My first almost complete and rewarding flight in MFS...

Had 2 great flights on the NEO, yesterday.

Used SimBrief for the planning, then exported the flightplans into MFS ( uses one of those clumsy folder locations ) and also imported into the FBW A320 NEO FMGC with all performance parameters read from SimBrief - great feature made available by this amazing FBW Team, and all for free !!!, less the navdata which was still from 1903 because I didn't yet buy any Navigraph subscription.

One aspect that I noticed and really like apart from the excellent ( even in low settings ) graphic experience of LPPT - EGLL with a frontal system passing bye, was the closeness of the wind and temp aloft values between MFS real weather and what had been forecast in my SimBrief OFP. Amazing !

While it isn't always the case, METAR data at departure and arrival were exact to their RW observations in this test flight.

These moments of joy with MFS alternate with some deception when, for instance, I see how ASOBO tackled the ground handling with x-wind ...They actually simply turn off the radial component up to around 8 knot ground speed.

Murmur, as usual with his trained sensorial flight dynamics analysis 🙂, went chasing for stuff and commented about the wind components he was seeing in the developer console, showing that even with a considerable wind set the only component that has a value is the axial one, the radial being zeroed. I had tested it and was able to taxi any aircraft up to around 8 knot ground speed. From there on ground physics is as bad as it was, or even worse, in X-Plane 11 before Austin implemented (*) that wind gradient solution. He made some more tests, and as we can observe, as we start increasing the taxi speed, magically the x-wind component comes to existence - not a really nice solution I must say, although it may look like it works 😕

Well it's not perfect, far from that, X-Plane s still way ahead ( IMO ) in many aspects that interest me the most like flight dynamics, at least in terms of design features because truth is I feel more like "being there" when flying even the basic default aircraft n MFS Standard than I do when using my few but top add-ns for XP, and it's not only because of the amazing scenery graphics ! Let's say I miss Plane Maker and Airfoil Maker and it would be amazing to get comparable tools for MFS...

Also, systems wise these freeware developers have already demonstrated that the platform is actually ready for complex system implementation using the tools it has built in contrarily to what I read sometime ago by some who made it look like almost impossible to use for programming complex systems ...

(*) Should add that Austin's solution to address the problems with ground operations under x-.wind is also a lot more sound since it makes a whole lot of a difference if you're flying an aircraft with a high vertical fin exposed to the wind gradient area or if you're taxiing in a small GA.... In MFS as it is right now it doesn't make a difference if you're in the Cub or in the 744... they're affected by the same "magic" regarding the crosswind component ...

Edited December 20, 20205 yr by jcomm