an undulating runway data question

[FishermanIvan 110]

21 hours ago, jpc55 said:

The first thing that pop into my mind was NOTAMs.  

Pilots don’t actually read NOTAMs, come on 🙂

[SamYeager 245]

11 hours ago, FishermanIvan said:

Pilots don’t actually read NOTAMs, come on 🙂

Leaving aside that slur on pilots I was under the impression that NOTAMs tend to be used for temporary changes/incidents whereas the gradient & undulation of a runway is pretty permanent.

[MUC1 27]

1st) in aviation we speak about runway slope (not undulating). For example you enter the "Slope" into the FMC of an B737 nothing else!

2nd) I had an 3hrs experience in an Full Motion Level D Boeing 737 Simulator at Lufthansa Training Centre and I have seen absolute no Runway Slope. It may be simulated for some difficult Airports but not for the standard ones. 

3rd) When I look at the pictures of Courchevel or Tenzing-Hillary Airport in MSFS2020, I do not understand why we talk about this topic 🤨

[Casualcas 830]

Because the negative competive sim fans need to make SOMETHING up. 

Edited February 24, 2020 by Casualcas

[jpc55 185]

17 hours ago, FishermanIvan said:

Pilots don’t actually read NOTAMs, come on 🙂

OK.

[Claviateur 789]

Sorry if this was mentioned already as I did not read every comment.

But ideally, the elevation data is based on layers.

That means the global elevation data can be one resolution coupled with a regional data with slightly better resolution, with city data with much better resolution and finally airport data with high res elevation data.

FSX had this capability, but the airports were flat by design...

For the competitor of FSX/MSFS, I edited the elevation of my airport manually to make the elevation smoother and add the missing details in the regional elevation data I generated with a 3rd party Orhtophoto scenery app.

Thanks to this 3rd party app, I could extract the airport terrain as a 3D object,edit it in a 3D app and bring it back into the mesh...

Hopefully, MSFS will allow us to refine the airfields data to make the slopes softer because now with non-flat airports, and with the simulated friction Asobo mentioned, one needs to have a smooth slope variation for an effecient ground handling and acceleration... Taxying should not be offroading either :)

Edited February 24, 2020 by Claviateur

[sightseer 895]

When I started this thread I was mostly trying to figure out what percentage of sim runways would be non flat.

There was once a golf course at the south end of KMEM 36L.  I used to sit out there and wait for jets to land.  You could see the passengers faces in the windows and then you would hear that weird swirling vortex sound and I would watch as the jet landed on the non flat 36L.  It wasn't that it had major humps or dips.  It was just that it was noticeably non flat.  

Fast forward to the beginning of this thread.

Would KMEM 36L be flat or non flat in the sim?
How many airports that have non flat runways in real life would also be non flat in the sim?

The world is full of sloped and variably sloped (aka undulating) runways.  Im hoping the data is available so that the sim is full of them.

Personally I find it hard to believe that not every concrete or asphalt runway has already been laser scanned for high resolution elevation accuracy. How this data should interact with the underlying mesh I do not know.

[Claviateur 789]

1 hour ago, sightseer said:

When I started this thread I was mostly trying to figure out what percentage of sim runways would be non flat.

There was once a golf course at the south end of KMEM 36L.  I used to sit out there and wait for jets to land.  You could see the passengers faces in the windows and then you would hear that weird swirling vortex sound and I would watch as the jet landed on the non flat 36L.  It wasn't that it had major humps or dips.  It was just that it was noticeably non flat.  

Fast forward to the beginning of this thread.

Would KMEM 36L be flat or non flat in the sim?
How many airports that have non flat runways in real life would also be non flat in the sim?

The world is full of sloped and variably sloped (aka undulating) runways.  Im hoping the data is available so that the sim is full of them.

Personally I find it hard to believe that not every concrete or asphalt runway has already been laser scanned for high resolution elevation accuracy. How this data should interact with the underlying mesh I do not know.

