Chuck_Henry

That information is a little out of date. For the benefit of any DCS players with more than a passing intrigue for seeking the Wings of Gold - 1. Folks with STEM degrees are actually a small minority in the pilot ranks these days. Just based on show of hands in every academic class I've had in flight school, maybe only 10-20% had a technical degree of any kind. Fewer than 10% engineers, for sure. My degree is in history and the academics haven't been a problem whatsoever because the material is written for any college-educated individual to understand. 2. IFS is now half that length for Navy and Marine students. I soloed at 13.5 hours and only once. 25 hours and a cross-country is only a requirement for Coast Guard students. 3. The T-34 has been retired since 2011. Primary training is now conducted in the T-6B Texan II, a very high-performance turboprop with an ejection seat, HUD (that never works), glass cockpit, and airliner-style FMS (with only non-precision RNAV capability, sadly). Incredibly fun aircraft, with a better navigation suite than all of the other Navy trainers and many fleet aircraft.

That is correct. That said, the flow of T-45 Intermediate/Advanced is a little different than Primary. You actually start out with Basic Instruments and Radio Instruments flying from the backseat, and the IP does all of the takeoffs and landings. Then you go into Familiarization phase where from Day 1 every pattern and landing you do is like a trap at the boat, including use of the field IFLOLS and painted "carrier box" on the runway. Carrier Qualification is actually pretty late in the game. You might have already completed Tactical Formation, Low Levels, and BFM/ACM all before heading to the boat for real. It all depends on the timing of where you are in the syllabus and when a carrier is available for the clown jets to do their thing. Point being that the carrier-style pattern and landing are completely second-nature by the time students get to CQs.

If you're a Marine training in the T-45C, you will only go to a pointy-nose jet. SNAs are still selecting legacy F/A-18s and AV-8Bs, with the number of slots for the F-35 slowly but steadily growing in proportion to the other two. The only people who don't go to a fighter are Navy E-2/C-2 students. Nowadays, though, they know that's where they're heading as opposed to decades past when you selected "Tailhook," went to the T-45 for Intermediate Jet, then stayed in it for Advanced Strike or went to the T-44 for Advanced Multi-engine.

Sorry about that. Like KIO said below, footstomping is just another way to say "emphasize," really. I was in full agreement with you.

Just going to footstomp this. Procedure vs. technique is something the instructors in any military flight training program (in the US, at least) will pound into you. You can learn different techniques to accomplish the same procedure, but you have to perform the procedure correctly in terms of the configuration, parameters, order of steps, etc. Obviously there are no negative consequences in DCS aside from crashing and having to get a new aircraft, but if your goal is to fly realistically, then you shouldn't use improper technique as a crutch. The procedures are doable if you learn to anticipate what your actions will do to the aircraft in time and space and stay ahead of that, i.e. to avoid pitch-up in the break, there is no requirement to use trim to stay level at 800 feet until you're ready to descend to 600. I regularly trim up for 3 seconds to get on-speed and then simply hold my stick forward as needed until the AOA bracket starts coming down to meet the velocity vector.

This is what works for me, as well. Remember, pulling G equal to 1% of your indicated airspeed is just a guideline. In reality, you can and should pull more or less aggressively as you need to for spacing or wind purposes. Entering the initial at 350 knots, I typically pull 3.8 to 4.0 G and back that off a little passing 300, so that I do end up at 250 by the halfway point as opposed to 20 degrees from downwind heading which is what usually happens if I only pull using the 1% rule. Then I drop the gear and flaps and immediately shallow my angle of bank to about 40-45 degrees so I'm not too tight to the runway. Above all else, remember that no self-respecting Hornet pilot uses the speed brake in the break!

It'll be really cool to see how well (or not) former F-14 pilots have retained their skills. The F/A-18 is one thing since our fellow DCS players who flew it IRL haven't been out of the cockpit that long or are even still flying it. The F-14 pilots will be, at best, 13 years out of practice.

