How Much Affect Does Wind Have On Aircraft?

[[DNKN]GoNuts4Donuts17]

I was curious to see just how much of an affect wind has on aircraft. This is only a small sample of one out of the dozens of aircraft we have in the GB series. I took the S.E.5a out with a full fuel load, four Cooper bombs and an Aldis sight just for conformity's sake. I know that cross winds will affect flight paths by pushing you off course on bombing runs and landings as I've encountered many times throughout my He-111 pilot career, however The S.E.5a manages to maintain a top speed in level flight of 127 miles per hour with either no wind, a ~55ft/s direct head wind and direct tail wind.

 

Is this something with FC still being early access and perhaps flight models aren't fully completed? I've yet to try this with any of the aircraft from the Eastern Front series' where all three games are fully completed. 

Edited June 19, 2019 by CHSims

[Nocke]

My guess would be this shows that that bar on the lower left indicates TAS, i.e. your speed relative to the wind, which should not change, just jitter perhaps with turbulences, due to inertia of the plane.

[[DNKN]GoNuts4Donuts17]

I just realized I posted this in the wrong sub-section as well ?‍♂️

[AndyJWest]

Wind in the IL-2 GB series has precisely the effect you'd expect it to. Neither the cockpit instruments nor the 'HUD' display show your groundspeed. For that, you'd have to calculate from the map, or use TacView. The 'HUD' gives IAS, as do most cockpit instruments - the exception being the Me 262, which shows TAS (or something close to it) above 400 Km/h.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

Transition from air wehicle to ground one can be dengerous in gusty cross winds. Up there turbulence can increase AA and plane can stall or in some cases Gs can go beyond plane structural limits.

[J2_Trupobaw]

Air speed is measured relative to the air, not ground. Once you take off, your plane moves with the wind at same speed as surrounding air. 

Fly some set distance (from point A to B and back) downwind then upwind, and measure times. Fly straight towards a set point with cross wind and see where you arrive.

[SeaW0lf]

I made a test with a D7 Vanilla (easy to setup) at 20m of altitude. I made one run over a course of 20km with no wind and another run with a 3m/s wind (opposite direction). I used a building (over water) to mark the start and the end of the run. I'm using a hand stopwatch, the game is offline and the graphics are on low to avoid any tipe of lag, and I have a GTX 2060 6GB (plenty to run it on high settings).

 

The results indicate that the wind is being correctly modeled. It was just two quick runs and the numbers can be more precise, but nonetheless it is indicating that the wind is there and doing its job.

 

First run: no wind, over a course of 20.000m. It took 6min19s to complete.

So we have 20.000m divided by 379 seconds, and then multiplied by 3600 (one hour), and the plane was traveling at approximately 52.8 meters per second (190km/h).

 

Second run: opposite wind of 3m/s over a course of 20.000m. It took 6min40s to complete.

So we have 20.000m divided by 400 seconds, and then multiplied by 3600 (one hour), and the plane was traveling at approximately 50 meters per second (180km/h).

 

You can see that the second run was approximately 3m/s slower. I could make a 50.000m run (or more) to round up the data, but it would take too much time.

 

So I guess we are getting the wind right.

 

Edited December 30, 2019 by SeaW0lf