Slopes of the runways and taxiways at any airport in the world are part of the terrain of the airport that is part of the elevation data... 

The airport layout (taxiways, runways etc) is draped over the elevation... The 3D elements over it...

So runways do not have a special elevation data that is independant from the rest as far as I know, scenery wise...

This means if you remove the layout and the 3D of any airport, the elevation underneath is just the elevation of the land there based on the resolution of the terrain data...

FSX used to have the same concept but then we had to flatten the land for the whole airport area because FSX functional airports must be flat...

However, if higher resolution elevation data is available for a specific area, it could be combined with lower res data for any specific location.

Now did MS aquire higher res data for major international airports, and will the terrain of MSFS be a mix between average res data for the global region combined with high res data for airports, I do not know.

But if this is the case then, the higher res data will be set to fit within a specific grid long/lat and will be plugged like a puzzle piece in the rougher global elevation data.

We do this with a 3rd party tool for the competitor Simulator... Rough data downloaded automatically is coupled with a custom high res data we have downloaded or purchased for a specific area...

However, even without high res data for the airports, the global mesh/terrain data could be refined manually (as I did for my scenery), or with algorythms to make batch refinement.

This PDF document is the manual of the 3rd party tool we use to generate Ortho (Photoreal) scenery for the competitor simulator and the tool also deals with terrain generation at different layers, resolutions and zoom levels.

There are great possibilities, MSFS terrain uses the same logic:
http://download.jirikocman.cz/Manual.pdf

And here you can see the slopes of the runways following the terrain where the runway are:

Edited February 24, 2020 by Claviateur

[MatthewS 761]

2 hours ago, Claviateur said:

And here you can see the slopes of the runways following the terrain where the runway are:

Quite impressive!

[FDEdev 955]

10 hours ago, Claviateur said:

And here you can see the slopes of the runways following the terrain where the runway are:

Especially the first screenshot doesn't look realistic to me.  Do you guys realize how much load a runway surface must be able to absorb, how much soil compaction is necessary and that during construction they don't simply pour a few centimeters of concrete over the countryside?  

Any airport operators aim is of course to provide an undulated surface as much as possible for a lot of reasons. Maybe I'm wrong, but personally I've never seen such crumpled runways like in the first screenshot IRL.

[F737MAX 5,796]

1 hour ago, FDEdev said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but personally I've never seen such crumpled runways like in the first screenshot IRL.

They definitely exist!

 

EGBB:

 

EGBJ:

[FDEdev 955]

1 minute ago, F737NG said:

They definitely exist!

Erm, there's a considerable difference between crumpled and undulating. 

[Dominique_K 10,152]

17 hours ago, MUC1 said:

 

3rd) When I look at the pictures of Courchevel or Tenzing-Hillary Airport in MSFS2020, I do not understand why we talk about this topic 🤨

Because a curvature at the end or a slope is something different than a mid-course undulation. There is no little doubt (in my mind at least) after the airport video that Asobo implements the former but it looks more difficult for the latter due to available data. 

With due respect to @FDEdev’s experience  what I read these recent days over the Internet to understand the issue tends to prove that there are such runways. 

@Casualcas Again this forum is made to discuss and  being frivolous and even, Heaven forbid, wrong  sometimes. 

[FDEdev 955]

1 minute ago, domkle said:

With due respect to @FDEdev’s experience  what I read these recent days over the Internet to understand the issue tends to prove that there are such runways. 

I never wrote that such runways don't exist (and it wouldn't make sense since I've landed on a few very noticable undulated ones IRL).

Even if it's only 5%, this would mean that there are more +2000 undulated runways.

[F737MAX 5,796]

8 minutes ago, FDEdev said:

Erm, there's a considerable difference between crumpled and undulating. 

I feel this is getting into semantics. However, I would call the two runways listed above as 'crumpled' and this one below as 'undulating'.

 

EGNM:

 

Either way, this is the type of non-flat runways that people are expecting to see in MSFS.