I play some DCS and am incredibly bad at it. And I harbor no illusions that it is in any material way an accurate depiction of aerial combat or the rigors thereof. But one thing I think it completely accurately conveys is at least a small measure of the complexity and difficulty of flying and surviving in high performance fighter jets.
The number of times I’ve made some small error and turned into a smoking hole in the ground - well, it happens most of the times I play. But these folks go up and are lucky if they get to walk away from a single mistake. Much respect.
LOL, I actually didn’t know that meme, but that’s perfect. The closest I’ve ever been to experiencing my own death was trying to figure out how terrain following radar worked on one of the DCS planes. I was bopping along in IMC and had maybe a fifth of a second to comprehend the side of the mountain I was shortly to fly into. My brain started to formulate “oh sh-“ but didn’t even get to the full point of conscious realization before it was lights out.
When it’s my time to go, I can only hope it’s that quick.
I live in Alaska, and this is why flying at night/IMC is strongly not recommended. Local CAP squadron just did a search and rescue this morning for someone who this happened to.
I play a bit of it too, enough that I know what a flying scissor is and what a one and two circle turn is but not enough that I get killed by random aim 120 that I had no idea was sailing towards me if I go online.
This would definitely throw a pilot who only got a glance at the 'canopy' and may make them alter their tactics into something bad.
This first time I played DCS in VR and crashed and blew up it made me feel queasy. The ground came hard and fast, for a moment my brain thought this was the end though my mind still knew better. I had to pause for reflection after that.
This shit is wild. That stuff is insanely confusing even at the closer view. It's crazy that you have to make these split second decisions at 7 g with life on the line. When I was a child, I'd always wonder how pilots die in training. I think I didn't really appreciate that with these kinds of things everything has to be in the realm of unconscious competence. Almost everything has to be freed into autonomous functioning so you can make the few tactical decisions your brain can manage. And you need to train yourself at that limit to really be ready for it in the real moment.
Back in 2003 I was a kid (21) posted to Cold Lake, and during the Maple Flag exercise there was a crash, a pilot was killed. A bunch of us were tasked with getting all the random kit - tents/cots/jerry cans/etc. together for a retrieval / investigation, it was just .. dunno. Then seeing the 'missing man formation'.
This effect is extremely apparent in r/c aircraft especially at long range or high-speed passes.
Without some other contextual clues (perceived motion against clouds, etc) it's extremely difficult to determine whether the plane is rolled 180 degrees and how it's moving. And especially as it turns through the degrees of shadow etc it's very easy to have the plane appear visually different from what you expect.
I've definitely flown some sailplanes etc (up high!) or played around with long-duration gliding on my old electric flying wings. And the farther out you go the easier it is to lose perspective. Losing perspective down at ground level (eg you got way too far out for a landing attempt) is usually game over.
The other one is it's very difficult to pick off in snap-vision situations. You rolled the plane and lost it (my wing would do 3-4 a second) and have a snap second to pick up the reorientation etc and yoink upwards. And that's probably similar in principle to fast-pass snap recognition workloads for fighters.
I had some fairly fast electric wings for the day, they'd hit 50-70 mph with some of the early neodymium brushless motors from Mega (the 16/15/4 and 16/15/3) and high-discharge 50A NiMH packs. Those things cooked, I added extra spars to help avoid harmonic flapping from overspeed etc. I liked to do soaring (one of the wings was originally an unpowered cliff soaring design) so I definitely dressed my wings up in high-vis designs (contrasting top/bottom with reflective in some parts, distinctive pattern on each). That largely solved the problem especially as I gained experience etc. Just ask the enemy nicely to do that, I guess. ;)
(but honestly that might be a good way to train, use a rc model at extreme distance with a reflective pattern and have the instructor spin it and the student has to reorient themselves and recover it (or push a flight stick in the direction you'd respond for that orientation). Practice an extreme form of learning to ignore silhouettes and orient from the other cues, and then slow it down to what planes can actually do without the visual aid?)
But yes that orientation illusion is really disconcerting and easy to fall into. Is it right side up, or turned and now it's upside down, etc. If you can't visually track features accurately you lose one of the degrees of freedom in the model. And you can often brute-force it with concentration and will... but if you lose it, the movement is gonna confuse the hell out of you for a couple seconds until your mental model reorients. Literally a visual gimbal lock.
you train on being able to understand the relative motion of the silhouette. notice how at the start he's got a contrasting top/bottom, red solid top vs black-and-green echelons on the bottom. I would do something similar, my bottom was purple and big metallic pinstripe panels along the bottom, and my top was blue and yellow in another identifier pattern or something. Panels that are deliberately designed to be difficult to mis-identify.
like I said I'd flown models up to 70mph and it's the same thing which is harder to track for a given distance/speed) although of course nowhere near as extreme a speed. but I'd blast along the available field in like 10-15 seconds during a low dive pass. Then you do a high-speed pullout, go way up, and buzz it again. And that's the plane, those gofasts aren't super fun other than that (they don't even have rudder - see 1:25 in your vid). Actually they would barely take off (note his hi-start/rubberband launcher assist, same timestamp) and we'd handlaunch them. And (again) the speed tends to give them a huge tendency towards harmonic flapping failure so don't dive it too fast!
