Relative and absolute motion of a Piper J-3 and Piper Pacer in formation

Gang,

This video on YouTube doesn't quite make sense to me:

The camera aboard the J-3 is moving around from turbulence but the Pacer seems to be jostled around by it more. A quick check of the weights on Wikipedia would hint that the J-3 with it's two passengers would still weigh less than the Pacer. To me, it looks as if the Pacer is getting jounced all over the sky while the Cub stately flies on with little to no aileron input by the pilot. Am I tricking myself and things are the other way around in regards to the absolute motion of each a/c?

Thanks,

Sean

It looks fine to me. The Cub (not just the camera) is constantly twitching and while the Pacer does move, at one point, more than the Cub, it's not a constant thing. Keep in mind that they weren't in close formation when that happened (he closed in after that), and so they weren't always affected by exactly the same burbles.

The camera aboard the J-3 is moving around from turbulence but the Pacer seems to be jostled around by it more.

Ignore the camera movement (it's affected by the camera operator) and pay attention to the actual movement of the Cub.

the Cub stately flies on with little to no aileron input by the pilot.

There's still turbulence, just not enough that correction was needed all the time. With turbulence that mild, in real life, the aircraft may well recover from a small bump with no particular pilot input. He also could have used touches of rudder. Also, as I look at it again, there are a lot of very subtle movements of the aileron. That turbulence is very mild, and unlike some of the "turbulence" in FS, it doesn't take much movement for tiny corrections, often not much more than very slight pressure changes.

And finally, the difference in wing loading isn't enough to make a lot of difference in aircraft response to turbulence -- it's not as if it were a Bonanza or even a C-182.

Keep in mind that FS, in some ways, isn't like real life at all, and FS turbulence doesn't really mimic real turbulence, for the most part.