Chuck_Henry

I can't speak to aerial refueling specifically since I so rarely ever do it (and even then, with mixed results), but I spend much of my time performing FCLPs, carrier approaches, and IFR flight which often require similar precision. I've found that zero deadzone and zero curve are the only ways I can fly anymore, whether it's in the F-14 or otherwise. Deadzones should only be necessary with crappy potentiometer-based hardware (which you do not have) Curves are a band-aid on the wound of sloppy control. What's your seat setup like? In actual fighters, your right forearm should rest on your kneeboard and most stick motion should come from your wrist. Sometimes just your fingertips. If you have your stick on top of the desk and have to elevate your arm and muscle it around, you're never going to get the precision you need. You should also never be "chasing the basket." You're told in IRL aerial refueling training never to do that. It's specifically what results in over-correction and pilot-induced oscillations. Aerial refueling is simply flying formation off a tanker. Know your visual checkpoints on the wing and body of the tanker and scan them continuously, then make the corrections smooth and small.

Damn, that was impressive. The pilot there must have shoved the throttles to mil right as he felt the mains touch down. In DCS, at least, the nose seems to want to drop a lot on touchdown if you get more than ~10 knots below final approach speed.

Just wanted to add to the discussion that if the comparison here is with the F-5, then adding a non-linear stick option to the F-14 would be realistic. I have the T-38 (trainer version of the F-5) for another PC sim, and while I never pay attention to what my stick is doing while actively flying, when you press the takeoff trim button on the ground, it moves the stick in the same way that @IronMike says the F-14 trims.

I'll concur with the initial post. Idle thrust and speed brakes are downright mandatory for the overhead break, which I have a hard time believing is the case IRL. Even the F-5, if you leave the throttles at whatever setting gave you 300 knots for the initial, will slow down to well below 250 if you simply roll and pull. The JF-17, with its significantly larger LEXs, should want to slow down even more.

Correct. What I meant to get across was that you can flare with a power push, but this takes quite a bit of practice to avoid simply going level at 50’ AGL or even starting a climb again. The F/A-18 is forgiving if you use the stick to flare even if this results in the slow AOA chevron. Touchdown speed in jets like these is roughly 10 knots slower than final approach speed, anyway, and ground effect helps you once you get low enough for that to be significant, as well.

You don't need to add power as you flare. Because of the way the FCS will maintain your trimmed AOA in the landing configuration, you can add power to flare like a C-17, but flaring with the stick will give you finer control over your vertical velocity. At around 50' AGL, just crack some power out (as a technique, I reduce the throttles halfway from whatever setting was keeping me on-speed toward idle) and raise the nose to put the Flight Path Vector just below the horizon. As soon as the main gears are firmly on deck, throttles to idle and hold the nose off as long as possible. With Half flaps, you can aerobrake the jet like an F-16, although NATOPS explicitly says it is not recommended (unlike the Super Hornet). With Full flaps, the nose will drop as soon as the main gear struts compress under the weight of the jet.

To answer the question, aerobraking is definitely a little bit of an art in this jet. If you look at the video I posted in the "Looking for critiques of my landing pattern" thread, you can see that it is entirely possible to aerobrake the F-5E until the nose comes down at around 100 knots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BplENaeyWfk I've found that the key, other than a properly trimmed jet and transition to flare, is to not milk the flare searching for that "butter the bread" landing. If you get slower than 10 knots below final approach speed (whatever was holding on-speed on final), you'll be almost out of aft longitudinal control margin and unable to hold the nose off for more than maybe 1 second. If you end up flaring too high or too long and want to aerobrake the jet, you may end up having to relax the stick to kill some lift and accept a harder landing. Or you can waveoff and try again.

It is possible in DCS, but only if you use Half flaps. This may very well be the case in the real jet, as well. Full flaps moves the center of lift significantly aft. The main gears are well behind the aircraft's center of gravity, so there isn't much aft longitudinal control margin below rotation speed anyway. You can still fly on-speed AOA on final, but around 50' AGL, crack some power out, shift the flight path vector to just below the horizon line, hold about 8 degrees nose up until you touch down on the mains, and bring the throttles to idle. (If you go to idle before touchdown, the engines won't spool down from flight to ground idle, and this will extend your landing roll). Hold that same flare attitude as you decelerate; if you go full aft stick immediately, you'll lift off the runway slightly. The nose gear will come down on its own below 110 knots (clean, typical landing gross weight).

Hey, just wanted to say thanks up front for all the constructive feedback. Point by point: - Yeah, I should have left the info bar. I recorded this mainly to post to Reddit and send to a couple friends, not as much for analysis. Next time I may save the track instead of recording video and deciding when and where to switch between cockpit and external views. - That's good to know that the crosswind turn is open to technique, and that it doesn't have to be the "pull, then roll" that I saw in C.W. Lemoine's video. I remember during one of my last instrument flights in the T-6 in real life, the IP I had was an exchange officer from the Air Force, and he preferred to do the "roll, then slice-up pull" on departure. Definitely feels more natural to me IRL and in the sim. - Did not know that the expectation is to drop the gear abeam as opposed to wings-level on downwind. I'll start doing that and aiming to maintain parameters. My initial thought is it gives you less time to trim and adjust power for that increased drag, but I suppose that can be a fun challenge. - Yeah, I think I subscribe to the C.W. Lemoine philosophy of accepting fast around the turn and on final since it keeps you in the ejection envelope. Not that it matters in the sim, of course. I thought about also keeping half flaps until the 90, then rolling to full, but due to the decreased drag and increased speed I find I overshoot every now and then when doing that. - Aimpoint is definitely my weak point in the pattern. I'll work on using the threshold instead of the numbers or the captain's bars if 500' down the runway is the goal. Yeah, the Air Force now teaches 2.5 to 3 degree glidepath, according to the T-38 Flying Fundamentals document which was my primary source in learning how to handle the F-5 in DCS. That combined with the short-ish aimpoint feels almost dangerously low, which is why I may unconsciously aim longer.

