Chuck_Henry

Sorry, dude, but this is entirely wrong. Other countries besides the US may have added ILS to their F/A-18s, but American F/A-18s remain without it. Your only options for approaches ashore are TACAN, PAR, or ASR. Supposedly, some Naval Air Stations have ICLS at the airfield, but the signals there and at the carrier are different from civil ILS which will not work with the F/A-18's ICLS receiver. Super Hornets received RNAV capability in the last few years, and Marine legacy Hornets in the last few months, but this only includes LNAV approaches, not LNAV/VNAV or LPV. Yes, you can use the UFC to create precise waypoints with elevation and use them to create an artificial glideslope if you want. Put them a mile apart starting at the runway numbers going up 300 feet each mile on the final approach course. Just understand that this is not a realistic practice, nor is it legal by any stretch of the imagination under FAA or ICAO regulations. The F/A-18's GPS lacks Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring, so it has no way of determining and alerting the pilot to bad satellite data.

Wow, this is a fantastic resource. It's like the Dan's Diversion and OPARS sites that a lot of us use for preflight planning IRL.

A lot of this depends on how you're flying the approach. If you're doing a 3-degree descent at on-speed AOA, then you don't have a whole lot of extra energy to hold the nose up. That said, it's not an F/A-18, nor is it meant to be flown like one. Mover, in his recent F-5 video, says the final approach is shallower than what most aircraft fly, and flies almost the entire pattern at amber chevron (fast), without so much as the green donut showing until the crack-shift-idle-flare at the threshold.

Just adding on that I, too, would really like an Afterburner Detent option under the Special tab just like ED did with the F/A-18. There are fewer things worse right now in the F-14 than finagling a detent-less throttle around the 80% range to get mil power without lighting off the burners.

The F-5EM would be amazing, but it would effectively amount to a whole new module. The reason I support the F-5N upgrade is it would be minimal work compared to installing a whole new suite of avionics and weapons.

I can second his assertion. I can only go into so much detail because of Rule 1.16, but the F-14's current behavior regarding Direct Lift Control and AOA directly contradicts NATOPS. It was fine before the last update, but now it's definitely off.

I personally prefer the F/A-18 over the F-14. The F-14 is great for the "cool factor," being the jet from Top Gun and all, but I don't really enjoy flying as much as I thought I would. There are a lot of quirks due to it being this complex analog-digital hybrid from the late 1960s; I'm honestly more at ease in the purely analog F-5E since it's so simple. The Tomcat is a handful to manage in the Case 1 pattern with DLC and speed brake to worry about, in addition to the gear, flaps, and trim. You can tell the Cat was designed as a high-speed BVR fighter above all else with the poor forward visibility due to the "jailbars" on the canopy, too. The F/A-18C has a lot more systems depth, a greater variety of weapons, and is an overall much more versatile jet than the F-14B ever was. Sure, it doesn't have range/endurance like the F-14, but that's what external tanks and aerial refueling are for, right?

Well, the difference is in real life, you know where things are based on feel. Blindfold cockpit checks are part of your first sims when learning a new aircraft, or at least it is now in the US Navy's flight school. Can't exactly take that approach when you're just clicking things on a screen.

2-109. If your version is different, just Ctrl+F "Direct Lift Control."

The only caveat to using Fuel Flow instead of turbine RPM to judge engine thrust is that FF will vary greatly based on pressure altitude. This doesn't matter for carrier ops since you're pretty much at sea level. As for using N1 RPM in the T-38, well, load up the DCS F-5 and try to control the engine by just looking at FF. Damn near impossible. I don't know if that's a difference between turbofans and turbojets or what.

Ah, that would explain it. The Air Force overhead break is pretty different from the carrier break.

I distinctly remember Jello on the Fighter Pilot Podcast said no self-respecting fighter pilot uses the speed brake in the break. For a long time, I managed to fly mine without using it, although I'd hit 250 with only 30-40 degrees of the break turn to go instead of the 90 that you're supposed to have. That said, a couple of our resident Hornet pilots have said to use it, and it's much easier to slow down from anything above 350 and still get the gear down by wings-level on downwind. I now use the speed brake by default.

Wow, he was right at home in that thing from the start. Really shows how similar the T-38 and F-5 are, and how well BST did to model the jet in the sim. I realize now I've been flying my patterns all wrong. On touch-and-goes, I'd turn crosswind almost exactly like in the F/A-18, pulling the power to maintain on-speed AOA with a manageable rate of climb at 30 degrees angle of bank, except climbing to 1500' instead of 600'. I'm gonna really have to practice that part where you accelerate to 240, then pull up and whip it to the left.

I scanned through Victory's Case 1 guide and couldn't find that, so I went to the good book (NATOPS) and it's there. EDIT: Removed a direct copy+paste. Forgot we can't reference documents newer than 1980. In any case, yeah, something is now off with Heatblur's modeling of DLC.

