Northrop F-5E Technical Description

[nairb121]

@Curly I wanted to ask in a new topic to leave your aileron bug report relatively clean - in the Technical Description documents you have, is there any discussion of the relationship between true AOA in degrees and the displayed AOA units? I suspect there is a mismatch in our DCS F-5E, but have been unable to find much useful. See post here for previous discussion:

 

[BIGNEWY]

Ive sent Curly a PM, we would like to see this document if possible, as long as it is a public one of course. If anyone has this please DM me. 

thank you 

[Bucic]

Are you talking about

units vs AoA mismatch or 

units-AoA relation real vs units-AoA in-game

?

[nairb121]

2 hours ago, Bucic said:

Are you talking about

units vs AoA mismatch or 

units-AoA relation real vs units-AoA in-game

?

Both, really - I've been unable to find much to correlate the true AOA and indicated units, only scattered references to stall AOA - stated in one report to be 23°, and in the -1 to be 27-28 units - Notably, this does not seem to match DCS, which places 27.5 units AOA at about 20°. This doc seems promising though, I hope we can see it in full before too long.

[Bucic]

On 10/28/2025 at 2:52 PM, nairb121 said:

Both, really - I've been unable to find much to correlate the true AOA and indicated units, only scattered references to stall AOA - stated in one report to be 23°, and in the -1 to be 27-28 units - Notably, this does not seem to match DCS, which places 27.5 units AOA at about 20°. This doc seems promising though, I hope we can see it in full before too long.

Ok. So let me tell you this - neither correlation matters. You fly by the units. Not only F-5E real flight manual doesn't bother with a conversion table or tape. There used to be a thread on this citing FMs of even newer machines with the same caveat. I am aware of the subject, I'm allergic to arbitrary, vague units and I've never seen a single reference pointing to a conversion data set. Because it does not matter in real flying.

 

Hell, you can do a quick conversion yourself. Note down 5 pairs of units vs aoa (from the in-game info bar) and just dump it into excel. Insert a trend line with the option to reveal the equation. Done.

I'm guessing it's always linear, so you can draf t a quick conversion tape like this

Edited Wednesday at 07:56 PM by Bucic

[nairb121]

1 hour ago, Bucic said:

Because it does not matter in real flying.

You're correct, knowing the "true AOA" is not relevant to typical piloting situations - all operational numbers are based on the gauge units. But the true AOA is relevant from a flight modeling standpoint, and as you know, there is fairly substantial evidence that the DCS F-5 has something amiss with its AOA modeling. I suspect that the root of this issue is an error in the correlation between indicated and true AOA - but I have no data apart from a single point, the stall AOA as mentioned above.

[Bucic]

On 10/29/2025 at 10:59 PM, nairb121 said:

You're correct, knowing the "true AOA" is not relevant to typical piloting situations - all operational numbers are based on the gauge units. But the true AOA is relevant from a flight modeling standpoint, and as you know, there is fairly substantial evidence that the DCS F-5 has something amiss with its AOA modeling. I suspect that the root of this issue is an error in the correlation between indicated and true AOA - but I have no data apart from a single point, the stall AOA as mentioned above.

For that there would have to have been ¿ a scenario where FM programmers had no data point for a specific flight condition available in plain AoA so they had to resort to AoA units gauge. Highly unlikely. 

It's also problematic from a bug reporting standpoint. It's just compounding variables.

There's a dedicated documented and acknowledged bug report on AoA capability inaccuracy. The error is significant, to the point any other discussion on AoA in higher numbers seems a waste of time until that modeling error is fixed.