Schweiks Sim vs. Real Flying Debate Thread

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

GrauGeist said:
And speaking of engines, his drastic fuel consumption is most likely because he set the controls for max. power for takeoff and didn't adjust pitch/fuel accordingly once he was up, meaning those engines were seriously taxed.
Click to expand...
that would be my bet. flying a plane with a variable pitch prop is more complicated than one with fixed pitch. now add in the fact it is a twin and you need to sync those. he probably had is mixture WAY off, engines running at different RPMs, his pitch set too coarse, etc,. there is a chance that the plane was flown in at the end of a trip or for mtc and not refueled yet. but even at that, there should have been enough fuel in the tanks for more than 10 minutes of flight. commercial airlines never run it that close. the only times I ever saw them draft fuel from a plane ( except for overweight ) was to fix a fuel tank or leak and when it came time for to weigh the plane to check loss to corrosion. those jet fighters were on scene pretty quick but this is scenario (highjack/ stolen plane for terroristic purposes ) is something DHS/FAA have plans for.
 
Quoted from the traffic between the guy and ATC:

"I'm down to 2,100 (pounds)," he told the ATC. "I started at 30 something. … I don't know what the burnage is like on takeoff, but it burned quite a bit faster than I expected."
 
bobbysocks said:
flying a plane with a variable pitch prop is more complicated than one with fixed pitch. now add in the fact it is a twin and you need to sync those. he probably had is mixture WAY off, engines running at different RPMs, his pitch set too coarse, etc
Click to expand...
Spoken like a true piston pounder! A turboprop is a whole different animal. There's no mixture control, just a fuel cutoff.(the fuel control does mixture). You don't adjust propeller pitch. (The prop governor does that. You just tell it what RPM you want, and it holds that through all power changes). The power levers control thrust. (both forward and reverse). Autosynch takes care of matching up RPMs as long as you set them reasonably close. Imagine driving a bus with an automatic transmission vs one with a 4 speed crashbox, a 2 speed axle, and no synchromesh.
Cheers,
Wes
 
Last edited:
BiffF15 said:
It was an ugly story ending with a completely unnecessary loss of life and aircraft.

Biff
Click to expand...

Then yesterday you had the pilot of a Cessna 525 jet fly his plane into his house in an attempt to kill his wife and her son. Hours prior he had been released from jail on bond after being charged with assaulting his wife. The wife and son were not harmed, but the pilot died. Crazy...
 
DerAdlerIstGelandet said:
Hours prior he had been released from jail on bond after being charged with assaulting his wife. The wife and son were not harmed, but the pilot died.
Click to expand...
Maybe bail for violent crime charges should come with GPS ankle bracelet attached. OR...Maybe fewer guilty parties would be acquitted if they had to concoct their defense from a jail cell instead of from their lawyer's office.
OR...Maybe ALL male alleged perpetrators of domestic violence are too much of a risk to public safety to be on the street.
Just a thought (or three).
Wes
 
Last edited:
GrauGeist said:
Agreed and Holland was known to be reckless on many occasions, hence the comment of an "interesting career".

Honestly, I don't understand why he was still a pilot after his track record...
Click to expand...

I think we can all agree there. But I have seen, and it's not a universal blanket statement to all and exceptions apply, where senior officers make some egregious missteps and it's all excused or covered up- Holland exhibit A. Some of those involving loss of life or class A mishaps. Almost like it's the proverbial club where once in, you're golden. Never understood the double standard from my perspective.
 

Hello Schweik,

Been away from this forum for a while. Missed the goings on in this place but the subject seems to have wandered a bit.
When I typed my last post, I had forgotten that I actually had IL2 installed on an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.33 GHz back when that machine was state-of-the-art. I am guessing this would have been around 2002 or 2003 or so. I played it for a while and didn't find it to be particularly hard to beat either. The old Athlon is still around but hasn't been powered up in a few years. IL2 is still installed.
I was cleaning around it a couple weeks ago and found a keyboard cheatsheet that I had printed which is what reminded me about this thread. There is also CFS, CFS2, and CFS3 all installed on the same machine if I remember right. (It actually runs Windows 98 SE).

The difference I suppose is that the CFS games with their open architecture kept my interest and even though IL2 had better graphics, it seemed way too limited. I am a lot more interested in learning about flight dynamics than in eye candy.

- Ivan.
 
Hi Ivan,

I'm not sure what year that win 98 version was from but that is almost the exact opposite of the way I would describe Il2 and CFS1-3. To me CFS never even came remotely close to vaguely accurate in terms of flight models. It was always very cartoony and the aircraft were very easy to fly - difficult to stall let alone spin. Some of the American planes and popular fighters like the Fw 190 were very overmodeled "uber" planes. Damage models were cartoonish. Engine management was non-existent and online servers seemed to always be set to unlimited ammo and so forth. I always felt Microsoft Flight Sim in various incarnations was only useful for simulating navigation and little else.

I should be clear I am only familiar with the original version of the game in all it's incarnations through "IL2-Pacific Fighters / 1946" I only briefly experimented with Cliffs of Dover and have not played Battle of Stalingrad or Battle of Moscow which use a different, new game engine.

Like most computer games (the old) Il2 went through a very long evolution and again, I don't know at what stage you engaged with it. A lot of what happened with that game derived from many tens of thousands of iterations of interaction between the gamers who played it, who have very similar discussions in their forums to those you see here (in terms of historical research) and the game designers.There was a lot of tweaking and I think Ubisoft or whoever was in charge did a good job of sticking to historical sources as the basis for their FM's rather than just what the crowd wanted.