I flew three of them over the years, the first was a legit balanced build and could get good endurance and fun performance etc. The second we bolted the lower-turn (higher-torque) motor onto (and higher-twist prop etc) and it was such a rocket it flapped during dives. And that tends to destroy the wing foam over time (much cheaper than that guy's fiberglass etc!). Still a lot of fun, and it's beefier than the first one and thus more fun to fly, but you just have to be mindful of how much speed you put on, because you can lose it if it flaps (the elevons cause positive oscillation as the wing bends and torques beyond the point of support). But the extra power is beneficial in climbs etc.
And the third one was a mini model that was explicitly a pocket rocket, and knowing the flapping problem we used extra spars along the wings to reinforce it, it uses the same high-torque 3T motor as the second one but on a much smaller model, along with late-gen sanyo 1950FAUP packs that were rated to 50A and could actually burst to 70A without damage. Thing was an absolute monster but as mentioned, no rudder, so you go up, you go around, you go down, you go fast, you go up... over and over. Still fun though, thing would literally tear into a climb and be high enough in ~6 seconds tops that you wanted to be turning off the climb (lmao). the batteries would absolutely melt the motor if it wants and you run it for too long in a extreme high-thrust/stalled state - the motor is hot after takeoff and I generally would throttle out at pattern height and run for a bit to deliberately cool after launch. It was very controllable yet felt fast and scratched that itch, always a ton of power if you wanted to goof off for something, and the color scheme kept it safe, I am always very serious about that, you don't ever want it to be uncontrollable.
(did a bunch of this with my father and it's one of my fav memories, we learned a bunch about engineering and it made some sick planes)
EPP foam is wild - it's way durable compared to EPS, styrofoam, it's like the heavy duty foam packing material they cut for item packing (bulk HDD shipments etc). buy it cheap, use a foam cutter, etc. And you can fix it with polyurethane glue lol. Worst case you auger in, you shatter your spars, dremel them out, put in new carbon fiber rods (cheap), then pour in more polyurethane foam (mixed with water in a dixie cup), wipe flat after an hour when foaming has slowed. I have augered those three in so many times, all of them.
Sadly I think a lot of that era is coming to an end with drones, the hobby probably isn't going to survive that much longer. Haven't done it in a while but the FAA has taken an interest in airspace that we used to be pretty free to use as long as we kept with the "visual sight" rule.
But yeah that guy's plane is nuts and he'll totally have trained on recognizing which side is up from the light/dark patterns. dude has a little mental gimbal he's flying the plane through and updating it as he tracks the model. It's climbing and dark towards me, roll it and pull up and I'll execute the immelman and then it'll be red and going downwards. And it helps that the radios have a "low rate" mode that allows very slow maneuvers during non-critical phases of flight, and this will help avoid that "the model spun and I lost it" problem. High-rate still often is necessary for brute force especially at launch etc, or during extreme manuevers that want lots of control throw.
still very dangerous to fly like that, I only use that as a secondary regime, if I'm flying the mental gimbal it's to recover the plane and bring it back where I can see it (ideally take note of the lighting angle etc, low and long light near sunset can be particularly dangerous, high-angle daylight is easier). Let alone with something that fast.
Long time ago but I had an aero eng class where we were designing model rocket gliders, team that lands closest to the target wins. same problem, balsa wing on a model rocket tube is super hard to see, the controls were extremely oversensitive (I'd programmed low-rates and high-rates and low was still very sensitive) and the roll rate was absolutely extreme (elevator was ok) but I managed to get it into a known configuration with The Mental Gimbal and nudge it into a glide slope, we actually got some distance versus the other teams before who mostly just lost it and spazzed out into a nosedive. Didn't quite win but I think we came second or third.
Part of the undocumented "how to build the F1" lore here with EPP flying wings is monokote/ultracote over the wings too. these shrink-on/glue-on surfaces significantly reduce the torsion moment of the tip. Does it make you invulnerable? no. is it a lot more torsion-resistant than packing tape? yes, absolutely noticeably so and it repaired model #2 when it started to get real flappy and increased the handling speed quite a bit. not equipping model #1 or 2 with ultrakote was a mistake from the start and it probably significantly contributed to the flap/torsion getting going.
> The main tactic was to draw the bandit into a ‘single-circle’ fight, meaning that one aircraft was chasing the other around the circle.
I'm curious about the use of 'single-circle' here. The way it's described makes it sounds like a nose-to-tail engagement ("one aircraft chasing the other around the circle"), which is usually called "two-circle" online (although I've always found that terminology confusing). Does single-circle have different meaning to Canadian pilots, or am I misunderstanding what's described?
I think you're misunderstanding what you read elsewhere? Single-circle lines up with what I've seen elsewhere (e.g. https://i.imgur.com/a4YEBc1.png ) and the plain meaning of the words.
Not sure how that would affect anything (besides confusing your close-flying allies, as here) beyond visual range where majority of modern aerial combat ought to take place.
This is the predominant tactic used by Russian fighters near Ukraine. They don't want to get targeted by SAMs, so they do long range missile shots against Ukrainian aircraft.
Mike Hoch is, in fact real[1], but that kind of word game is common. Heywood Jablome, Hugh Jass, Amanda Huggenkiss... There was a running gag on The Simpsons where Bart would prank call Moe's Tavern with names like these.[2]
The number of times I’ve made some small error and turned into a smoking hole in the ground - well, it happens most of the times I play. But these folks go up and are lucky if they get to walk away from a single mistake. Much respect.