Is it just me, or is the midwest weather really crappy this year?

After almost 15 years flying for SPA, I thought I had learned how to land anything from a Piper Cub to a B747. This summer I have been flying the Feel There ERJ-145 and the Just Flight A318 into and out of KMSP on the Econ Hub Flights. Everything seems to be working OK, except it seems I can't hold the glideslope <strong>and</strong> Vref on the final approach. As a result, I'm either in danger of landing short, or I'm spooling up as I cross the threshold and then I have to descend rapidly to get the bird down, often stalling it onto the runway and getting a high vertical velocity on landing ("LAND FPM"). In the case of the ERJ-145, which has no auto-throttle, I find myself spooling the engines up and down trying to catch rapid changes in airspeed apparently due to wind gusts. In the case of the A318, which does have an auto-throttle, I find that, though the auto-throttle holds Vref, the aircraft falls below the glideslope approaching the runway and I have to turn off the auto-throttle and spool up the engines to avoid landing short. Maybe this just shows why commercial pilots are required to retire about 15 years below my age, but maybe it's something else.

Recently, I completed six flights as a passenger in regional jets (CRJ-700, B738, A319), Palm Springs - Phoenix - Albuquerque - DFW - San Antonio - DFW - Palm Springs. In almost every one of these cases, we experienced substantial air turbulence on descent from cruising altitude and the pilot put the aircraft down really hard and then had to go to full reverse thrust and hard braking to get the aircraft stopped. Maybe these observations show that there has been a lot of low altitude air turbulence in the southwest this summer and the pilots are opting to come in well above Vref, slam the plane down and then brake hard. I'm using "real weather" (Active Sky Next for FSX). Could it be that it is faithfully reproducing the real conditions this summer and that is causing my difficulties?

Has anyone else had similar problems?

Mike<br /><br /><!-- editby --><br /><br /><em>edited by: Westcoast, Aug 28, 2019 - 06:40 PM</em><!-- end editby -->

I haven't been flying the local routes for a while, and when I did I think I was flying Virtualcol planes that sometimes seem to have their own control problems following ILS. I did just test out my new Citation S550 from MSP to DLH, but I arrived in a passing thunderstorm and bounced around enough in that small jet to get a PAX penalty in Econ. I kept my approach speed a bit higher due to the weather, and other than the bouncing about, the plane held the ILS nicely considering the conditions I thought.

I've fiddled with the ASN settings a bit when I first set up Econ mode I think to mitigate the PAX penalty with the routine wind gusts - or it might have been FSUIPC or a combination of both. I'm not sure how ASN translates active weather to the sim, but it seems to paint with a pretty wide brush around the different weather stations.

I'll have to give some local flights another shot here with my various planes, but I'll have to relearn how to fly most of them again.

Thanks for the suggestions Bob. Adjusting FSUIPC and/or ASM are both good ideas. However, the focus of my observations and question were slightly different. I have been flying with the same set of FSUIPC and ASM settings for some time now (several years) without, until recently, experiencing this particular problem. Yes, I've experienced some turbulence which caused my passengers sufficient concern to get me docked by our Econ model, and yes I've had problems holding the centerline in strong crosswinds. But, I have generally been able to pull off a nominal ILS approach without serious difficulty. If this particular problem is caused by rapid variations in the headwind (as I suspect it probably is), then there is no doubt that I can fix it by adjusting the weather input to the sim. That isn't quite my point. Instead, I'm wondering if the weather really is particularly turbulent this summer and that my "flight" experiences are reflecting a real issue currently being experienced in RW aviation. If that is the case, then I ought to be trying to develop the skills to overcome it, rather than just suppressing it.

I suppose that the only way to answer this question will be to repeat a particular problematic flight before and after making adjustments to ASN. But, even if that resolves the problem, I still can't be sure which flight reflected the RW conditions.