I would say however that the flight models in Il2 were far more accurate for the aircraft that the Russians were familiar with - basically anything that operated on the Russian Front, as opposed to the ones for the Pacific Theater and so on which were added later.

For aircraft such as the early to mid-war Bf 109E-G, Bf 110, Fw 190A, Ju 87, Ju 88, all the Russian fighters (LaGG 3, La-5, Yak series, Il2, Pe-2 etc.), the Italian planes which were used on the Russian Front (MC 200, 202, G.50) and many of the Anglo-American planes used by the Russians like the Hurricane, P-39, early model P-40s, Spit V and so on, the flight models seemed pretty accurate compared to all the books I had read. It was certainly not difficult to wreck one if you weren't paying attention.

I don't think their system - the old Il2, handled high altitude very well either incidentally. Anything above 15,000 feet starts to look weird.

S
 
Hello Schweik,

There is a lot of validity in what you describe. I still play mostly with the original Combat Flight Simulator mainly because the flight modelling actually lacks very little in comparison to the later versions (in my opinion) and because visual modelling is a challenge. The STOCK flight models are simply junk as you described.... At least mot of them are. The stock Merlin powered Spitfire Mk.IX makes a pretty good approximation for a Griffon powered Mk.XIV and that is about it for accuracy. The stock P-51D is the "uber" plane; Its weight is about a ton and a half too low and performance is correspondingly high. The stock Me 109G goes about 100 MPH (480 MPH) faster than it should. The stock FW 190A is actually one of the UNDER modeled aeroplanes of the bunch. With a maximum Coefficient of Lift of around 1.2, it has trouble staying out of its own way and is a barely flyable brick.
The designers really didn't know how use the features that were available in the actual game engine and it shows.

The redeeming factor of all this is that it is an open architecture and there are ways to get things done if one knows what the target performance and handling of an aeroplane should be. A lot of the decoding of the parameters in the flight models was done long before I got into the game (with a few errors just to make things interesting) and even *I* have managed to figure a few things out on my own over the years.

You are also correct in commenting about the damage model but at least the relative damage of weapons can be corrected.
There are few things that are still bothersome and very hard to work around.
The game still only handles single speed superchargers and AI gunnery is way too accurate.

Regarding forums, the IL2 forum are much superior. I think most of the CFS gamers died long ago.
While a lot of good information is presented there (I end up there sometimes when I am looking for some specific information), I don't believe there is much you can do to alter the aircraft yourself and for me that is the most interesting part of playing with simulators.
Of course with this flexibility comes the ability to do some really stupid things: A couple days ago, I accidentally goofed up a parameter I was adjusting and had my Airacobra doing spins and gaining altitude while spinning! In addition, it was going slightly over 2000 knots while doing this!
It wasn't hard to figure out where I goofed up so it was pretty easy to correct.

Another "problem" at the time was that I didn't have that much interest in aerial combat on the Eastern Front. Even today I don't have a great deal of interest there though I do understand the IL2 world is much expanded. It is probably the better game if you don't have an inclination to mess around with flight models on your own because the modelling there is very good if not excellent. I prefer to have the basic framework to be able to see how things interact.

- Ivan.
 
Hi Ivan,

Well that totally makes sense, I'm sure playing around with / editing the flight models is fun and interesting.

One thing about Il2 worth noting, while indeed I think the Russian front planes are the best modeled, they do have many others and generally I think the earlier war planes aren't bad - the A6M2 and F4F for example.

Also, many of the planes on the Russian Front also fought in other Theaters, for example Me 109E, F and G, Fw 190A, MC 202, Ju -87 and 88, He 111, Spitfire Mk V, Hurricanes, Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and P-39s, A-20's and B-25s also fought in places like North Africa, Italy or Malta. or over the British isles though sadly they don't have a Spitfire Mk 1.

I gather there has been some modding done to the old version of Il2 as well though I don't know anything about it. The only thing I have ever modded was skins, mostly because I am too lazy to get into the guts of it all.

Finally while I too did not always have sufficient hardware to play with the leading edge graphics, the original Il2 is now within the capabilities of most mid-range computers, so long as you have a graphics card, and it's cheap - you can get it on Steam for $10 I think.

S
 
XBe02Drvr said:
All the G suits in the world aren't going to help you with that problem, only a strong diaphragm and peak physical condition! G suits are an antidote for positive Gs, but not much help with negative.
Click to expand...
Like blowing out a little when you hit the dip in the roller-coaster, or actually sucking air into your diaphragm like you're going to lay down the most spectacular belch in human history
He probably knew exactly as much about the "Q" as he could glean from various flight sim computer games.
Click to expand...
Some kind of access system?
So I guess airplanes do indeed have keys these days
I bet there'll also be a push to reduce the authenticity of computer flight sims.
Click to expand...
I hope not, that would be a real shame -- one dickhead does something completely nuts and everybody else has to pay for it...

GrauGeist said:
Yeah - that was a quick and tragic end to an interesting career...
Click to expand...
I'm amazed Colonel Holland didn't get bounced out on his ass.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Similar threads

S
Spitfire vs. Dora mass battle
2
Replies
31
Views
2K
spicmart
S
Vickers Wellington vs. Warwick
Replies
6
Views
519
SaparotRob
WWI Aces Flying WWII Planes
Replies
17
Views
1K
Admiral Beez
A
N
The Great P-47 Range Debate on you tube now.
4 5 6
Replies
105
Views
8K
Holtzauge
Sakai Saburo Vs Sugita Sho-ichi
2 3 4
Replies
70
Views
4K
GrauGeist
Menu
Log in
Register