This is actually true, and it really shot ED in the foot in terms of A/G radar development. Realistically speaking, it's probably going to be the last thing finished for the F/A-18.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BplENaeyWfk After a few weeks, I feel like I'm really getting it down. Mover's F-5 fam flight video really helped me figure out the crosswind turn and fly appropriate speeds from downwind to final instead of on-speed AOA the entire time like the F/A-18. Some sticking points that don't feel quite right: - Transitioning from the climbing part of the crosswind turn to the level part. There seems to be a part in which you have to roll the jet to nearly 90 degrees angle of bank to stop the climb, reduce power, then shallow out to about 45 degrees (or as required for proper abeam spacing). I'm not sure if I'm ratcheting the jet through this a bit much. - Transitioning from the steeper part of the approach turn to the 2.5-degree glide path. I feel like my tendency right now is to dip below the proper glide path as I'm decelerating toward on-speed due to an improper aimpoint. Where do you guys try to place the runway numbers relative to the gunsight glass?

What are you doing with power and the speed brake during the break itself? It seems like you rolled out really tight on downwind since you had to bank it hard to at least 60 degrees off the perch. That's not prohibited to my knowledge, but it's certainly not ideal. EDIT: Nice aerobrake at the end, though. I'm still trying to figure that part out myself. Even just a little backstick pressure on my part seems to really want to make the nose pitch past 10 degrees up.

Unfortunately, the Clean Labels Cockpit mod is the only thing that approaches what you're asking for. Hopefully there are folks working on mods to solve this kind of issue. For what it's worth, according to our handful of former F-14 aircrew around here, the gauges could be fairly difficult to read in the real jet, too.

The F-5's value to me is that it's a very manual, analog jet with nothing to compensate for poor airmanship or planning. I consider it a trainer, like its unarmed counterpart the T-38, for maintaining pure stick-and-rudder skills, e.g. scanning outside instead of relying on the HUD, trimming in the pitch axis, maintaining coordinated rudder. For actual combat, I don't recommend it.

I'm going to disagree, if only because canopy imperfections are something your brain and eyes automatically look past IRL, whereas on a 2D monitor they're more apparent and annoying.

In all fairness, wouldn't be the first time a DCS module didn't exactly reflect something you'd find IRL. Our F-5E is a variant that basically nobody used, with a too-old radio stack and too-new RWR.

And hopefully a fix for the still-bugged attitude gyro that drifts after like one VFR pattern.

Fair enough.

I'm an F-5N advocate because it would be minimal work compared to a significantly less advanced (F-5A) or more advanced (F-5EM) Tiger variant. Much as I love this jet and want to see greater lethality, I don't think ED could justify a massive revision when there are so many other aircraft people want to see.

First and foremost, I appreciate that you folks have made strides to improve communication with the user base. That does not go unnoticed. However, even if you communicate early and openly about going back on your word, it doesn't change the fact that you went back on your word. I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering the post about "Viper development not impacting Hornet development" being more committal than it actually was. In any case, I think all but the most unreasonable of us have come to terms with how ED has chosen to handle the F-16 and F/A-18 concurrent development, and that it didn't make sense to force programmers to bounce back and forth between the jets just so the Hornet would get TWS before the Viper. Personally, I'm not going to disagree at this point. But it still felt like a bit of a slap in the face for those of us who committed to the F/A-18 and have little to no interest in the new baby, so to speak.

Being a pulse-Doppler radar, the AWG-9 was far better than older "pulse radars" such as those on (most) F-4s and F-5s. “Look-down, shoot-down" capability was a game-changer. It was, however, a mostly analog system. You needed the RIO to perform tasks that are largely automated in the radars of the F-16 and F/A-18, for example. Under the hood, the AWG-9 utilized an analog computer. It wasn't until the F-14D and its APG-71 (the AWG-9 with improvements from the F-15E’s APG-70) that the Tomcat had a digital computer for better processing speed, mode flexibility, clutter rejection, and detection range. It was improved clutter rejection that really made the F-14 a better over-land performer.

If they can't develop the D, I'd at least like the option to equip the B with the Sparrowhawk at some point in the future.

Q-5 (either variant) has my vote. DCS needs more dedicated ground-pounders.

Can confirm. CCIP is actually almost considered an emergency mode for F/A-18 pilots these days. With the sort of conflicts in which the United States has been involved over the past 2 decades, there's just so little tolerance for error in bomb drop. The overwhelming majority of the time in actual combat, it will be GPS or laser-guided because that's preferable to someone basically eyeballing when to pickle.

The unfortunate reality, in the words of the founder himself, is that the Early Access module is the only thing keeping DCS profitable. Working on the core sim does not generate revenue. Working on modules for which the sales have already peaked and (mostly) fizzled out does not generate revenue. Churning out new modules for Early Access release generates hype and revenue. Where do you think the development team is going to direct their talent and labor? We've reached the point in which I believe Eagle Dynamics needs to seriously consider a subscription model for DCS. There needs to be a way for the core sim to make money, or we are never going to see another finished module unless it's from a third-party.