Heatblur F-14D confirmed 2025!

VKB pedals if you don't need toe brakes. MFG Crosswinds if you prefer to have them.

That article completely ignores how maintenance-intensive swing-wings are. It also fails to acknowledge that it was a 1960s solution to aerodynamic problems that have since been solved with fly-by-wire. It's fun to imagine what a true 21st century F-14 could have been, but the reality is that most of those improvements discussed would have required an entirely new airframe anyway, not just a Tomcat gutted and replaced with lightweight electronics and substructure. It's up in the air whether or not you would even need a RIO if the cockpit resembled what we see today in the F-22 and F-35. Also, such an airframe would have almost certainly been designed to not require swing-wings. Suffice it to say the ASF-14 was an aircraft for the military for whom money and logistics are of no object. On the note of "the Super Hornet is a dog" - I advise you to hang around the /r/aviation subreddit sometime. Virtually every real-life Super Hornet pilot would disagree with you. No, the F/A-18E/F cannot match the F-14D in terms of sheer speed and range, but it is the 80% solution that has delivered mission success and readiness on-time and on-budget to the US Navy for going on 2 decades for far better maintainability and reliability than the F-14 was ever capable of. When you look into the Block III upgrades in the works, it even shows that the Rhino has yet to even reach its full potential. CFTs, an EWP, and EPEs will do a lot for its range and negating the drag caused by those outwardly-canted pylons. I love the F-14 as much as anyone, and the D variant will always be my favorite aircraft of all time, but at some point I feel like we all need a wake-up call that it was mostly 1960s technology, barely a 4th-gen fighter, that over time simply became more trouble to keep them in the air than it was worth. Now, a navalized F-22, on the other hand, I would have been all for, but that's an entirely separate discussion.

Lack of a fly-by-wire that trims itself to on-speed AOA will do that. I was perplexed for a while at how difficult it is to fly a 3-degree glideslope in the F-5. I'd cross the runway threshold with amber donut, pull the power at roughly 20 feet, try to flare, and land hard every time. Then I actually read Chuck's Guide (RTFM...imagine that) and learned that's not how you fly an F-5 on final approach. Instead it's a 1000 fpm descent from the abeam turn until short final, then 400 fpm (basically a 2 degree glideslope) until 20 feet when you go idle and flare. That was much easier to get down after a fair bit of practice. Not that much more difficult than, say, an F/A-18 with the HUD off, but definitely different.

This is a drawback inherent to all turbine engines. It's actually not as bad in the F/A-18 compared to an aircraft without FADEC, but it is still enough of a factor that you have to learn to anticipate it. T-45s (the Navy/Marine fighter trainer) actually fly approaches with the speed brakes extended so the engine can operate at higher RPMs for better spool time, without getting too fast. This isn't procedure for the Hornet, but I imagine you could do it by simply holding the speed brake switch to the rear while manipulating the throttle to stay on-speed all the way to touchdown.

That's just a common thing in fast jets without fly-by-wire. One of my friends who's in Meridian flying the T-45 says it's the same way.

The F/A-18C does not have ILS capability. The signals for civilian airfield ILS and carrier/Naval Air Station ICLS are entirely different and incompatible. The legacy F/A-18 can fly TACAN approaches, the plates for which are available for free on Skyvector. The Super Hornet has supposedly been approved for RNAV (GPS), but as far as I know the Marine Corps (the only remaining US military operator of the F/A-18C) has not bought into that since they plan to retire their Hornets by 2030 and TACAN/GCAs have been good enough.

I recommend you listen to the Fighter Pilot Podcast episode that talks about Flight School. They go into quite a bit of detail regarding the advanced training in the T-2/TA-4/T-45 and then the actual F/A-18.

Anyone want to help a fellow out and post instructions on how to create white text DDIs/AMPCD since that guy deleted all of his posts? Or did someone up at ED HQ not like that people were doing this?

