You are correct FS9 does not reproduce wind shear worth a flip. ::)
The worst place to be is just before a huge storm hits or collides with a sea breeze look out the wind shear can be huge and cause all kinds of problems. which is why most airports of any size at all have wind shear detectors in place. But one still has to worry about the airports without towers any pilot landing at one of them just before a storm hits is playing Russian Roulette with Five bullets, And definitely not playing with a full deck. 8-)
It models shear well enough-I find whether I've created different wind areas or I'm flying with online weather, the transition between altitudes or areas can be intense. It's not very realistic, but it's there.
But MSFS doesn't take terrain into account, which was my point about the whole local phenomenon thing regarding Pago Pago in the sim.
But of course, as it turns out, that accident had nothing to do with mechanical (terrain-induced) turbulence, so...
As for the relative sanity of pilots sneaking into airports ahead of storms, it's worth noting that the heavies fall victim to shear fairly often, even at big airports with all the bells and whistles.
The little guys flying in and out of small airports (like myself) rely more on good preflight and info-gathering and using one's "weather nose", and they tend to have a better accident record as far as shear is concerned... even light planes on IFR flights, where they're likely to encounter bad weather.
And I guess us "little guys" have smaller limits for wind, etc., so we tend to make more conservative go/no go decisions (except for the idiots, but they die off pretty quickly).
There's a tendency with high technology to trust one's own senses and "horse sense" less as one grows dependent on gizmos that are definitely not always right... that syndrome has killed a lot of airline pilots and pax. The more defenses you have, the easier it is to be complacent.
I've encountered shear in flight, and each time I was prepared and would not have been where I was if there seemed a chance it would exceed my limits. I've snuck in ahead of big systems, but always on the safer side wind-wise, always with an "out", and always looking out for any sign that things might start changing for the worse.
And never "just" ahead of a storm, that's for sure. Closest I ever came was flying a C172 VFR into KNEW, which has a tower but no wind shear detection... with a monstrous group of storm cells spewing up out of the Gulf, I got in from the north about 45 minutes before all hell broke loose. But even that far ahead of the storm's arrival, cloud bases had been dropping steadily along my route and they were clumping up... by the time I was about to enter the Class D north of the field, I was down to 2000 and picking my way among clouds, in light rain. Vis was down to 5 miles or so.
Almost decided to double back to Slidell, it was getting so bad. But there just happened to be a hole over the city, so I got in OK.
Learned a lot that day- like: that's as close as I ever want to fly to a thunderstorm.
No wind shear that time, though... just a very steady breeze out of the south.
by gary42127 » Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:33 am 
