Victory205

I didn’t correlate which callsign went with which liar. My apologies.

Vince’s “guess” was “30 seconds”, not five as Maxin misquoted. I ran into Aiello in a pilot lounge a long time ago, not too long after he was hired. He had already done a podcast on the F14. I asked him about why he didn’t push back on some of the BS that was already piling up from his interviews. He basically shrugged his shoulders, and the gist was that the show was about entertainment, not a documentary, and he didn’t have the technical expertise to argue against whomever was on the show. I got the drift that the purpose was about clicks and cash, not so much accuracy. He was a NFWS instructor at Fallon by the way, a very different course and mindset than Miramar in the 1970’s and 80’s. The interview does highlight one aspect that is ignored by Tomcat lovers. The F14 was unreliable in comparison to the newer fighters coming online, which was the main driver of its retirement. Everyone points to Dick Cheney as some sort of Darth Vader character, but had the Tomcat had 85% FMC numbers and maintenance man hours in the teens, we’d still by flying the F14E/F strike fighters today. My view is that to achieve Gen 5 reliability, the entire F14 airframe would have had to have been gutted with redesigned systems (not all) and updated avionics. Possible, but costly given the changes in threat and focus when the decision was made. One of the RIO’s in our squadron ended up making RADM, and was a CAG, XO of USS Constellation, held posts in OPNAV in Air Warfare, and Commanded THIRD FLEET. He mentioned that Tomcat maintenance became a morale issue. The Hornet wrenches were sitting around their shops playing cribbage and acey-duecy, while F14 troops worked all night to get enough jets up to make the flight schedule for the next evolution. It was Naval Aviators, based on operational and cost considerations, working in the groups described above, who ultimately made the recommendation to kill the Tomcat.

For perspective, the Space Shuttle accelerated at ~3G on its way to low earth orbit. The fantasy F14B in the video could almost keep up with it below the troposphere.

The rule of thumb is (1.22 * sqrt of the delta height in feet). This returns the distance in miles, either divide to convert distance to NM or use 1.06 as the coefficient in the formula. Is the curvature of the earth modeled, or is it “flat” in DCS? The TACAN emitter is located on the mast on the carrier, at least 200 feet above the water as well. Guessing that isn’t modeled either. I’ve not checked to see if TACAN is masked by terrain either. TACAN operates on frequencies limited to line of sight.

They’re both full of <profanity>, and take you for fools. You should be angry at them for lying. Since the claim was instantly suspect when this video was brought to my attention, I ran the accel numbers months ago, and the result is commensurate with the G loading on a Cat shot off of a C-13-1 steam catapults found on Nimitz class aircraft carriers. If true, then generally speaking, the F14B performing an afterburner takeoff would be able to accelerate from 0-140 knots in 310 feet…without using the catapult The strange aspect was the exactness of the claim of “9.7 seconds”, which would have had to have been timed with a personal electronic stopwatch since the analog aircraft clock isn’t that granular. Why people do this is beyond me. Out of curiosty, I ran accelerations in the HB version of a clean F14B. -At 3000 MSL in level flight 150-610KIAS took 34 sec. -At 8000 MSL, with a zero G unload, it took 27 sec. -At 18,000 MSL, pointing the aircraft at the center of the earth, unloading to zero G, it took 17 secs (the distance required resulted in crashing into the water). -A clean DCS F16 for comparison, with it’s superior thrust to weight, using those setups took 30/24/20 seconds respectively. To achieve anything close to the claimed performance, we would have to triple the acceleration rate of the Heatblur F14B. I want to be in the room when @IronMike approaches @NineLine with that proposal. I was already working to address this claim with more detail is on my list for an article, but so far, there hasn’t been any determination by Heatblur on setting up a venue for it. I may look for an alternative, since the goal is to preserve the true technical aspects of the aircraft and how it was flown that will outlast me, long after I’m gone. Props to the gents here who smelled the BS and broke out their calculators- JoNay, Spurts, JCTherik, et al. Well done. Bonus Question: To triple the current acceleration, what increase in thrust would be required? Don’t worry about ram effects since they cancel out, what’s the general magnitude of the required increase?

Turn off the HUD.

