Departure Airport using 'wrong' runway

I just discovered something, and thought I would share it...

 

For quite a while I have noticed that when departing a controlled airport, the runway in use is very often opposite that which the weather would suggest. For example, departing KEUG over the weekend, south winds and typical crappy Oregon weather strongly suggests using the ILS to runway 16...but the controllers are using visual 34 for landing and takeoff.

 

I've wondered why this is so, even though it never became a problem; any time the tail wind was pretty strong, I always had enough runway available to not worry. Landing is not an issue, the runway in use is always reasonable based on weather.

 

I began to think that this happens because I start the flight and load the departure airport, and then start my weather. I use either FSMetar or FSrealWXlite, since the default weather no longer works. The controllers determine the runway in use BEFORE the weather has loaded, and then that runway is used regardless of the weather.

 

So I tried to start the flight, load the weather, and then restart the flight at the same departure airport. Lo and behold, the weather stays active, and now the controllers determine the 'correct' runway based on real weather.

 

Seems to work dependably, and I'm very pleased.

 

Nadlzfw

You might also find assigning a key to "Refresh AI" after the weather has loaded does the trick without a restart.

 

Best regards,

 

John

I also have experienced this runway direction thing as well.

This is what I do when I setup my flight(I also use fswlight by the way)I download the weather ,open up FsNav and check to see which departure runway I am positioned on ,if this does not correspond to the weather conditions I simply use the goto active runway option and this moves my plane to the correct runway .I may have to do this a couple of times but eventually it gets me correctly aligned.

It's very quick to do and does not mean having to reload the whole flight.

Very occasionally this doesn't work and FS9 insists on using the seemingly incorrect runway, but this is rare.

 

Cheers

Andrew

 

PS I don't use FS9s ATC service at all ,so I don't know how it would respond to this act of disobedience.

If you forget and fix the weather before starting a flight all you have to do is change the time (backwards) by one second.

What is more reliable for me is to go to World/Map and change my heading by one degree.