Dragon1-1

The WP radar wasn't actually downgraded all that much, AFAIK. The main difference was lacking one single radar mode with better ECCM, and there are reports from Serbian pilots in Yugoslavia using that mode in combat, so even that's not certain (apparently, this mode worked similar to VS mode in Western radars and wasn't very popular with pilots). The 9.12B, sold to 3rd world countries, was the one with a significant downgrade. In any case, R-27ER and ET use exactly the same seeker as regular R and T. Same mounting interface, too. The only important thing that's different is the big honkin' rocket booster at the back. The R-27 family is essentially modular, this is why so many variants exist.

Relying on any single system opens you to that system being targeted. If StarShield becomes an essential component of the US military technology, the first thing potential adversaries will do is develop ASAT weapons capable of taking the system out. You can't prevent satellite overflights of any given territory, including enemy ASAT sites so there's no good way, other than putting active defenses on the sats themselves (driving up mass and cost) to make sure they won't get shot down. For constellations, killing one sat will create a debris cloud that could damage the others, making this a massive risk. In fact, this is one reason why Reagan's Star Wars program didn't go anywhere. INS should be enough to get home, at least with enough accuracy to get a visual on the airfield, or an ILS fix. However, there needs to be a way of setting up the ILS and enabling it without using the LAD, not to mention stuff like switching waypoints and taking INS fixes.

That it isn't new doesn't mean it can't fail. In most aircraft, an MFD failing isn't a huge deal, so it doesn't go in the news, they just fix it before the next flight. The LAD hasn't been around for very long, there are probably some contingencies for a total failure, but I'm not sure how well they'll work in practice. Of course, it also helps that fighters are flown much less than airliners, when we consider the total flight hours. I'm a bit worried that the engineers, while they know what they're doing, might have different priorities than we'd hope. "It's cheaper that way" mentality had caused a few aviation accidents over the years. The LAD is nice because it's cost-effective, you've got one screen, no buttons and minimum maintenance requirements. Of course, the F-35 has an ejection seat, which probably affected the calculation as well.

It can't if it's being jammed. This is another crucial failure point of many modern systems. This is also the issue with using the datalink: what if the enemy manages to jam it? GPS jamming is fairly straightforward, it's easy to degrade it to the point it can't be used for landing or PGM delivery. With datalinks, it depends, but reliability of a high bandwidth system in a hostile EW environment will be suspect. All the other suggestions rely on another system that would have to be added (and cost money). I would propose a minimum fuss, minimum problems solution: display the data in simplified form on the HMD. You don't need a full color high resolution map, just enough to get the jet home. Fuel and remaining time could be displayed by pressing a button, that alone would improve the situation somewhat. That alone would allow proper fuel planning. In general, in case of an electronics failure, you want to give control to the pilot, not to more electronics. An airliner is in a better situation because it doesn't rely on a single screen. Having two crewmembers, it usually would have at least two displays. This gives it a basic measure of redundancy a fighter LAD lacks.

Yeah, it never works, except in ODS and OAF, when it did. When you're targeting an airfield, a military base, or any sufficiently large gathering of conventional forces, a B-52 strike tends to be rather effective. You seem to be confusing destroying the enemy's ability to fight with breaking the enemy's will to fight. The latter is kind of hard to destroy with bombs, but when facing a regular army, the former is very much doable, and made much easier by being able to deliver a lot of big explosives. US loses like Vietnam and Afghanistan were against guerilla movements, which require a more comprehensive approach to fight.

My mistake, it was found on 737s. The directive recommended checking all Boeings, though, including 787s. However, since it was optional, Air India has explicitly been said to have not complied with it. Meaning that, assuming the pilots didn't treat the lack of toggle locks as normal from the start, complains about it wouldn't necessarily have gone anywhere. And yes, such a minor thing not getting fixed for 7 years is perfectly plausible. Either way, since that part was pulled from the wreckage, they will undoubtedly check this. This is being investigated right now, but we need to remember that even without the locking toggle, those switches are pretty hefty. It'd be hard for them to get flipped down all by themselves. Nobody wants to bring up accusations of pilot suicide, but switches don't simply flip themselves. Even with a worn out switch missing a locking toggle, it'd take a very powerful jolt to actually flip.

B-52 has a simple role which hasn't changed in 100 years: low threat delivery of a massive load of bombs. There's no magic here, you need a great big plane, a great big bomb bay, and... that's basically it. You don't deploy the B-52 where you expect it to be shot at by anything, instead you surround it with enough fighters and SEAD that even though the enemy knows you're coming, they can't do a damn thing about it. It is, by far, the most efficient way of pounding the enemy into submission once air defenses and fighter bases had been taken down, possibly by B-21s. Another role it fulfills is a long range cruise missile boat, shared with similarly old Tu-95. It's rarer to see it do this, but it can. All you need is a big plane with big racks capable of hauling a lot of mass. Once again, B-52 delivers, and you don't need to fix what isn't broken.

