Noob Afterburner Ques

[CrackerJack]

This is going to sound like a dumb question. I've read the manual and completed the Take Off and Landing tutorials but I'm totally confused when it comes to the afterburner.

 

Is the afterburner engaged by simply placing the throttle at max power?

 

On the L segment panel there are number of switches that refer to afterburner operation:

 

No 12 - Emergency nozzle??

 

No 33 - Engine nozzle control switch?

 

No 57 - Second afterburner on/off switch?

 

At this stage what I want to understand is the basic operation of the afterburner. Can anyone give the a rough idea or point me in the right direction please.

[ttaylor0024]

Afterburner is engaged at about 95% of your throttle quadrant movement. In real life there will be a detent in the throttle quadrant. You do not need to flip any extra switches to engage the afterburner.

 

The Second Afterburner basically just increases fuel flow further and gives you extra power. Flip the switch on and your normal afterburner will be more powerful. Note that just because the switch is flipped to on doesn't mean the afterburner is on.

 

You can tell the after burner is on in the cockpit by the newly added audio, as well as two green lights on the right vertical annunciator panel (right of the tachometer). In english, one light on the left of it will say "AFB (afterburner)" and the other on the right will say "Nozzle Open." Picture added to help, and the lights are circled in red. Your temperature gauge below your tachometer will have a temp above 650*C. Another way is to look at the engine tachometer itself and you will notice the indicators in the yellow arc.

 

 

Note that the light at the bottom of the red circle to the left of the radar is for external fuel tanks, and will not show up if you have a full centerline fuel tank and you're afterburning.

Edited January 18, 2015 by ttaylor0024

[CrackerJack]

Thank you! TTaylor, much appreciated!

[Stealth_HR]

Also, to the right of the AB light is the "second AB" light, for when you're afterburning, you've switched L57 on and you're below 5000m ASL.

[Mike Busutil]

Also for what it's worth, the afterburner has two switches. These will have to be enabled in order for each one to work. "Afterburner 1" (Far left) is the main one while "Afterburner 2" is the emergency afterburner.

 

[Fishbreath]

I have the Engine Nozzle Control Switch bound to an easy-to-reach key, to kind of fake having a detent. It makes it much easier to use military power without accidentally getting into a reheat mode.

[xxJohnxx]

I have the Engine Nozzle Control Switch bound to an easy-to-reach key, to kind of fake having a detent. It makes it much easier to use military power without accidentally getting into a reheat mode.

 

But if you switch of the engine nozzle control you can loose lots of thrust in less than 100% throttle settings. I am not sure why you would want to do it this way.

Would be much easier to just set up a custom control curve where you have a short flat zone just before you go into afterburner.

[Fishbreath]

That's not been my experience at all--there's the nozzle power switch on the right vertical panel with the rest of the systems power switches, but the LV33 switch doesn't seem to cause a loss in power to me. It just prevents entry into afterburner, as far as I can tell.

[panzerd18]

Second afterburner should not be used for more than 3 minutes at any one time.