RealTurb CAT Areas Global: named after the one thing it stopped simulating

A simmer called longhaul747 wrote the two most useful sentences about RealTurb on AVSIM, and they contradict each other. He flew into Las Vegas several times over a hot summer, expecting the thermals to make it a rough ride, and it was "silky smooth". Then he flew into Jackson Hole and the turbulence was so violent he nearly abandoned the approach: "I thought I was going to break the wings off the E175."

Same add-on. Same settings. Same few weeks.

That is not a bug. It is the product working exactly as designed, and understanding why is the whole review. RealTurb generates turbulence from three things and only three things: shifts in the simulator's own wind field, wind blowing off terrain, and the density of cloud you fly into. Jackson Hole is a bowl in the Rockies — terrain and wind, so it delivers. A baking Nevada afternoon is convective heating, which RealTurb does not model at all, so it delivers nothing.

Which brings us to the name. This product is called CAT Areas Global — clear air turbulence areas — and version 2 explicitly stopped using them. The developer's own description says so: enroute turbulence "is not linked and limited to SIGMET's CAT or TS areas in this version 2". Instead it reads the wind at your aircraft and looks for gradients. That was a deliberate and defensible change, made to escape the coverage limits of forecast areas. It also means the software cannot produce turbulence the simulator's weather does not already imply — which is why, on 8 May 2026, a user flew a jet stream over the United States with a 155-knot headwind and severe turbulence forecast on the charts, and reported: "I didn't get a single bump the entire time."

We read eleven sources for this review: the store listing and all its review text, the developer's Facebook page — which is his only public channel — a 117-reply AVSIM thread running from December 2023 to May 2026, a PMDG forum thread in which PMDG's own staff argue about it, two trade write-ups, two videos and the product manual.

What you are actually buying

A small background application that injects turbulence into Microsoft Flight Simulator and gets out of the way.

Price	€11.99
Demo	Fully functional, 10 days
Released	Listed 18 December 2023
Current version	2.1.0, announced 22 April 2026
Simulators	MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024
Size	18 MB
Upgrade from v1	Free

Three independent turbulence sources, each with its own pitch and roll scalar adjustable from 20% to 150% and its own minimum altitude: enroute (from wind shifts and speed at your position), terrain (wind blowing off high ground, which extends the effects down to approach altitudes) and in-cloud (scaled by cloud density, so thin cloud does nothing). There are custom turbulence sounds tied to your aircraft's G-load, with configurable thresholds for "lighter" and "heavier" turbulence, and you can save the whole parameter set per aircraft.

One correction worth making before anything else. The most visible negative review on simMarket, from 21 June 2025, reads: "seems outdated, buggy, not working with new fs2020 or 2024 version. There is no update since 2023!!!" That is wrong, and it was wrong when it was written. The 18 December 2023 date on the listing is when the product was listed, not when it was last touched. An MSFS 2024 compatibility build was reported on AVSIM in November 2024, version 2.0.8 followed, and the current 2.1.0 was announced on the developer's Facebook page on 22 April 2026. Five days after that one-star review, another customer wrote: "It works really well on my end. In both 2020 and 2024."

There is no website. The developer's entire public presence is a Facebook page with about a thousand followers whose "About" section links to a simMarket search.

What the community consistently praises

Terrain turbulence, which is the thing it does that nothing else does. Asked on AVSIM on 6 May 2026 whether RealTurb offers anything over Active Sky, Fiorentoni's answer was one line: "ActiveSky has no terrain turbulence." That is the differentiator, it is real, and it is why approaches into mountain airports are where every enthusiastic report comes from.

Second, real pilots use it and say it feels right. V1ROTA7E — an AVSIM member whose signature reads former 747 first officer, 757/767 captain, 737 check airman and current 777 captain — wrote on 19 December 2023: "I've been using this tool for awhile, and quite like it." On the PMDG forums in July 2024, a user pushed back against a PMDG staff member's scepticism: it is "a whole lot better and realistic then the default MSFS stuff and pretty spot on like the RW (rock solid with the 777 no disconnects even at 8X)".

Third, it is not exaggerated — which for a realism add-on is the hardest praise to earn. Mark Crabtree, on the PMDG forums on 15 July 2024: "I do not see it push the plane unrealistically. I'll be cruising around, and the plane will bounce like I would expect to see in real life." Michael's four-star simMarket review of 4 April 2026 says the same in fewer words: "a realistic level of turbulences (not exaggerated)."