Trailing plane will fall out of the sky in this case. This is because in this scenario, you're reacting to what the leader does. If you both firewall the throttles in sync, you will stay together, but what is going to happen is that you'll see the leader going full thrust, and only then apply power of your own. This will produce a lag, normally when flying formation you could correct it by adding more power and then pulling it back, but as you're both at full power, you can't. So you will fall behind/below, and if you try to maintain your position in the formation, you will start trading airspeed for altitude, putting you behind the curve and stalling the jet. If you don't, you will eventually settle into the same climb profile as the leader, but the gap that will have opened up between you noticing the acceleration and engine reaching full power (a surprisingly large delay with a slow spooling jet) will remain considerable. You would also have to only start climbing when your engine spool up, not when the leader does, as otherwise you'll climb too early and likewise end up behind the curve. Max rate climb is a very unforgiving maneuver.

If you read the report, this wasn't necessarily the case. Several Dreamliners were found to be flying with the toggle locking feature disabled. Boeing issued an advisory directive to fix it, but Air India didn't implement it, since compliance with it isn't mandatory. Also, as those switches are toggled before every flight, and exist in every Boeing airliner, any pilot who flew one for any length of time had, indeed, practiced. I flip the toggle locking switch on my Winwing PTO with barely more effort than a regular toggle, it's smaller and lighter than those, but someone with strong hands could probably have pulled them both out at once. It would be awkward, but if you're flipping them several times a day, you might get into habit of doing it like this.

A real aviation switch of this size would be pretty stiff, to the point where it'd be odd if they were both actuated at exactly the same time, unless toggle lock was disabled. Of course, the condition of the aircraft would also play part, but I highly doubt they could be jostled or bumped by accident. I doubt any Dreamliner had been flying long enough to actually wear those switches out.

If you can make it, you'd do it by luck, and probably not in IMC, because without the LAD, actually selecting the point you want to fly to and enabling ILS is probably difficult, if possible at all. I'd hope that there are HOTAS options to, at least, get the aircraft home if the LAD suddenly decides to go blank. Losing tactical systems isn't too bad, because you're not really fit to fight if you lose even one MFD in a more traditional cockpit, it's not quite as bad, but you generally want to get home ASAP anyway. The biggest problem with LAD, IMO, is loss of engine instruments (particularly fuel flow) and the fuel indicators, robbing you of all means of endurance calculation. Other than that, the HMD can display enough information to keep the aircraft flying mostly straight and in the right direction, if you can select the home plate by HOTAS.

Doing that perfectly, 100% of the time, is very much superhuman. We're not just talking a well trained pilot, we're talking one who can magically teleport the stick from one side to the other. We're talking one who can guess his airspeed perfectly at all times while keeping his eyes glued to the bandit (and simultaneously looking behind, the AI is that good). We're talking one who can continuously hold perfect trim, disregarding the imprecisions in the trim switch, or even the need to actuate it. In fact, I'm pretty sure nobody actually trims mid-fight. DCS AI does, it's always in perfect trim like an FBW jet. I agree that most players don't even meet the criteria of simply flying well, and the MiG-15 is a real beast when flown well. However, no real pilot is going to hold corner speed to the knot while not looking at the airspeed dial. We simmers are seriously disadvantaged in the G load department, but a pilot's butt isn't a super-precise G indicator. You can be good at guessing, but you don't have a HMD, so in a dogfight, the MiG-15 needs to be flown by feel to some degree. Otherwise, you'd spend so much time staring at the gauges that you lose tally.

They didn't have guards, but they were protected against being bumped accidently by protrusions on the sides, and they're also supposed to be toggle-locking type, though supposedly this wasn't always the case. Either way, they require a pretty deliberate action to flip. Right now this is probably the only explanation that doesn't assume a truly improbable level of stupidity. There's no reason for the pilot to have his hands anywhere near that area at that phase of flight unless he's actually trying to crash the plane. Sadly, murder-suicides by a pilot are not completely unknown. It'll be interesting to see what else the investigation turns up.

You're not getting it - flying aerodynamic tables exactly in an analog bird like MiG-15 is superhuman. It's like you're dogfighting a wind tunnel model, not an aircraft flown by a real human with real controls. Aerodynamics are only one part of the aircraft's performance, another critical factor is the human-machine interface. Yes, it's theoretically possible to fly the MiG-15 that way, but in practice, you'd need to build a piloting robot, or retrofit an FBW system (same thing, really, if you think about it). A human pilot needs to physically move the control column to maneuver, actuate the trim switch to adjust the trim, physically look at the gauges to determine airspeed, keep tally, and so on. In a MiG-15, all those tasks are somewhat complicated by poor cockpit ergonomics (a somewhat notorious issue with all Soviet fighters), in addition to the normal delays and imperfections from making those actions. AI models none of this, which makes it superhuman. We're effectively fighting a MiG-15 equipped with modern FBW controls, a force sensing stick and a modern HMD. In fact, it seems to be exactly the same case as with climbing with warbirds. Until they got WEP restricted, most people couldn't do it, but Reflected found a way by the means of unrealistically tight trimming and very hard, but doable precision flying. Yes, it follows the tables, but it does not follow either real WWII practice or normal ways to fly a warbird. This is also why complaints about fighters which are supposed to have FBW are much less frequent.

