I heard that HB changed the F14’s flap damage model so if you deploy landing flaps above 200ish knots of pull more than 1.5G the flaps jam.
I was wondering if someone has documentation from the IRL to say that’d really happen, or if it’s just to humor the people complaining the TRT at 270-300kts with landing flaps down was too good compared to other modules.
It makes me sad that the flap model was changed because now there’s not going to be anything that can compete sustained TRT-wise with the EF2K.
There’s a long-ish thread on this at the ED | Heatblur forum. FWIW, I think they did the best thing, but read the thread and HB’s responses for background.
Bruh, on the 11/20 I was getting 21-22 deg/second TRT without flaps at ~300kts below 5000ft in the F14B, today(11/24) flying the same regime/ same way I was barely getting 18 deg/sec TRT.
The F-14 NATOPS manual is publicly available (along with many aircraft) with a simple search. (I won’t list it). In the manual, you’ll find a detailed section on FLAPS operation and limitations. I only quickly glanced through it, but couldn’t find anything pertaining to G limitations. Perhaps the F-14 Tomcat Pilot’s Flight Operating Manual Vol. 1 on Amazon has more information, but that’ll cost you about $30.
The NATOPS simply state that full flap is for takeoff and landing only.
And then there are some limitations for the maneuver flaps.
It doesn’t go into detail what would happen if you used full flap for other instances than described, but it stands to reason that bad things may happen when you extend nearly full span flaps and then bend the wings. What exactly happens isn’t publically available information and is possibly only known to the engineers at Grumman and those unfortunate souls that endeavoured to try this in real life.
Basically, the flaps are not designed to do this, so don’t.
Now, immortal armchair pilots will of course do anything to get the upper hand in the game and have no such restrictions, and therein lies the rub…
