Questions about Wind -

[Ace_Chaplan]

I was flying Mikko Maliniemi's awesome pitts2-s Bulldog around the hawaiian islands and was flying into the wind, but the wind speed was so high I was hovering in mid-air! My ground speed was close to zero but my airspeed was about 70knots.

Can this really happen?

Also I noticed when you press shift-z it shows wind info and I am not quite sure how to read it.
For example:
If it says 132/44, I assume the first number is direction and the second is speed.
Is the direction indicating where the wind is coming from or the direction it is going?
I assume the speed is in knots, but when I load weather the wind will say something like 7 knots but the wind speed can actually be closer to 30-40 knots according to the shift-z wind info.
Is the shift-z wind speed relative to your airspeed? Is it right?

I'm not sure I get it so perhaps and expert can help me out here, thanks!

[jthomas]

yes it can! I was at an airshow where they had an old WW2 vintage Feisler Storch (which has a stall speed of 20 knots). Lo and behold, the wind was blowing at around 25 knots and the Storch took off, hovered and landed like a helicopter! Not bad I guess.

[Flying_Turnip]

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Apr-14-02 AT 08:08PM (EDT)[/font][p]Theoretically (Oh no, he's getting theoretical! Run!) this can happen, though I've never seen it before.

You think reading the wind data is difficult!?! You've obviously never seen a METAR Weather Data report. Anyway, your assumption is correct (144/44) would mean winds a 'coming from' a HDG of 144' and the Speed (Kts) is 44.

The thing with winds is, teh higher you get, the faster the winds getts because there is absolutly nothing getting in it's way, which is way ground spped would be about 7 knots like you siad becasue there are hills and buildings and trees getting in the way. It's not very freequent and if you play with FS2002's winds settings you should be able to clean up the amount of times this happens. I've only ever experienced it twice. The best thing you could do if you encounter it would be to either fly with the wind (That'll give you a great Ground SPD) or clime higher than the wind layer).

Fly Safe,

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...92578a81e7.jpg

P.S. I also havbe the Bulldog, what a marvalous aircraft! Best download I've got so far!..well, most fun anyway:-)

[Ace_Chaplan]

Thanks guys!

The bulldog is indeed a jewel, but a real bitch to land unless I climb out over the engine cowling!

[Magdrop]

I remember many years ago flying a brand new Cessna 150 from the factory in France to the UK. The headwinds were so strong that while crossing the English Channel we were overtaken by a ferry.

[Yarddart152]

Me and my flight instructor use to try to get the plane to hover sometimes just to do something different when i was working on my instrument rating. We'd call up flight service when we were just doing basic IFR work and ask what the winds aloft were and we'd experiment to see how slow we could get the ground speed. There was a ole crusty VFR loran in the 172 I use to fly all the time, and we'd watch the groundspeed on it. We'd just go into slow flight and the slowest I could ever get was down to about 5 knots groundspeed on a fairly windy day. but it is possible to actually fly backwards if ya get up into the higher winds aloft, or if you are flying in a hurricane or something ;-).