Thank goodness that Jester isn’t British. I’ve had the pleasure of flying with an FAA/RAF exchange RIO/WSO on several occasions. This is what it sounded like-

There was a famous, within the Navy, incident during WWII where an isolated young pilot was getting shot up by a swarm of Zeros, yelling over the radio for help. Nothing could be done for him, and he was garbaging up the frequency, blocking critical calls, so one of the grizzled veterans calmly transmitted, "Shut up and die like a man". It's detailed in "First Blue" by Butch Vories. I never flew with anyone remotely as goofy as Jester. While most fighter personalities trended towards cynical humor on the ground, in the cockpit, it was all business. Once the deck crew began to break down the chains on your aircraft prior to launch, and until you were safely off of the flight deck after the recovery, the tone was calm, serious business. There was a lot to do and think about, and no yelling, screeching, or infantile distractions were tolerated from either cockpit. Had nothing to do with being "Mr Perfect", and everything to do with being a professional aviator. Apart from humor, there was an expectation of comms cadence and compliance with ROE and tactics. Leo the RIO's blathering and behavior from the second Gulf of Sidra incident was widely panned throughout the community. The wingman's behavior was calm and professional, but the inter cockpit tape wasn't released to the public as far as I know. You can still hear the difference between the two crews on the flight lead's audio. The reputation's earned for life in the aftermath between the two aircraft were very different. Jester is a valuable solution for an aircraft that is heavily crew coordination dependent being flown solo, but his "attitude" is obviously an artistic interpretation, based on the Hollywood expectations of what a RIO should act like, and an attempt to entertain an audience comprised of gamers with corresponding maturities. I hear more silliness from kids crashing their modules into bridges and ships than I do from Jester, but I find both annoying to some degree. Maybe some old grizzled fighter pilot should tell both of them to “Shut up and die like a man…”

We’re constantly evaluating and looking for areas to improve. I checked the high alpha handling again last night and it’s correct. The rudders do blank and reduce roll rate at the extreme alpha values that sim pilots use, far beyond what was typical in real life. For example, the only time I ever accepted a flat scissors was when on cruise with tanks and ordnance, restricted to a short mil power 1v1 due to fuel considerations. Pegged AOA below 100 knots is a great way to die. I have papers in work for a host of subjects, including wing rock and realistic buffet cues and employment; trim, inflight refueling, general handling, spin entry and recovery, vertical recovery, CASE I landings, etc. It’s going to be awhile before they are added to Fat Creason’s performance page, where they will be easy to find, because the gang is thrashing like mad men on the F4, and I am somewhat wounded at the moment. Until then, read, and reread the FM performance paper that has already been posted. The F14B is already complete, but for the reasons above, hasn’t been added. If you think that the F14 is a handful due to wing rock and rudder inputs and handling at high alpha, wait ‘till you see the F4… Good luck, Fly pretty.

For everyone- Center the steering T precisely, before launch.

Not quite sure that I understand what you are trying to convey in that message, but there is a tradeoff on carrier landings at the moment, heavily dependent on the ship side of the equation to make it less frustrating. The vast majority of passes that I see via video examples would result in technique waveoffs for exceeding the criteria for a safe pass- Lineup, speed, GS deviations, groove length, etc. You'd be sent home and counseled for performance and retrained before you got the chance to break a hook. Besides the structural considerations, the F14 right now should hook skip more for fast approaches, or even relaxing the attitude at touchdown. I haven't fooled with the hornet lately to sample its tolerances. All understandable, no one is vetted in DCS before being allowed to attempt to land on the boat, so it has to be reasonably dumbed down. It's pretty remarkable that sim pilots do as well as they do, but the ship is still very forgiving of landing with sloppy parameters.

You are correct in that none of this should be a problem. It’s a bit ironic when someone flys a crappy pass, then complains that the aircraft or arresting gear system didn’t break. There is a marketing angle for all of the carrier compatible modules. If the various devs make it too hard, they’ll get endless social media whinging and lost sales. That’s why the SC should be the limiting factor in terms of simulating two-blocking the arresting gear and broken cables, or simply having the LSO wave off aircraft that are fast. It’s a moot point if you fly onspeed below carrier landing weight with proper wind speed/closure.

No slack on carrier landings- Physics don’t care. It’s difficult to tell from the telemetry readout, I don’t see absolute closure rate or if VSI is reflective of actual or the laggy instrument, but generally speaking, the overall landing dynamics on all of the aircraft are too forgiving. A big portion of the weakness in the system comes from the arresting gear itself, and I am not familiar with how super carrier models that.

