Hi all,
Saturday I experienced an issue with live weather: I was cruising at FL370 with the 777 over Iraq during my flight from EDDL to OMDB when the weather picked up a live METAR string with a QNH of 9954 hPA, probably a typo where it had to be 995 or 994 hPA. This ridiculous QNH made my plane instantly uncontrollable: it thought it was flying way too high and fast, with all the bells and whistles (overspeed and altitude warnings) going off at once. At first I thought the PFD and alarm system were malfunctioning, but since this did never happen before I quickly took a glance at the METAR string, reverted to manual mode and deleted the 4 in the QNH so advanced weather had a valid string to work from (after which I had a tough time recovering from the stall I got in due to the autothrottle idling to compensate the overspeed, I think the sudden movements would have caused a few dead/injured passengers IRL :p). The issue is clear I guess: a small typo in the METAR string had disastrous effects on the weather simulation.
Would it be an idea to add some kind of error checking in the weather code, so it reverts to e.g. standard weather or the last known valid weather setting when an obviously wrong QNH (e.g. lower than 900 or greater than 1150 hPA) is found? (I think I prefer the latter, as this keeps the weather consistent with what the plane was in before). Obviously not a very important feature request, it's the first time in 9 years of flying in live weather that I encountered such an issue, but it was quite frightening and I guess human mistakes might occur in the future too so I think it's not wrong to make the weather system able to deal with such issues.
Thanks already!
Kind regards,
Isaak