a result of a real weather download from the nearest airport.

 

So that only leaves us with clouds. Clouds can exist in different states at different altitude layers, and the critical one here is precipitation. Combine that with the right narrow temperature range and you might get icing (I'm not sure, but there may be some randomizing of the chance).

 

You can't escape icing by trying to fly into a different temperature zone because it's universal, but you can climb or descend into an altitude layer where the METAR says it isn't raining or snowing. You might get some variation in the degree of icing when you're flying in and out of individual clouds at the same altitude. But the only way to actually escape it, is to change your altitude into a cloud layer (or lack of clouds) where there is no precip. At least that's how I understand it. 

[Murmur 3,941]

Yes that should be about right. Basically to get out of icing conditions in X-Plane, you have to either get out of clouds/precipitation (e.g. turning back if you entered it), or get to a lower altitude until the temperature is high enough.

 

As you said, I don't think there are tridimensional temperature zones. Except those due to METARs. So I think (not 100% sure) that if you have 2 METARs with different reported temperatures, the actual temperature at a given point between them is interpolated.