The G's for 1% of airspeed rule is not for the entire break turn. Once you lower gear and flaps, assess how tight or wide you are in relation to the runway and adjust your bank angle (adding in forward stick pressure as necessary to keep from ballooning) to roll out at the appropriate abeam distance. My technique is typically to shallow out to 20-25* angle of bank as soon I slap the gear and flap handles down right at 250. In real life and in sims with sufficient scenery detail, you want to be familiar with the airfield's surroundings and create a good ground reference point to fly over each time. The goal with VFR traffic patterns in general is to fly the same ground track each time, not hit the wickets of 27-30* AOB each time. What you must never do, verified with a friend of mine who's a T-45 SNA, are bust 600' AGL or exceed 45* AOB in the 180 turn. The former can lead to a mid-air with someone in the break who gets sloppy with their altitude. The latter can prove catastrophic if you lose your left engine (assuming a left pattern) and get slow. The FTI and NATOPS numbers are an ideal starting point for a no-wind standard day at typical landing weight, but they are by no means hard and fast rules. Use your eyeballs and "do that pilot shit."

Most NDBs are decommissioned for good, so we do NDB approaches only in the sim. Not too bad when you just think about it as a needle-only approach. Partial panel in the aircraft is still a thing, though, even though most IPs agree that the odds of being that navigationally degraded in real life are astronomically low. Then again, so are the odds of really losing a PT6 engine (fuel starvation or inadvertent fuel cutoff aside), but we still train for that.

Yep. We only did Basic Instruments in the TH-57, essentially just to improve our basic airwork before jumping into Formation flights. But we do the full T-44 syllabus, so any pointers for Review Stage would be quite welcome :pilotfly:

Not a jet jockey, but have been IFR-trained essentially 2 going on 3 times now (T-6 in Primary, TH-57 in Intermediate, and soon T-44 for Advanced which will result in my actual NATOPS Instrument Rating). At the risk of oversimplifying matters, I view it as 2 main things. 1. Knowing your aircraft's power and attitude settings for desired airspeed and climb/descent rate (or level flight). You should know cold what bank angle you need for a standard rate turn, what pitch attitude and power adjustment you need for standard rate climbs and descents, how to set and fly a 3-degree glideslope, and how to make level speed changes without ballooning or descending. If you don't, you're already setting yourself up for failure. 2. Maintaining an aggressive instrument scan. Someone above already mentioned the "hub-and-spoke" method, in which most of your scan is on the attitude indicator and you systematically shift your eyes to the airspeed, altimeter, heading, and VSI. In addition to deviations from desired parameters, you also have to take into account the rate at which the needles are moving (or the trend vectors in a glass cockpit aircraft). That will determine how drastic or subtle the power or attitude correction needs to be. You might also want to spend a little time hawking that particular gauge if you're way off, but avoid the trap of fixating and letting everything else go to crap. It's a science in theory, but everybody has their own techniques. Don't be afraid to use and abuse the trim. Get that VSI exactly where you want it. In a fast jet like the F-14, that's the thing that's going to get away from you the quickest.

Genuine partial panel while IMC is an emergency, period. You will be declaring one with ATC and requesting no-gyro vectors for a PAR or ASR to the nearest suitable airfield.

There's no real schedule. The estimated dates and such given by Wags and NineLine are what the development team is aiming for. The features are finished when they get finished. Sometimes they get ahead and sometimes they get behind. Wags posted a while back that overall, the upcoming features in the chute require significantly longer to get correct, so we're just going to have to be patient.

The training missions that come with the F/A-18C module are decent for learning the basics. If you want some kind of written reference for learning maneuvers, this US Navy flight school Intermediate Jet Familiarization publication is a great place to start feeling your way through flying the Hornet. https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/pat-pubs/P-1212.pdf It's written for the T-45C, but you can apply the same principles to the Hornet fairly easily. I recommend starting with this as opposed to the NATOPS because that publication assumes you've been through the undergraduate T-45 syllabus.

You are correct in that you'll mostly be flying and attacking your targets visually. The F-5E is really not much more than a day VFR fighter.

0 curves or deadzones on my center-mounted Virpil T-50 grip/WarBRD base. It's precise enough to handle the F-14 or the F/A-18 intuitively. The F-5 can feel twitchy at first, but you just have to get used to a "less is more" approach to handling the stick. Aim to move it with just your fingers and wrist most of the time. Forearm should be resting on your leg. This is how it's done in real fighter aircraft.

I think that particular video got taken down for some reason. I used to have it saved to a playlist, but it isn't there anymore.

You do have AOA on the HUD, it's just in reference to the aircraft reticle and not the flight path marker.