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You don´t even need to go outside of the aviation field to see this phenomenon. Many people actually believe Airbus is a French company, or a Boeing airplane consists mainly of US made or developed parts.

That´s what Mavericks are for... :D

And for maximum immersion you would have someone ask about your TPS report every ten minutes while your flightlead tells you "Hey SkateZilla, what´s haaaappening. I´m gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday, mmmkay? Oh, and I almost forgot, I´m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. Mmmkay?" :D

SEAD stands for Supression of Enemy Air Defenses. It doesn´t necessarily mean the enemy defense assets are actually destroyed, it can also mean they are just supressed for whatever time window is necessary (through electronic means, i.e. jamming or by spamming the airspace with HARM missiles). If the air defenses absolutely, positively have to be destroyed for good it would be a DEAD mission (Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses). SEAD may destroy the target as well, but not necessarily so. Make sure you pick the right Tornado variant. There are three different ones (IDS: Interdiction/Strike, ECR: Electronic Combat and Reconaissance, ADV: Air Defense Variant), with Germany operating the IDS and the ECR variants. The ECR is the one you want to pick, since it is designed to do nothing but hunt down enemy air defenses and kill them. Also it is one of the few platforms that can fire the AGM-88.

Security Policeman at Bentwaters, huh? Seen any UFOs? ;)

Come on, you know full well already just how much you want it. You´ve just opened this thread to hear us back you up. So here you go: Buy it! ;) The TM WH is hands down the best piece of hardware I have ever laid my hands on (excuse the pun). Just unpacking that baby made me giggle like a little girl. When you see the packaging you will understand. And yeah, it may be expensive, but the price-performance ratio is out of this world. Nothing, and I mean nothing beats the feeling of placing your hands on the cold, solid steel, with all buttons just naturally falling into place right where they should be, while you rain unparalleled, ultraprecise death and destruction from above onto the enemy. That thing is a beautiful piece of art, and I can´t help touching it all the time even when all I´m flying at that moment is a spreadsheet in Excel. Oh, and girlfriends are vastly overrated anyway... once you are the proud owner of a TM WH you won´t even notice she´s around... :D

They came off right away, and with the second set (yes, I bought two sets) I took them off before I even assembled the stick. No idea why, but something about those stickers really makes me go "ugh...".

You would have died a happy man though... :D

Does blue stand for inert in Japan as well? I thought it was just a NATO thing?

I hate to make it look as if I were on the side of that Robert dude, but there are some things said by others that are wrong as well: Actually, no. The safest country on earth when it comes to aviation is Australia (measured in number of people transported vs number of people killed), the US is not even in the top 5. That is not to say the US is a dangerous place to fly, quite the contrary. It is very safe. However, some places are even safer. Well, compared to the rest of the world, you guys do use poor standards in many of the things you do. I understand you are ruled by the FAA, not ICAO. However, the rest of the world lives by ICAO standards and considers them vastly superior to FAA standards (just go over to pprune.org and read the various stories yourself). In a globalized industry like aviation is it not advisable to have two different sets of standards. It´s just like still sticking to miles/pounds/cups/whateverweirdmeasurement and confusing everyone else on the planet including your very own NASA engineers. :D Don´t read this as US-bashing, I´d be the last person on earth to do that. I love you guys like you probably wouldn´t believe and spend most of my vacations over there, but the one thing you (you in the plural form, not you personally) regularly ignore is that there is a HUGE world outside of your country which does many things better than you do. That´s just natural and doesn´t put down your country at all.

Ugh.. can we please not let this go down into a "my country is better than yours" pissing contest?

Thanks for the link, looks awesome! Is that something that happens every year? The next time I will presumably be in the US is most likely gonna be around summer 2014, and I will be in your neck of the woods for about a week. So if that show takes place next year as well I might consider adding it to our itinerary if the other guys agree (I´ll be travelling with a bunch of friends, all of whom are ex or active military and/or law enforcement and all with an interest in everything military. We plan to travel around and hit as many museums and airshows as possible on both east and west coast, still working on the exact routing though).

