by Paul "Grypen" Leeming

My EF2000 experience paid off as I was able to correct for the ‘pitch bobble’ effect that occurs after a steep turn before it happened. A new aspect to turns was that although the Hornet is a fly-by-wire aircraft, the stick does reproduce force effects to let you know how the aircraft is loaded in flight, so pulling around in a steep turn actually required effort to do, especially in a high G turn. Speed bleed off is fairly similar to the effects in EF2000, and I remembered to increase throttle power to compensate.

By now I was at about 10,000ft and doing 550kts, so I opened the speed brake and throttled back whilst at the same time pushing the stick forward to enter a dive towards the Sydney Tower and the Opera House. Due to the speed I discovered, much like EF2000, that it is quite hard to just push the aircraft forward into a dive, so I rolled inverted and pulled it into the dive instead. This was much more responsive and once again I was reminded of just how good PC sims have become in the physics modelling of real fighters. They will only get better too!

Rolling right way up once more I increased the throttle to full and leveled off at about 800ft, aiming to the right of the tower..... and then it was gone, all the windows no doubt shattered by my (by then) supersonic flyby! Pulling up hard I went vertical to about 15,000ft, then levelled off for some aeros. After a loop and another aileron roll I decided to try a landing back at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport. To save time, the operator was able to slew the aircraft so that it was on finals approach at about 5 miles out, and this procedure reminded me a lot of the Microsoft Flight Simulator slewing method, with the graphics whizzing past.

Back to normal mode and the slew tactic suddenly presented a problem - I still had the throttles at 100 percent! Quickly I pulled them back to idle and deployed the speed brake, but it shook me up a little and I spent the rest of the approach trying to get the correct speed and power settings for the throttle. This was made more difficult by the fact that my home setup uses a Thrustmaster TQS, which has an arced throttle movement and sits forward on my desk, whereas the real thing is of a sliding nature with a fair range of movement, as well as being a split throttle and not quite as ergonomic as the F-16’s.

This throttle also sits down by your left side, which is much more comfortable than my home throttle, but meant that I was not used to the movement. I can definitely say that having now played with both, I can see why the F-16’s HOTAS setup is widely regarded as the best in the world. People, if you want the ultimate in ergonomics and function, with the design development thanks to the multi-million dollar budget of the US Government, the F-16 series joysticks as copied by Thrustmaster are THE BEST, not just in games but in the real world too!

The culmination of all this fiddling and over-correction was that I messed the landing up big time and pancaked the aircraft just short of the runway. Oops! Even Navy hardened landing gear can only take so much before it collapses. The operator was kind enough to put me back at the start of finals again, and this time I was much more prepared for the speed and sink rates at different power settings, and actually managed to land it quite well!

One nice bonus of the Hornet’s HUD over that of EF2000 is that it has a true nose direction caret (for nose up angle) as well as the flightpath caret, with a descent rate display above the altimeter on the HUD, meaning that you can calculate in your head the likely time to landing. It might sound complicated but in practice it works almost intuitively and definitely helped me get down in one piece, especially in the simulator environment where visual cues are not so accurate.

Click to continue

There is also a glidescope indicator on the HUD as well as a power setting bar which helps you apply the correct amount of power for a smooth descent. The Hornet’s carrier landing design certainly shone through, and with practice I am sure I could have gotten much better and precise than I did in the limited time available to me.

A feature of the simulator that really heightened the realism was the simulated motion. I say simulated because the simulator is actually on a fixed base, but the seat has had air bladders inserted in the cushions which pump up or deflate to simulate forces on the body. This system may sound low tech, but in practice it worked very well and I can see it becoming part of the Force Feedback concept on PC’s in the next five years or so.

By varying the bladders, roll sensations and G’s can be simulated with some accuracy, although it obviously won’t match a moving base simulator which can provide much stronger motions. However, in tandem with the graphics it provided a very immersive experience and I certainly felt it work on my first landing!

Overall the experience left me amazed at just how real PC simulators have become. It also allowed me to appreciate the advance of technology in cockpit management. The Hornet was the first glass cockpit fighter, even though it consisted of just three CRTs and a bunch of backup dials, switches and warning lights.

Contrast this with the EF2000 displays (they are quite accurate, I have seen the real thing at an airshow) and then another generation again, the Gray Zone Warfare Has Sold Half a Million Copies in 4 Days