Unless they changed something…
That’s a good one. I do the same thing with the gear switch, after I select it down, I keep my finger on it until I see all the green lights and I don’t remove my finger until that happens and I say “three green” out loud.
Or just clip your tie to the yoke plateholder…
I actually flew with a captain that did this when we got an instruction to call 10K climbing.
I’ll admit it’s not recommended for fighterpilots…
That must be like front row seat main stage at your gentleman’s club of choice.
I have the afternoon off today…I’ll check it out!
@BeachAV8R
All this discussion around how the fuel dump switch works and bingo levels is great and all, but… have you made anything go BOOM! yet?
His own jet, no doubt…
should prolly put those in the Persian Gulf thread too.
A very good idea!
Although I was never a naval aviator, I spent a lot of time around them during my career and picked up a few tidbits.
Your scan as you move into “the groove” is basically, Meatball (IFLOLS), alignment, speed (as shown by the indexer lights next to the hud).
The one thing you are really, really not supposed to do is “spot the deck” i.e. look any length of time at the deck as you would look at a runway for landing. (The quick check for alignment doesn’t count)
The meatball takes care of that - its gyro stabilized to put you on the 3 wire (2 wire for CVN-76 and higher). The reason is that even in fairly calm seas, the deck is moving and your visual perspective is constantly changing…is it you flying the airplane? Or is it the ship moving? A combo of both? The meatball takes ship movement out of the equation so that you know, any deviations from glide slope are you in the plane.
Of course if DCS oceans are “sea state 0” - not moving, the above is fairly moot.
Spent some time this morning playing with the flight model. I know, I know…blow some stuff up…yeah I know. You guys know me by now though…I really enjoy incrementally exploring these modules whether they are DCS or P3D or whatever…
So I took the clean Hornet free flight mission and took her up to about 20,000’, put out the speedbrake to slow down with throttles to idle and waited for speed to drop to around 180 knots. Passing through that, I retracted the speedbrake, added full power on the left engine, and started pitching the nose and held around 40 degrees or so as speed decayed further. As expected, to hold heading more and more left rudder was required until hitting the rudder limit. At around 85 knots or so, the rudder could no longer hold heading and the nose started to drift right. Holding full back stick the plane continued to rotate to the right, the nose started to fall and a right rotation spin developed at which time I pulled the left engine to idle.
The plane in this image is rotating to the right even though the bank is slightly to the left. Spin mode engages showing the control input to correct for the spin. It seems unusual to me that though we are spinning to the right the indicator tells you to put the stick to the right…but I have to remember this is a fly-by-wire airplane that has a bunch of weird control surfaces that can figure out better what to do than I can. So stick to the right, neutral rudder (I didn’t see any rudder command). And wait, and wait.
Falling at about 11-14,000’ per minute at around 60 knots, it took about four or five rotations before the speed started creeping back up as pitch reduced to around -35 degrees and at around 140 knots or so the spin mode disengaged after dropping about 18,000’. At that point, with the extra speed and the nose pitch low…we are indicating more around 18,000 FPM down… Ease out of the nosedive carefully without secondary stalling and you are back in business.
Gave it a whirl in the other direction…going a bit higher this time…left engine to idle, right engine full power…again Vmca at around 80-85 knots where you reach max rudder authority. And off she rolls to the left this time…settling into a left rotation spin. If you just let go of the elevator as the incipient spin develops, the plane will come out of it…you have to try pretty hard and put in positive spin inputs to get yourself silly.
Out of curiosity, I tried traditional spin inputs of throttles idle, stick forward and centered, and full opposite direction of spin rudder.
Well…after falling about 20,000’ with no sign of that working, I couldn’t stand it anymore and went with the computer suggested spin recovery and took my feet of the pedals and buried the stick to the left…at around 5-6,000’ and it took a few rotations before the speed started to recover and with my heart in my throat I was able to pull out at just below 1,000’…sorry Wags, you probably regret letting me play with your Hornet now…
Anyway - thrilling ride and nice to see that spin recovery mode suggestions actually work. I’d have to dive into the book to understand why the spin recovery stick placement is in the direction of the spin…but I’m sure it has to do with something something computer aerodynamics control surfaces something something…
well, you damn near blew something up there
So…umm… ?
LOL…I’m working my way up to it. Where’d I put that barf bag?
The computer says ”do it”
Beach its the same in a strike eagle, you just follow the directions on the spin recovery display. Fun fact what you are doing with the stick (in the strike eagle) is using the stabs as an airbrake to slow down your rotation more than anything else, just don’t have any forward stick in or you are in for a massive world of hurt.
Is now the time for the joke where the Air Force prints the direction on the MFD and the Navy pilots get an arrow?
That would leave the Marines with beer keg and burger icons?
I believe their’s are an icon of Mattis’ knife hand
Also Beach, after you get done with the , wanna try out the A/G stuff? I’m curious if they got the CCRP and designation logic in yet.