Today, June 2nd 2021, is the 75th Anniversary of the Italian Republic - and we thought there was not a better day to announce our second commercial project for DCS - since, in real life, it was one of the biggest successes of the Italian aerospace industry.
DCS G.91
The G.91 is an Italian jet fighter aircraft of Cold War era designed and optimized for Strike and Recon missions. The G.91 originates in the NATO NBMR-1 competition in 1953, which sought a light fighter-bomber “Light Weight Strike Fighter” to be adopted as standard equipment across the air forces of the various member nations.
The G.91 was declared winner of the competition in 1958 and entered into operational service with the Italian Air Force in 1961, and with the West German Luftwaffe in the following year. It was also evaluated by the U.S.Army and adopted by Portuguese Air Force, who made extensive use of the type during the Portuguese Colonial War in Angola and Mozambique.
We will develop the following version: R1B (Italian version), R3 (German Version) and PAN (aerobatic version converted from the A version).
We have no release window at the moment - and needless to say screenshots are preliminary.
It was the Luftwaffe’s main sturmovik for the cold war years. Zippers to do the deep strikes, phantoms for fighter work and the gina for CAS. Should be a fun ride. One can never have too many shoes planes in the hangar.
The Fiat G.91 beat 7 other designs in the competition.
The requirement was for a fast, short-field, tough strike jet.
Two of the designs that were beaten by the Fiat would continue to have their own successful careers: the F-5 Freedom Fighter (known as N-156 at the time of the competition) and the Étendard (known as Mystere XXVI at the time of the competition).
The final iteration of the Étendard, the Super Étendard Modernisé, was retired from the French Navy in 2016, and the F-5 is still serving countries today.
And yet based purely on its performance as a short field, easy maintenance strike aircraft, the Fiat G.91 was better!
DCS does not have the infrastructure incorporated to do ASW. No underwater modelling, no SONAR modelling, only rudimentary ship modelling. It would take an inordinate amount of work to build the foundations necessary to make an S-3 work.
DCS is quite well suited to the Gina’s bread and butter work; tearing up a bunch of red ground units with dumb bombs, rockets and guns.
The S-3’s mission profile mostly involves straight and level flight or very large grid patterns. I don’t know about you, but compared to hustling along a valley dodging bullets and missiles that sounds pretty farkin’ boring to me.
Therefore I conclude that the Gina is a far more fitting addition to DCS, even if it is the easier one to make by a long shot.