WAR

Yes and a little bit before! But it's been a long time now and the memory isn't what it was :ermm:

In addition to the replies above, all versions of the Harrier, old and modern were able to hover dry depending on all up weight, outside air temperature, atmospheric pressure and the pilot's ability/technique. The 90 sec hover figure which is sometimes mentioned is just the maximum time you have water flowing. A warm low pressure day, heavy with stores would require the water to hover, but remember that whilst you are using the water you are also reducing your all up weight by approx 500lbs of water in 90secs and approx 400lbs in fuel. If you were dependant on the water then you would check the limits during the decel and invoke the water so that you knew it would flow, if not then you still had wingborne lift to accelerate away before you ended up stuck in the jetborne regime in a continuous descent. Of course you could and should trip the engine limiters in this case to remove the JPT limit, high counts on the engine but better than crashing. Harriers have been lost due to pilots forgetting this switch! Even if water was not required to hover, it was best to use it otherwise it was just an additional weight which wasn't needed. Generally if you were coming back for a single VL landing then 90secs was sufficient, if you wanted to practice your VTOLs etc then you'd use the water up and then practice various short take-offs and landings until able to dry hover.

Thx Zeus, and apologies, it wasn't my intention to cause anyone any stress, I believed it to be a valid observation based on my experience on the Harrier. I'll just observe from now :)

Thanks BIGNEWY for the more polite response. I'm totally aware that this is early days, just wanting to make sure that there wasn't the belief that this glow is also visible during the day. I'll await and see

Really?? I understand all of the post Zeus made but isn't the whole point of this forum for constructive criticism? What's the point of waiting until the final effect if there is a possibility to make a change now, perhaps the programmers believe that the heat glow is visible during the day whereas it is not, certainly at least with my eyes? The effect needs to be dramatically different during the day to be realistic, not slightly, isn't that what we all want, the most realistic simulation of the Harrier.

@Krupi Yes that video highlights exactly what I said.

@Zeus67 I know you say that the final version will be slightly different, but I think that it needs to be toned down rather a lot for the daytime flights. It's really only at night that this effect becomes so visible. 02:20 in the hover from a GR9 06:50 from a Spanish AV-8B Most of the video from an AV-8B II demonstrating the hover. Not such a great video but close up of AV-8B vertical takeoff

We were lucky enough to have Gen 3 goggles which had reasonable depth of field on the terrain and when the millilux levels were high, you could certainly fly very low level at high speeds. But of course they have their limitations like when the ambient light levels drop or on single points of light. Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish the tail light of the formation member ahead from a bright star! Poor NVG/FLIR performance however didn't stop us from flying low level attack sorties, it was just a damn sight scarier. Another aspect which helped was the training, we had a simulator, well the US did initially until ours was built, so all pilots underwent a course before they began the EO workup in the jet. I see Gen 4 googles now exist, though I'm not sure if these are in use on the Harrier now. Anyhow I guess this is going off topic for this thread and deserves it's own in due course.

Thank you for the replies, I understand now, is it the same for the FLIR?

Hi All, Firstly, just want to say how amazing this project looks and what a great job the team is doing. Secondly, Zeus, will the NVG's be reactive to ambient lighting? Under full moon, clear sky conditions they were extremely bright, really turning night into day. Over snow covered ground, under the above conditions, they were too bright in fact, the same under the Northern Lights. In civil twilight they were almost unusable due to high millilux levels but you just fly with them up until they become effective. Reducing moon phase or increasing cloud cover and thickness reduced the effectiveness up to the point that a new moon phase and thick cloud cover, especially away from urban lighting made them once again almost useless. Another good aspect of the NVGs is that you can see aircraft lights (non NVG compatible) at great distances, well beyond normal visual range, this often gave up "enemy" aircraft who didn't go covert. However as NVGs are so powerful, even a single non NVG light can blind you if it's close by, important when you make landings to carriers, airfields and also tanking operations. I'm sure this is an obvious comment but when wearing the NVGs you look underneath them when viewing the cockpit and sometimes FLIR on HUD image as well. Night EO low level ops are really about using the best that both the FLIR and the NVGs can give you under the conditions at the time. The FLIR image in the HUD wasn't great to identify targets unless they were huge and had contrast, so was mainly used for track 12 navigation, switching between black and white hot depending on the background thermal transmissions and pilot preferences. Sometimes it was not used at all, once again depending on the conditions. The FLIR degrades significantly due to humidity, be it rain, mist, or just high moisture content. The FLIR image on the MPCD was much clearer in the right weather conditions and often would be displayed on one screen with the moving map on the other. Once again each pilot had their own preference for set up. A 75% phase moon and clear night in low humidity conditions wasn't much harder than a day mission for a single ship flight. A new moon night in bad weather with thick cloud and no urban lighting was another matter, then throw in a formation.