Victory205

Holy Moly! The manual is impressive (but you should still sleep with your NATOPS). Wish Heatblur was around when the RAG was up and running. They'd have a ton of F14 crew as fans! Really nice work. Have a look.

No, no! Nice effort. Pretty video. The airplane is easy to fly gang, and it's easy to stay out of trouble. You aren't gonna be flat spinning regularly. I'll post more later.

Ugh.

Thanks for the tip! You can have the FPM on the crotch with lineup and GS both AFU, with the LSO's waving you off. It is a secondary aid, and you need to scan centerline and glideslope (meatball), whether you have a HUD or not. You can land right in the touchdown zone with drift and go over the side, or hit the pack with the FPM sitting pretty because of misalignment with the centerline. Early in the groove it is "Meatball, Lineup, AOA". The AOA is trimmed out to remove it as a variable. In the middle to approaching the Ramp it is "Meatball, Lineup". In close to over the deck, it is "Meatball", counting on the LSO for last second lineup calls if you aren't stable. I recommend turning the HUD off, or at least pulling the RED filter so you can see the deck and bal, so you can learn to land properly.

Getting close to 100 pages...

1) Nope. You should be trimmed hands off downwind. Done. 2) HUDs are great for weapons delivery, but they aren’t optimum to fly off of, especially in weather. You just don’t know it. Fly the ball, not the FPM. 3) You’ll need rudder inputs based on AOA. Plenty of feedback from buffet. Easy to learn, rewarding to master. You fly a Tomcat, you just point a Hornet. Not much of a challenge in the latter. 4) Jester is your friend. SA is available in a similar manner, before the Hornet even hit the Navy Fleet. Your radar, if you are good, is better for lots of the A/A mission. If you are good. 5) You’re just sitting there in your office chair. Cockpit is clean, well laid out. Jester has the real challenge. Hornet is busy and cluttered. Your workload will go down. Tomcats always went to the best looking pilots who had earned their Golden Wings.

You seem to want to be entertained by people working to get their product to market. Why?

You got the “child” part right.

The cockpit smells like canopy polish unless on the boat. Then it smells like canopy polish, jet exhaust, non-skid and oily salt water. Sometimes when you landed in the early evening, you could smell bread baking in the dirty shirt wardroom. Reminded me of home.

It will look, fly and smell like a Tomcat. No need to keep showing that.

Can’t believe you guys are telling people to read the manual. Why, you actually seem to be looking forward to it!

Seems that Toser did a lot of things that he never did.

That’s what dating a Naval Aviator will do to an unsuspecting bogey. Tom Cruise still looks the same. He was 23 when the movie was shot.

Not so fast. You're PayPal deposit hasn't cleared yet. Remember, not one cent less than our agreed upon price, and in USD, I've already got too many Euro's from your friends.

Mongol nailed it...

Yep, a wonderful sleep aid. If you want to pass your NATOPS check and become a fighter pilot, then you must learn to love it. I still sleep with mine. ;) When the Heatblur manual is published, I’ll be studying the RIO’s cockpit and AWG9 to see what’s implemented too.

The community usually generates the hype, then complains about the hype they created.

All you know is what you have read my friend.

We know exactly what happened. RIO, training grades, etc all told the story. Ejections are often brutal.

Posting Michael Jackson memes should be a felony. The man was weird, and he’s dead, and he’s still weird.

There is no evidence that he didn’t have the grades to qualify in the community, and he did pay a high price, losing his wings. Kept after it in a different part of the Navy and did well, so I’ll give him that. His defense was that you obey orders, and technically, he was ordered to splash the F4, he just didn’t get the whole, “this is an exercise” idea for some reason. No one briefed “now boys and girls, we really aren’t going to shoot down anyone today”. The whole thing happened within sight of the ship too. Classic. It wasn’t a bomb run either, they had already called the Boss for a standard “fly by”. The idea that it had to do with inter service rivalry is risible.

A Kill is a kill... We sent a jet to BHM for an air show static display after the incident. They had a squadron of RF4C’s stationed there in the ANG. As our crew walked into their ops, everyone dove behind the nearest desk... The promotion was quite controversial. Think the guy was also going to run for political office at one time, until the story came out. Anyway, you can step the sidewinder stations if you need to. :smilewink:

I see a lot of passes from various sources where the aircraft isn’t close to being on speed. Don’t develop that bad habit, you’d be waved off for many of the aforementioned approaches and get hook skip bolters if not. Landing at max trap weight, speed was critical for arresting gear stress as well. Nice to see HB giving tools to analyse passes.

Wags is sort of a competitor to third party developers, isn’t he? He’s exploiting your OODA Loop! :wink:

Yes, forgot to mention that. Supposedly, Tim Dorsey stepped from a bad Aim-9 to a good one when he shot down a USAF F4C. God gave him one more chance to not foul up, but he blew it anyway. It is a myth that all fighter pilots are good. This is pretty close to the real story. The nitwit had actually intercepted the Phatom on a tanker before he made his run on the ship. https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/that-time-a-navy-f-14-accidentally-on-purpose-shot-down-an-air-force-f-4-during-an-exercise