A320 family climb performance issue with tailwinds

1st Official Post

    Hi IPACS team and everyone,

    I've been doing some test flights across the entire A320 family in Aerofly FS Global (A319, A320neo, A321, and the new A321XLR) and I’ve run into a really weird performance issue during high-altitude climbs that seems to be directly tied to wind direction.

    If I climb to cruise altitude with a constant, flat headwind, everything works perfectly. The aircraft climbs smoothly and manages to reach FL360 or FL370 without any major speed decay. However, if I set a constant tailwind of the same speed and try to do the exact same climb with the same weight and temperature, the climb performance completely falls apart. The aircraft struggles heavily to maintain its speed, the IAS decays, and the autopilot often gets stuck around FL330 or FL340, unable to climb any further. Sometimes it even drops so much speed that it triggers Alpha Floor if I don't manually intervene. This shouldn't be happening from an aerodynamic standpoint. In real-world physics, as long as the wind is steady and there are no gradients or shear, the wind direction only affects our ground speed. Once the aircraft is stabilized in the air mass, the rate of climb and indicated airspeed should remain exactly the same whether it's a headwind or a tailwind. It really feels like the physics engine or the autopilot's autothrust/climb logic in the sim is somehow referencing Ground Speed or ground-track vectors to calculate the excess thrust needed for the climb, instead of strictly using IAS/TAS and air density. This bug seems to be systematically penalizing all the A320 variants whenever we fly with a tailwind at high altitudes. Has anyone else noticed this behavior during their cruise climbs? Devs, could you please take a look at how the wind vector interactions are calculated for high-altitude climbs?

    Thanks!

    Edited once, last by poyraz_tr51 (June 22, 2026 at 3:55 PM).

  • Go to Best Answer

  • poyraz_tr51 June 22, 2026 at 4:57 PM

    Selected a post as the best answer.

    Hi, I’m still quite new to Aerofly. One of the first things I noticed is that with the A320F and B737 variants, climb performance drops off drastically above roughly 10,000 ft, even at very low gross weights. For instance, with an A320 at a gross weight of 58t, it was barely possible to maintain a climb rate of 900 - 1,000 ft/min above 15,000 ft—whether in Managed or Open Climb mode. Normally, at that weight, you would switch to V/S MODE 2,000 ft before reaching your TOC (e.g., FL320) to reduce the climb rate to 1,000 ft/min to avoid triggering TCAS alarms for other airspace users. As soon as the wind is set to "calm," everything works normally; the aircraft climbs steadily to cruising altitude with expected normal climb performance.

    Beste Grüße.....Dirk