Yup, "fife", sorry. Had a brain fart there (it´s 5am over here, or "zero fife hundred", if you wish :D). @Nealius I don´t think it has anything to do with not learning the phraseology, I am sure every controller and pilot in the US learned it at some point during their training. Maybe it´s just that it doesn´t sound as cool as slang, dunno... Found a nice article about it here: http://shemmalmquist.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/phraseology-in-international-air-transport-operations/

2 grand, huh? Well, since I have already spent 400 bucks for a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon once and the pilot flat out refused to do any wild maneuvers (something along the lines of "the other passengers wouldn´t appreciate it". Pfff, bunch of sissies... :D), just five times that amount doesn´t sound all that unreasonable, especially since I am sure that pilot won´t mind some zooming and booming. How much time in the air do those $2000 buy you? And do you actually get to do some flying yourself?

Bingo. Which is also the reason for "three" to be pronounced as "tree" (almost everyone outside the native english speaking world has major troubles pronouncing the "th" without breaking their tongues), "five" as "fiver" and "nine" as "niner" (to prevent confusion with the german word "nein", which is pronounced just like "nine"). I have a whole lot of friends in ATC and aviation in general, and they all say that by far the worst offender when it comes to abusing standard phraseology is the US. Even large airports like JFK in NY are famous (or rather infamous) for not using proper ICAO phraseology, creating a lot of confusion among foreign pilots. A good friend of mine is a long haul pilot on the A340 for Swiss Airlines, another one flies the MD-11 for Lufthansa Cargo, and yet another one is a pilot on the A330 for Air Berlin. They all three speak impeccable english and have no trouble at all understanding controllers in Russia or China. They all dread flying to the US though, because they have such a hard time keeping up their SA when in their airspace. Sometimes they have to downright guess what the controller meant, and since that is not acceptable of course it leads to constant "say agains" on the radio, and certain controllers of certain airports even don´t hesitate to display an attitude over the radio which doesn´t help at all. Why that is, I don´t know. It can´t have anything to do with being native english speakers, because ATC in the UK is known for strictly sticking to the ICAO phraseology.

/me mucho jealous. Wish I were there. What a beautiful machine!

Well, the word actually IS banned, at least in this part of the world. The proper term would be "affirm".

Exposure to the mass market. And no, I don´t particularly like Steam either for a bunch of reasons, but as far as gaming is concerned, Steam is the place to be these days.

Funny to see your gf flying barefooted. I could never do that!

Amazing, thanks for sharing! The look in his eyes when he realized that it´s actually himself who he´s watching - priceless. No weapons at all, flying all alone all the way up to Berlin, passing over the target area three or four times, no armored glass because "we figured if we got that close we were dead anyway"... I really wonder how they ever got their planes off the ground with all that weight of their giant brass balls.

Well, when you talk to someone whose native language is not the same as yours and he is having difficulty understanding you, he won´t all of a sudden understand you any better just because you yell at him. Chances are, he´s gonna have even more difficulty understanding you. But what do I know.

Yes, I know all that. This doesn´t have anything to do with masking or walking the bomb into the target, but simply this: If I aim at a wall and the bomb starts guiding toward the point I am illuminating, what happens when I move the laser over to the other side of that wall? Will the bomb still go for the laser dot, which technically is still illuminating the very same spot, just on the other side of the wall, or will it go dumb as it does in real life?

Which is useful when dropping a JDAM, but kinda pointless when dropping a LGB. ;)

I´m currently reading "Stealth Fighter" by Lt. Col. William B. O´Connor, where he talks about his life in the F-117 community and how he fought in Operation Allied Force. Awesome book, highly recommended! Gives some really nice insights into the many peculiarities of the stealth community. In one part of the book he is talking about a particular attack during OAF. The target, a munitions plant, was surrounded by huge berms on all four sides, and he explains what was necessary to hit this target. One of those things that he needed to take into consideration when dropping the bomb onto a target surrounded by those berms was the podium effect, which was a new term to me. I´ll just post the relevant snippet so you guys know what I´m talking about: Before reading the book I never really thought about this problem, which brings me to the question: Is this effect actually modelled in DCS World? If I want to kill a tank, should I put the laser on top of it instead of its side? What about buildings? If I want to drop a hangar, should I aim for its roof instead of its wall? Can the bomb actually go blind in DCS World because the laser hits the other side of the target?

You mean you also clean the canopy? Without supervision, all by yourself? :D :beer: