DCS F/A-18C

Flight Sims DCS F/A-18C Hornet
2741

You know…with the Normandy theater and WWII aircraft, we could do a nice Final Countdown 2 mission…or Campaign!

The Vinson is doing routine ops in the English Channel when they run into a weird “time storm” (no doubt caused by the ship’s reactors…that evidently happens a lot even though @Navynuke99 won’t admit it). They get transported back to June 4 1944 and have to tackle the moral question of helping the Allies with Operation Overlord. In the mean time, FA-18 dog fighting with German fighters…what fun!

Note to self: Next purchase, P-51 and Me-109

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2742

Yeah… they usually only happen in the plants, on the midwatch, and for some reason they’re always jumps FORWARD in time, like 2-3 hours. Weird.

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2743

This was actually a midwatch conversation with my section in Central that lasted a couple of months on deployment. I’ll start a separate thread for that in a bit.

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2744

Actually not as weird as you think. When I was onboard te USS GUAM, the wardroom participated in proof of concept testing for what the Navy called the Horizontal Time Accelerator (HTA).

The individual HTAs were installed beneath the test participants racks (in those big drawers).

Everyday, after lunch in the wardroom, those selected for HTA Ops. Coincidentally, the same officers who ad to be up and hour or two before reveille…the Intel Officer (me; get the daily intel assessment ready) and a bunch of guys from Air Dept (get the flight deck, etc. ready for flight ops…regardless.

When we had finished lunch, one of us in the group would state, “Onboard the GUAM, Now commence HTA Operations. All designated personnel report to your designated HTA stations.”

We would all go to our staterooms, turn out the lights, lay down on our bunks (the horizontal part of HTA), and close our eyes.

The HTA would then accelerate time ad we would wake up one hour in the future! Then we would go back to work. :sunglasses:

BTW, this may seem like something ridiculous that I just made up but no, aside from the HTA in the drawers under the rack, we really used to do the above verbatim. Gosh I miss amphib sea duty.

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2745

Something else I did in Strike Fighters 2 back in the day…decimate a bunch of Axis planes with modern jets.

Not that the WWII planes were ever the same quality (TK made WWI and Vietnam-era or later, never the WWII-Korea time frame), they were 3rd party mods and some were better than others. Generally speaking, the extreme disparities tend to make the engagements unfulfilling at best and frustrating at worst.
Tends to work better in strategy games than sims.

A fun what-if anyway.

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2746

So, I broke down and ended up buying the 18C and the Persian Gulf today. I started off with a cold start on the Stennis, but I must’ve messed something up because the FCS checks kept going back to a restart state. I tried the procedures for resetting the FCS, but nothing worked – including resetting the breakers. Ended up restarting from the beginning and didn’t get the problem that time around, so I must not have a full grasp on the reset procedure yet. Had no problems after that, beyond trying to get right on the shuttle for a cat launch (as I have no idea how close one needs to be to get that just right).

Adjusting to the thrust in the air was a bit of a challenge as it felt to me like the engines weren’t quite as responsive as the Harrier’s; though naturally, firewalling the throttles made it go quite a bit quicker. I blew up on the first landing (banzai!) but after going through it all again I brought it down successfully, then launched and recovered another time. Definitely not by the book and sloppy as all get out, but I’ll take a good landing over a crash any day.

Air-air seems pretty straightforward, similar to the M2000, so didn’t have a lot of problems adapting to the 9s and 7s. Air-ground is a bit more involved in the programming aspect but I find the CCIP more accurate than the Harrier’s; the Harrier has probably taught me some bad habits, but then again so has years of simming helis and props over jets.

I do have to wonder if I’ve got my settings just right because it feels as if launching from a carrier and landing should be harder than this. Aerial refueling is pretty tough, so once again it could be a familiarity thing.

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2747

Alright, I’m sure everyone knows about this, but my experience is as follows:

I started with a cold start mission to test a few things:

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I was doing this for about ~45mins, practicing landings, air refueling, fiddling around with the BIT page (I used some “Start, ya bastige!” spray on the page to no avail; I clearly don’t have full understanding of all the fiddly bits yet), only to find that my track is fairly corrupt – positional error or altitude error or some such. Around the time I start to line up for landings, my aircraft on the track goes right into the drink, sometimes early on or sometimes later, so I figure the track must be too long or I’m abusing the time warp too much.

So rather than go through it all again, I load up the Cat I carrier landing mission and go from there:

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OK, things are a bit different now. Feels like I’m flying with hydrogen/helium in the tanks, not loaded weight. Follow the instructions for full flaps, etc. but I’m just too dang high:

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Abort this approach, come back around again, this time setting flaps to auto. I don’t like those speed numbers… Used to coming in at ~250.

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Missed the wire!

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On follow up, determine that I really need to lose some speed and alt, so I tone back my approach to ~200kts and lose a bit more altitude.

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That does the trick, though I’m not happy that I caught the 3 wire… I had been catching the 1 wire earlier, so my technique clearly needs work.

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Conclusions: since I’ve been adjusting to taking off and landing with 40-45,000lbs weight, I got used to needing to having more power and coming in a bit sharper than lightly loaded. When loaded in the above scenario, I have a tendency to come in too hot and high. I don’t know if it’s better to practice with a typical combat load or go light. Most of all, I probably need to practice at night and in adverse conditions, in order to shake my habit of trusting my eyes and not the instruments.

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2748

You shoud not land with more then 33-34,000lbs weight!

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2749

With flaps in Half or Full, the FCS is not longer behaving like you’re used to. Instead of trimming for 1G stable flight like in Up And Away mode (AUTO flaps), it’s trimming to keep a specific amount of AoA. The pilot adjusts this value so the plane holds 8.1 units of AoA (the big amber ball to the left of your hud). From there throttle is used to adjust the glide slope, while stuck is used to adjust speed. You don’t fly for a specific speed, but generally speaking it will always work out to ~135 Knots or below depending on your weight.

and what @Ghost0815 said, max trap weight is 33,000 lbs. Anything more and you putting unnecessary stress on the plane and the boat.

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2750

Isn’t 3 wire the best wire to catch??

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2751

I’m pretty sure the boat can take it just fine.

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2752

You are not configured for landing in those approach pictures, and you are not on speed. Flaps are huge on the hornet, you have a tiny sliver deployed, likely because of the speed. Looks like they are in AUTO position. Try this simple excersise to make landing a breeze:

  1. Level flight at 2k feet for safety

  2. Slow to under 250 and drop FULL flap and gear.

  3. Idle the throttle and don’t touch the stick

  4. use trim (usually 2-3 seconds on nose up trim)to put the flight path marker in the middle of the E bracket

  5. Without touching the stick, use the throttle to return the FPM to the horizon (level) and keep it there

When you have it right, you will have the AoA donut, and be flying around somewhere between 120-135 depending on weight and have 0 vertical speed. Congrats, you are now flying “on speed”. This concept was eye opening for me, and is vital to landing the hornet properly. All that’s left to do is nail the pattern numbers, and you will safely land every time.

To reiterate you should see something like this contraption E-o- moving up and down with the throttle movements, but the -o- will stay centered in the E. Do not manually adjust pitch with stick input.

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2753

Practicing like that helped me to understand how much throttle I needed to slow a decent and how quickly the engines responded to the throttle.

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(Is 8500lbs of fuel, two empty bags, 4xMk20s, and 2x9Ms overweight? Someone get me a chart!)

Clear, concise, and to the point. Thanks! I was definitely coming in much too hot in all previous landings since I kept flaps at the auto setting and relied on the flight path vector to guide me onto the deck. It worked, but clearly not best practices.

Thanks! I’ll try that next time I’m playing around with it.

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2755

Definitely. The checklist page on the DDI shows your current aircraft weight.

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2756

Thats just the @Navynuke99 and his friends down in engineering messing with the power to the jet because you are a nugget.

Hmmm…I wonder if they could program a LSO-pilot interchange for weight.

In the real world it goes something like:
LSO - “Three quarters of a mile. Call the ball”
Pilot “Hornet Ball. Five point Eight”
LSO - Roger Ball

Hornet is type of jet (an FA-18C. FA-18s are called Rhino)
Five point Eight is pounds of fuel on board x 1000 (5.8 = 5,800 lbs)

So when the jet gets to 3/4 a mile from the boat, in somewhat proper heading, altitude, speed with gear & hook down for landing, you get Call the Ball on the radio with either an automatic or F-key selection that adds the correct fuel into your reply. If it is under max trap, you get a “Roger Ball” reply. If it is over max trap, you get a wave off…I don’t know the correct terminology since I’ve never seen a jet land too heavy but maybe “Wave Off. Weight”?

Probably wayyyyy down the list of things to develop for the carrier (I know @Navynuke99 wants a Reactor Scram option next)…but it would certainly add to the realism.

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2757

Ss always sage advice from @Gunnyhighway. :smile:

Slowing to 250 kts is usually accomplished in the Break…Start flying parallel the ships heading at something like 300-350 kts a bit off the starboard side of the boat at the aforementioned 2,000 ft. Then Break-pull a hard left turn “at the numbers” (abreast the ship’s number on the flight deck bow), and roll out on the reciprocal heading. They tricky part is pulling enough G’s on the Break to slow to 250 while dropping the gear and Flaps as described…and ending up on the reciprocal heading.

Then do the rest of @Gunnyhighway’s checklist on the downwind to set up for the approach. The NATOPS manual (Chapter 8 I think) has the rest…I always mess up when to start my approach turn.

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2758

DCS: F/A-18C Hornet – Pirouette Maneuver

One of the unique maneuvers of the Hornet is called the pirouette. This is high AoA maneuver that allows the pilot to reposition the nose laterally at very low speeds. It can be very handy in a low speed, high-alpha fight. Here is a little video of how to pull it off.

  • Greater than 45 degrees angle of attack
  • Full lateral stick and rudder in the same direction

The legacy Hornet uses no special “mode” for this maneuver, but the Super Hornet does.

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2759

Nope, that’s the fault of Combat Systems. As Load Dispatcher, once it leaves my load centers (which it does at the O-2 or O-3 levels for bow or waist cats, respectively), it becomes a matter of “not my circus, not my monkeys.” Especially because we used to yell at them all the time anyway about being too lazy to properly switch over their MBT’s and SFMG’s.

2760

Not gonna lie, even simulating Catapult Supervisor Control for the accumulator fill valves would make me happy.

@Hangar200, did you ever qualify OOD, or was that outside your scope?