Fourth, it plays well with what you already own. Users run it alongside Active Sky — "Real Turb compliments ASFS" — and alongside FSRealistic; a French reviewer on 5 May 2026 called it "parfait en duo avec FS Realistic". environmental_ice's December 2023 post, the most-liked in the AVSIM thread, describes exactly the behaviour you want from it: hitting turbulence at FL340 and climbing to FL360 to find smooth air.

Fifth, the price and the demo. €11.99, free upgrade from version 1, and a fully functional ten-day trial that several people in the record used before deciding — including one who tried it and declined. Nobody needs to buy this blind, which matters more here than usual.

And sixth, the developer does answer, when you can find him. He replies in the comments under his own Facebook posts, including to a customer in June 2026 reporting turbulence in clear-sky, calm-wind conditions.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Nothing happens where something should — still open, and getting louder

This is the complaint that has grown over time, and it is the one that should govern a purchase in 2026.

fakeflyer737, AVSIM, 8 May 2026: a powerful jet stream over the USA, severe turbulence forecast on the charts, a 155-knot headwind, "and I didn't get a single bump the entire time. Dissapointed with it." jcomm, a long-standing user of the product who has posted in that thread nine times, replied the next day: "really? Well, have to test it again... but that's bad news."

supersym tried the demo the same week and reported that with GA aircraft the turbulence felt "very light" and he was "a bit disappointed". longhaul747's silent Las Vegas summer is the same phenomenon a year earlier.

The explanation is architectural rather than a fault: no convective or thermal turbulence is modelled, and since version 2 no forecast CAT data is used, so if the simulator's own wind field is smooth through a jet stream there is nothing for RealTurb to detect. That is a coherent design. It is also not what most buyers think they are buying from a product with "CAT Areas" in its name.

And sometimes too much happens where nothing should — still open

The opposite report exists too, from the same period. A customer named Kubilay Kaplanoglu asked on the developer's Facebook page in June 2026 why he was getting turbulence with a clear-skies preset, around 9°C and calm winds, sometimes in "large amounts" on takeoff. The developer asked for more detail; nothing further is public.

Earlier the balance ran the other way entirely. Dadavvy, PMDG forums, 15 July 2024: "be very careful when flying over mountains (even at 39k ft) my 737 was getting flung up down left and right last night, but the AP stood strong."

PMDG's own staff advise against it — still open

This one deserves its own heading because of who said it. Mathijs Kok, posting as a PMDG administrator on 15 July 2024: "Remember that if you have this active during Auto Cruise, it can trip the AP, and 'things' can happen. Personally, I am not a huge fan of this."

Kyle Rodgers, listed as a PMDG Developer Emeritus, made the deeper argument in the same thread, and Mathijs endorsed it with "Very good comment": realism mods tend to be heavy-handed because they have to be. "If it's turbulence, and you're not delivering obvious turbulence, they might think they got ripped off." He runs, in his words, pretty mod-less.

A customer disagreed three days later and reported no autopilot disconnects in the 777 even at 8× time compression. Both accounts are in the same thread and neither has been resolved.

It is not "install and forget" — still open

The marketing says "No user input/setup required for the effects to work. All is analyzed automatically!" The record says otherwise, repeatedly.

Vitold69, AVSIM, 7 November 2025: "Different airplanes require different settings, and these settings are not always logical." His own figures — Fenix A320 at 100/70 pitch and roll with cloud turbulence above 100%, the heavier FBW A380 at no more than 50% "or it's unstable especially at turns", and MSFS's own turbulence always set to Low. And when supersym found the GA effects too weak in May 2026, the advice he got was to set the simulator's turbulence to Realistic and hand-edit the RealTurb_CAT_Areas_Global.ini file in his Documents folder.

Antivirus flags, unexplained by the developer — still open

This has cost sales and nobody from RealTurb has addressed it in public. jkeyeuk, AVSIM, 24 November 2024: "Virustotal reports the latest download from my purchase at simmarket as Malicious Bkav Pro W32.AIDetectMalware SecureAge. I will not be installing it." He raised it again a year later, on 7 November 2025, asking reasonably that "the actual developers would clarify the reason for the warnings on anti virus scanners".

The evidence points firmly to false positives. Both flagging engines are among the most false-positive-prone on VirusTotal; roesti offered a plausible technical explanation — software of this kind attaches to the simulator process to read and write memory, which is exactly what malware looks like from the outside; and flyingscampi installed it on a work laptop running SentinelOne EDR and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint without incident. But two people in two years asked the developer to say so, and he has not.

