1st attempts 
this is HUGE fun, i feel like Chuck Yeager but sat on my sofa with a coffee instead of wedged into a starfighter scared to death 
92387ft in the tomcat and more to come. just technique now…
1st attempt, F-14B, clean with max internal fuel, ground cold start. Got as fast as I could at 2-3,000ft in dry thrust, then hit burners and shallow climb to 50,000ft, then leveled off. Kept burners on, got to max speed, then another gradual climb to 75,000ft. Got to max speed again, then got to 85,000ft, then dove down to 70,000 and began a lazy, 60deg climb. Got to 112,000ft over Crimea.
Used up almost entire internal gas on this one, ended at 600lbs remaining. Tried the Mirage – burned out the engine at 60,000ft. MiG-29A, just couldn’t get power above 60,000ft. Su-33 the same. Switched back to the F-14B for a second attempt over Caucasus, same procedure:
Of particular note, you’ll see that the fuel flow gauges have gone down to virtually nothing at these altitudes. So I have no idea if they’re even generating much thrust, if at all…
Oh, I also flat spinned the F-14B for the first time doing this. At about 90,000ft on recovering, it entered a spin which continued for a few revolutions. I hit the SAS override, released the stick and only pressed opposite pedal and it recovered within a couple revolutions.
Ok so you put into practise what I was thinking of trying next. That’s awesome @franze! 112000ft is seriously cool. I tried a modified ballistic climb as I wasn’t sure about speeding back up after the first ‘step’ to 75k like you did.
This is brilliant. The wife has insisted I watch a film so I can’t go and try again but tommorow me and the tomcat are gonna get seriously high together 
Real problem is that the air density doesn’t give the engines much to work with at those altitudes. I’ve no idea what the real numbers are for the F-14, but public figures give a ceiling of 53,000ft for the GE engines and 56,000ft for the PW engines. When we get the F-14A, it might actually do better than the F-14B in this regard, if the PW engines are capable of generating more thrust at altitude than the GE engines are.
I might try putting a tanker at 45,000ft, refueling at it, then spend more time getting up to speed, but that’s probably a violation of the rules. 
When you climbed up to 85k would it possibly be better to ballistic climb from there at highest speed or do you think the dive back down made the difference you wanted? I’m genuinely interested in how you got that high lol thatd 20k ft higher than me and I want to beat that
Issue with 85k is you really don’t have much speed to work with, or at least I didn’t. 150-160kts doesn’t give much authority and the air density is so thin it’s very easy to spin out, so you need at least 250kts to get some decent elevator authority. Thus it’s kind of a yo-yo pattern, setting up for a maximum speed and maximum angle over time… And you don’t have much control authority! Note that almost all the instruments are off by quite a huge margin from the infobar due to the deviations.
Some screenshot of a Mig-21bis mission I’ve been working on. I’ve noticed that my AI wingmen don’t turn off their taxi/landing lights when airborne.
I’m stealing a couple of these for my “Desktops” folder!
Nice one Franze! Great achievement. I was able to get Su-33 to 110532ft today.
But seems like the champion is the Eagle
First I got it to 2,5 Mach in level flight @37k ft
Then went into a <3G climb to around 50°
and ended up at 119988 ft!
At the top I was going basically sideways, RCS would come in handy here
WOW! That’s serious height!
I attempted a two-staged design by firing a Phoenix at the top, but the game stops to draw object somewhere above 300’000 ft
I felt that as soon as someone tried the F-15, it’d be the clear winner here!
From the numbers it has similar power to the 14 but less weight, and also carries three drop tanks so you can be more liberal with the power.
Will be interesting to see how the 16 could do - is total thrust a larger factor than power/weight?
You don’t need the tanks. Just head to an altitude that maximize your speed, slam the throttles to zone 5, when you feel that you no longer accelerate and have burned most of the fuel but enought to make to the top - climb. The way you do it will determine how high you go.
I think it wont go far, maybe similar to the Hornet - it does have good thrust-to-weigh ratio, but overall thrust and small mass will yield smaller kinetic energy pool. And since altitude is a measure of potential energy whe need a lot of kinetic energy to spend to exchange it to that potential energy. Big thrust and lots of weight to accumulate that energy is a key here in my opinion.
I noticed that too…think I may have posted that in another thread…can’t remember what the answers were.
One would think that, if programing a wingman’s lights logically (gear down & darkness) is difficult (it might very well be) then a wingman’s landing lights should match the flight lead. The 21 seems to be the only mod where the wingman’s landing lights are always on.