Odd. Last time I flew the F-5 it worked. Do try the hold binding instead, it seems the remaster added it. Maybe something changed there.

Did you bind both idle and off actions to the appropriate buttons? The F-5 doesn't have a dedicated "hold" binding for idle cutoff. You need to assign both idle and off bindings.

In any case, this is not something you should touch while in the air. As one expert put it, there's nothing here that is likely. No matter which Boeing the pilot in question was trained on, there's zero reason to even have your hand anywhere near this area once the plane is off the ground.

It would seem like the engine switches were inadventarily operated by one of the aircrew. Now to figure out why would anyone mess with those mid-flight.

I do hope the preorder will either show up on Steam in September, or the 30% discount will be available, say, for the first two weeks of EA phase. Otherwise, it would not be fair to Steam users.

In that particular case, it's fire protection. LAU-68 is used by the USN, while the LAU-131 is used by other services. The latter also has connectors both at the front and rear, which is useful on some airframes, but not on ones that USN uses. The big difference, though, is the insulation that LAU-68 has. This greatly increases the time it'd take for the rockets inside to cook off if they ended up in a fire. On a crowded aircraft carrier, this can mean the difference between an extinguished fire and a massive explosion, since on a carrier there's a lot of ammo in close proximity, surrounded by thin metal walls, and nowhere to run. USAF ordies have the luxury of being able to hop into a hummer and floor it until they're on the other side of the airfield if the ammo dump starts smoking. USN doesn't, so they put more emphasis (and money) on making sure their ordnance takes a good while to blow up from heat, giving them a fair chance of putting it out. In general, the reason can usually be found in seemingly minor differences between the launchers. There's usually something that might seem inconsequential, but is actually an important factor for a given service to choose one over the other. It's not only capacity, but data connections (the reason why you don't see JDAMs on TERs very often, they need a dual "smart rack"), fire protection, location of connectors, stuff like that.

If the LUA file is correct, and if the AI MiG-15 flies exactly as LUA file says it should, then the only logical conclusion given the above is that human-flown PFM MiG-15 underperforms. Perhaps a test to check if it does is in order, but I'd be surprised if that was the case. Since it's been shown the LUA is pretty much spot on compared to the charts, either AI flies better than the LUA implies it should, or the player doesn't fly well enough. Also keep in mind that we might also be looking at something like with Reflected's warbird formations. There, it was possible to climb with the AI, just really hard. You had to be perfectly on speed, have trims set in a perfect way, and never, ever fall behind even a bit. Then, you'd stay in formation, despite AI performing a max performance climb. So we also need to exclude the scenario in which the AI simply hits the (arguably unrealistic in practice) theoretical maximum and the human doesn't.

Note that a simulation also needs to include some way to model abnormal conditions for which data does not exist. You can put a simulated plane into a flight regime in which testing it for real would be too dangerous, for instance. In DCS, this is further compounded by having to figure out how a plane would fly with various kinds of battle damage. That's one reason why DCS doesn't use lookup tables only. While this could be passable for something like CMO, where you don't actually fly the aircraft, One thing GFM does is simulating some of those abnormal conditions. AI will be able to stall out and depart the aircraft. Hopefully, ED will take opportunity to look at decisionmaking process of the AI, and at the way it flies simple administrative tasks, as well.

Yak-3 is iconic, but I'd rather have the Yak-9, if only because it served in Korea as well as in WWII.

That's a good point. We can plot out LUAs all we like, but it's of no use if AI performance doesn't actually follow the LUAs. If the current AI FM is incapable of translating those curves into realistic performance, directly inputting real data is of no use. Hopefully GFM will be able to do a better job at that. Of course, we also have to keep in mind that with vintage aircraft, it should be modeling a human pilot's inability to perfectly follow the curves. This human factor is difficult to simulate, but there are ways to fake it.

And that's the problem - they are perfect. AI is consistently achieves and maintains the aircraft's performance limits in ways a human could never manage. This was noted, for instance, by Reflected in his climbing with AI warbirds video. If you're in perfect trim, have your engine settings just right, and don't make any mistakes, you can keep up with the AI. I'm pretty sure no WWII pilot could actually set up his aircraft this well (at least that got improved, but only by capping the AI engine power). A dogfight is ultimately decided by who makes the fewest mistakes, and the way AI flies, small errors inherent to every human's piloting simply aren't there. The fundamental problem with that model is, it doesn't tell the whole story. As mentioned above, it's dry maths, not accounting for how the plane is actually flown. This, BTW, is why modern jets suffer from this issue much less than vintage ones (sure enough, the AI FM has been designed for modern jets). Nobody flies the MiG-15 on the numbers all the time, but in the F-16, the computer is doing much of the flying for you. If you want to get the best turn rate, just haul back on the stick and presto. This will get you in trouble in vintage planes, but AI can ride the exact point between too hard and too little pull.