If I’m reading the VSI data correctly, both traps were faster than onspeed by a large margin, one impacting around 850 fpm and the other at 1100? Is the VSI readout a repeater of the aircraft VSI including instrument lag? Also seemed to have shoved the nose down right at touchdown, which will cause a skip. Pretty ugly pass overall, the hook is the least of your problems.

I haven’t explored weapons sep dynamics in DCS, and probably won’t, but I doubt that they are realistic in terms of aerodynamic interaction. I’ve never read anything here that references the G loading at release. I have seen video where players were pickling at zero G and holding it for a few seconds. Yikes! We’re any of those incidents that you described at China Lake (lovely place ) performed at less than one G? I’m not sure many here are aware of the trajectory characteristics of Napalm canisters either.

There was a spore in SEA that caused the potting compound to soften in the Phantom (and other aircraft). There were something like 2000 canon plugs in the F4, potentially experiencing intermittent or chronic short circuits or contact failures.

It looked like a giant, disgusting toe to me. Last time I saw Joe was in Fallon around 1990-91 timeframe. He was a bit sheepish about the whole episode. He was just happy to be flying again. I think he was flying F5's for some contractor or adversary unit, I really don't recall. Everyone called him "Toeser", one look at that hand was all it took to end any debate on his new callsign.

Joe Satrapa flew F8’s in SEA and his area of “expertise” was gunnery phase in VF101. He was also a huge gun nut, which famously cost him his right thumb. When he started the whole “Last of the Gunfighters” routine at the O Club, his peers would loudly point out that the Mig 17 carried no missiles, and had far more guns kills than any US Fighter, making the little Fresco the real “Last of the Gunfighters”.

You can “neither confirm nor deny”, right?

What nukes? Never heard of 'em...

Absolutely. We used it constantly for a host of tasks. It saved fuel and time, helped in intelligence gathering, in addition to the basic tactical employment. The one aspect that could have been better is that the camera resolved better than the screens, so we were leaving something on the table. On video playback, the monitors and recordings had better specs than the aircraft, so in the debrief, you'd be looking clearly at a particular aircraft type, while listening to the crew in flight discussing what it might be. No 4K monitors onboard, back in the day. We understood that, and would often "capture" an object of interest without being able to tell what it was for viewing later by the Intelligence Wizards on a better viewing setup.

A hilarious, great story teller from VF14 who was in my NFWS class diverted into Oman with his wings stuck at 68. He came into the break, hit the auto switch and nothing… Tanked him up, and sent him to the beach. He lands at 185 knots, no problem, taxi’s in, shuts down, opens the canopy and say, “Ya’ll are Mercenaries, ain’t cha?” While he was there, the story he got was that the Jaguar’s RadAlt was calibrated perfectly for 360 KIAS. Fly 360, and it showed the exact distance from the lowest point on the aircraft to the deck. They had a bombing sortie set up, so as the RO was trundling out to the range in a Toyota pickup (evidently not!), his impatient buddy in the air decides to “thump” him for snitz and giggles….except he’s saving a little gas by flying at 300 KIAS. His pass was made at a higher alpha, cocked up a bit, and BAM! The ventrals hit the car. The RO was trapped for a bit, until the pilot circled back, saw what happened, and radioed for a rescue mission armed with a crow bar to open the sardine tin enough to let him out. Bet that cost him a lot of beer.

Fly the ball. Be the ball… What time frame was that with the AIM-9J/P? Similarly we were shooting up the inventory of G/H’s, but in the early 1980’s, always deployed with the 9L and later in the decade, 9M.

Ha! That’s probably it! Are you familiar with the story, embellished as it may or may not be?

Yes, thank you. I wanted to make sure, because I keep seeing these videos from Tornado pilot talking about how the little critter basically sweeps the skies of all adversaries, and how the AIM54 has no capability against fighters and can be ignored. I got to know a German Tornado pilot who was stationed in the states doing primary flight training. We compared a few notes from time to time. The wing loading is so high on that thing that I’m surprised that it can make it around the landing pattern while still keeping sight of the landing strip. Figured that the F4 would out maneuver it. The Buccaneers we intercepted were over water, the RIO had no problem locking them, but I could see their wakes on the smooth Mediterranean water from over ten miles away. As you shared, it would be tough getting a gun solution on them without tying the record for lowest flight altitude, especially with our gun canted up several degrees. With the exception of perhaps the Omani Mercenary Jaguar pilots (one of them hit the range safety officer’s truck with his tailpipes), the British are the world wide kings of flying low. When you smile, all of you have bugs in your teeth.