Auto-start does not always work — still open

It is supposed to launch with the simulator via exe.xml. slicker55 reported in September 2024 that Webroot was preventing it and the only workarounds were disabling the antivirus or starting it by hand. David's simMarket review of 20 April 2025: "it doesn't start up automatically and I have to turn it on manually every time... been waiting days for developer to respond."

Sound routing — partly fixed

Michael's four-star review of 4 April 2026 docks a star for audio: only three volume presets, and no way to choose an output device, so cabin rumble plays at full volume through whichever card carries his engine sounds. He had raised the same thing in June 2025.

Eighteen days after that April review, version 2.1.0 replaced the presets with a percentage field — the current settings dialog shows "Sounds volume (%) [Range: 0 - 100]". The output-device complaint stands.

Performance and stability

An 18 MB background process, and it behaves like one. Across 33 store reviews, a 117-reply forum thread with 47,600 views and a PMDG thread, nobody reports a frame-rate cost or a crash.

The instability that does appear is in the flight model rather than the software — autopilot trips at cruise in 2024-era reports, and the FBW A380 becoming unstable in turns above 50% strength. Both are the product doing its job too enthusiastically for a particular aeroplane, and both are fixable from the settings dialog.

What is harder to judge is whether the software's behaviour has changed. The reports of over-modelling cluster in 2024; the reports of under-modelling cluster in 2025 and 2026. No version has been released that would obviously explain that, and MSFS's own weather engine has moved a great deal in between. We can document the shift in the record but not its cause, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Who should buy it

If you fly airliners into mountain airports — Innsbruck, Jackson Hole, Queenstown, Kathmandu: buy it. Terrain turbulence is what this product does better than anything else available, Active Sky does not offer it, and the enthusiastic reports in the record are almost all approaches into high ground.

If you fly complex airliners with turbulence dialled down to Low: buy it. That is the gap it was built for — as F737MAX put it on AVSIM in September 2024, MSFS's own turbulence is problematic with airliners that use their own flight modelling, and RealTurb "is supposed to replace some of the missing active air movement for heavy metal flyers who have had to set turbulence to low."

If you already own Active Sky: buy it, they complement rather than conflict, and terrain turbulence is the piece Active Sky is missing.

If you fly general aviation with the simulator's turbulence set to Realistic: do not buy this. tttocs said it plainly on AVSIM in September 2024 — flying GA at Realistic he was "kicked around plenty and appropriately" over ridges and in crosswinds without any add-on, and wondered what he was missing. He was missing nothing. Two GA flyers who bought or trialled it since have found the effects too light.

If you want turbulence that matches the forecast charts: do not buy this. Version 2 deliberately stopped using SIGMET areas. It reads the simulator's winds, and where those are smooth you will fly a forecast-severe jet stream and feel nothing, as a customer did in May 2026.

If you want convective or thermal turbulence: do not buy this. It is not modelled and never has been. A hot afternoon over the desert will be glass.

If you run third-party antivirus and will not install software your scanner flags: try the demo first and check it there. Two people have asked the developer to explain the VirusTotal detections and neither got an answer.

Where it stands today

RealTurb is a good, cheap, narrow tool with a name that promises something wider than it delivers, and a developer who is present but almost invisible.

The narrow thing it does — putting real air over real terrain — it does convincingly enough that a serving 777 captain uses it and a competitor's users buy it specifically for the feature Active Sky lacks. At €11.99 with a working ten-day demo and a free upgrade path from version 1, the risk of finding out is close to zero, and that matters: this is a product whose value depends entirely on which aeroplanes you fly and where, and the demo will tell you in an evening what no review can.

The wider thing the name implies — clear air turbulence where the charts say there is clear air turbulence — it stopped attempting in version 2, and the consequences are showing up in the recent record. The store still shows 33 reviews at a rounded "5", which on the actual spread of 28 five-star, three four-star, one three-star and one one-star is 4.73. But the newest substantive posts on the biggest forum thread are two disappointed users in the same week of May 2026, and the response to them was another user saying he would have to go and test it again.

Our 3.6 reflects that split. Buy it for the mountains. Take the demo before you buy it for anything else. And if the developer reads this: a single sentence on a web page about why VirusTotal flags the installer would sell more copies than another point release.