Although this post is really about gliding, It should be pointed out that the
topic of Ridge lift also affects a lot of other G.A traffic who are required
to maintain level flight in order to comply with Quadrantal rules. There is an
error in the performance of air deflected up hill and mountain ridges (Ridge
Lift - not to be confused with thermal updrafts). . The ridge lift extends to
a much greater altitude than reality (e.g. the ~2200 foot Appalachian ridges
wind 20 knots would not have workable ridge lift above 3500 feet. If a GA
pilot continues to encounter lift above this height it is going to affect
their fuel consumption and how he has to trim the aircraft to avoid an
increase in altitude, whilst for a glider pilot in the above scenario, at 3500
feet you’re now in zero lift drifting rapidly downwind with a howling 25 knot
crosswind, so it’s near impossible to make any upwind jump you were trying to
set up with the increased altitude - the MSFS error makes it relatively benign
compared to that. As a general “rule of thumb” (based on the experience of
many Real World Pilots) a realistic “Top Out” height for ridge lift would be
300 - 350 Ft above the ridge top per 5Kts of wind speed. Ian Lewis (B21) from
Cambridge University wrote this very interesting paper back in the days of
FSX. Whilst it was based on what could be achieved with SimConnect, modelling
the proposed solution directly into the sim’s core weather engine would be the
ideal. Since you are about to release and support gliders in the upcoming
November update, I think it is fair to say that Realistic Thermals with
unrealistic Ridge Lift - and Vice Versa - would not be the best of beginnings
for gliding in MSFS [https://xp-
soaring.github.io/.../sim.../sim_probe_paper.html](https://xp-
soaring.github.io/fsx/dev/sim_probe/sim_probe_paper.html?fbclid=IwAR18l8iU_g1xFQqTCooF-4rk00phkbAFUo0mypMnG677_D3ueAKF5pioeGg)
Hello @FF403 Your feedback will be reviewed by our core simulation programmers
for SU12. Regards, Sylvain