More like 2028/2029, etc. At least if ED or some other third-party developer wants to simulate the APG-79 AESA since information on that radar and ones like it remain understandably scarce.

While I'd love to see an F-5EM, this would almost certainly require a lengthy development time and the re-writing of a lot of code. It isn't just quality of life upgrades, but almost an entirely new aircraft in the shell of the original F-5E. Per Wikipedia, the F-5EM includes no less than the following upgrades, which are extensive. - Grifo F radar in a larger nose section - INS/GPS - Aerial refueling system - Electronic warfare systems - HOTAS - Glass cockpit displays and HMD - RWR - Encrypted comms - NVG compatibility - OBOGS It would come down to producing almost an entirely new module.

Gotcha, I'm probably thinking of LANTIRN. Which is no worries at all since the F-14's IRST was apparently not worth it at all, and that's why they replaced it with the TCS for the B model.

Which of these are we getting, again? I know the B is coming out first, but I could have sworn I remember someone saying Heatblur intends to do TCS and IRST, which appears to have only been on the D model.

+1 One thing that a lot of the community doesn't seem to understand is the developers don't just throw a dart at a board with all the potential variants of an aircraft and produce the one it lands on. The newer you get, the harder it is to find documentation on capabilities and characteristics. Especially avionics. For example, Dino's F-14D for FSX/P3D was fun to fly, but a let-down when you go to pull up IRST, TCS, or PTID and see that they're all inop. Or use the manual wing sweep lever and it doesn't do anything. Or find out that you have to tune the radio using a 2D pop out panel. You probably see where I'm going with this.

I would really love to see a full-fidelity E-2/C-2 module. We're well on our way to having a full carrier air wing, but it really wouldn't be complete without that. I'd also like to have a C-130J Super Hercules. So far there really isn't any sim which has one worth a damn. P3D's latest update (4.3) has some basic types, but none have a glass cockpit and they're all medium fidelity at best. There's a ton of potential for unimproved short field ops, airborne drops, kicking Sheridan tanks out the back, and even providing CAS with the Harvest Hawk package. Finally, I really hope that Heatblur will make the F-14D at some point. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, since their F-14 is sure to put anything available for FSX/P3D (Aerosoft F-14X and Dino's F-14D) to shame. Just wish we were getting the definitive, most capable version of America's greatest naval interceptor. I'm also more of a fan of glass cockpits and the Sparrowhawk HUD, for sure.

Air navigation can be as painful as you make it. There are many more ways to navigate that don't involve a moving map on an electronic display in the cockpit. That in itself is an extremely new feature for aircraft in general, and there is a real danger of getting sucked into it as a crutch. https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/pat-pubs/P-767.pdf https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/pat-pubs/P-1208.pdf I recommend skimming at least that first document, which is the publication used for Primary flight training in the US Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard to teach visual navigation. It's a very straightforward procedure called clock-chart-ground. You have waypoints that start at your takeoff airfield, go in a straight lines (magnetic heading) for measured distances, with times it will take you to fly those legs based on your groundspeed. You start a clock on takeoff and reset it after reaching each subsequent checkpoint. As you hit intervals of 2 minutes, check the clock, check your chart for where your aircraft should be after each 2 minutes, and do your best to find an identifiable terrain feature (manmade or natural) corresponding to the chart. tl;dr Navigation is far from rocket science given one has access to a map (F10), a method of keeping time, a known and constant groundspeed, terrain association, and good basic airwork (particularly with heading and speed control).

Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and say that you're being extremely optimistic. Your timeline isn't unrealistic by any means, but it pretty much assumes that absolutely nothing goes wrong short of the usual beta release > bug fix > stable release cycle. We all know from the past that won't happen. Bug fixes break unrelated things for weird reasons, core developers drop their pack and leave, etc.

That's insane. There's no way the actual F/A-18 does that.