33LIMA

Reluctantly, Jederman set out after the east-bound convoy, at the head of four bomb-laden 109s. The boss had expressed some confidence that a rapid repeat attack by jagdbomber coming in at low level would likely arrive before the enemy air cover culd be replenished, but as he climbed away, our Willi had his doubts... It wasn't long before Jedermann had the convoy in sight. At first he thought the shell spalshes indicated that somebody else on the same side had similar plans for the convoy, but he soon realised that they were 'shorts' from heavy-calibre AA fire from the convoy escort. The first sign of trouble came when his number four came on the air in a panic, reporting he was going down. Looking behind he saw the 109 slanting down to the left, but no sign of any enemy aircraft. Had he been hit by the flak? It seemed unlikely at this range, but all of a sudden those shell spashes looked a lot more dangerous. Jedermann decided to attack a merchantman at the rear of the convoy and to bomb from level flight on a track diagonally across the enemy. He began to swing around in an arc towards his intended target. At this point, the other two 109s were still with him... ...so he ordered them to attack independently, if only to draw the enemy's fire. He wasn't feeling confident that any hits would be scored, and just wanted to get this done and get out of it. Loseing one of his comrades to an unknown cause short of the target had thoroughly dampened any ehthusiasm he'd felt for this show. Which wasn't very much, at all. Quite keen not to be caught by the blast of his own bomb, crash into the masts of his target or get show down, Jederman pulled up short of his target, levelled off, tried to ingnore the flak, and then let fly as target started to disappear under his nose. Bomb gone, he rolled hard to the right and began a steeply banked turn to get out and away. In the pic below you can see the bomb, just beneath Red 5's spinner. Boom! Nobody was more surprised than Willi when the bomb hit just ahead of the merchantman's bridge. As if that wasn't sufficient good fortune, Red 7 got a hit too, on a 4-stack destroyer, towards the head of the convoy. Bravo! Both ships obstinately refused to sink, but that wasn't to be expected from a single 250 kilo bomb. But it was all rather satisfying, nevertheless. Perhaps this jabo business isn't so bad after all, Jedermann told himself. Jedermann set course south, for home, and throttled back, checking the skies around and calling for the schwarm to re-form. Red 7 was soon in position, but of Red 6, there was no sign as yet. The reason for that, it soon became clear, was that he was having a bit of bother with a couple of Hurricanes. Back north went our hero, but by the time he got there the two RAF fighters were beating a retreat, having evidently snapped up Red 6. Jedermann slowly overhauled the culprits... ...but (as usual with un-modded AI) they saw him coming, and it was only after an extended dogfight that Jederman managed to get hits on one of the Hurris. The Hurricane had only been lightly hit, though, its strong structure displaying its customary resistance to enemy fire. Especially as Jedermann had been using mainly his twin synchronised MGs, saving his cannon rounds for the kill. With the range wound down, now was that time. Another burst with all weapons sent the Hurricane down, minus several feet off the tip if his left wing. Meanwhile, up behind, Red 7 was rolling inverted onto the tail of the second RAF fighter, clearing Jedermann's tail and getting a kill of his own, into the bargain. Time to go home! Two 109s lost was too high a price to pay in Jedermann's eyes, whether or not the air sea rescue people managed to bring one or both pilots home. Two Hurricanes shot down evened the score, and better still, Jedermann's merchantman was seen to go down, so he's now joined the rather exclusive club of single-seater ship-killers. He just hopes the boss believes him when he puts it down to pure luck, and won't make a habit of giving him such missions. There's plenty to do in the skies over Africa, without going to sea to look for trouble.

IL-2 '46+Dark Blue World - some pics from a recent mission in the Willi Jederman series of campaigns from FlatSpinMan, this one set in North Africa. Desert Air Force Kittyhawks are providing air cover for a convoy: The Regia Aeronautica on its way, though - they did fly some Stukas but the twin-engined bombers above and behind are repainted IL-4s: Jedermann and his schwarm of Bf 109Es sweep the skes ahead of the Italian formation, which he can see as dark specks against the clouds below and behind: The Kittyhawks are soon on the scene, trying to hit the attackers before they can unload on the convoy: Two of them go for Jedermann and the fight is on: Our hero knocks down one of the Kittyhawks after a protracted dogfight: Turning around, Jedermann is just in time to see the splashes settling from bombs directed at the convoy, whose flak seems to have succeeded in spoiling the aim of the Italian airmen. But he's soon engaged with a second pair of Kittyhawks, one of which he sends curving away, trailing what looks like leaking glycol: After another burst, an aileron comes adrift from the stricken Curtiss and down he goes, engine seized and prop dead: Climbing gently in a wide arc around the rear of the convoy, Jedermann recalls the schwarm, although his own wingman hasn't gone far.: One of the other 109s isn't answering, but his number three is soon behind and to his left, with the North African coast and safety looming in the distance: The raid seems to be over but there are still some Hurricanes about: Jedermann is out of cannon rounds - the 60 rounds per gun he has doesn't last long - but he chases a vic of retreating Hurricanes and leaves one smoking but still flying, before heading back south for base. For some reason, I/JG27's current desert airstrip is always illuminated, day and night, by these fires along the single improvised runway. Maybe keep the flies at bay? Anyway, it's been a worthwhile trip, with two victories and a third damaged, in return for a 109 missing. And Jederman returns to find he's been awarded a medal, the EK1. The convoy attack didn't go particularly well, but from the air-to-air perspective, Jermann's not complaining...until he find that the boss, determined not to let the enemy convoy go unscathed, wants him to pay it another visit, this time, with the 109s taking the bombs...

Much of the interest today may be with newer mods like the oddly-titled BAT or the VP modpack, but most of my IL-2 '46 gameplay is still with the Dark Blue World mod, not least because of the large number of campaigns, stock and user-made, that are compatible with it, out of the box. For example, I had been enjoying the Spitfire Scramble campaign in BAT's predecessor, the CUP mod, despite the odd setback... ...when the next mission substituted the default Piper Cub (!!!) because it couldn't find an He 111P, necessitating hand-editing files so substitute an H version. Not in the mood for this, I switched to my DBW install and returned to a couple of uncompleted Luftwaffe campaigns. Not only are these working well, but they are reminding me how great the original Il-2, in it's '46 form and with DBW, still plays..and looks. I think this is a stock German bomber 'DGen' campaign, flying Ju 87D dive bombers actually, in the early stages of the Stalingrad operation. I got a nasty shock when Yaks slipped past our escort and seemed about to begin a 'Stuka party' as the RAF called these affairs, but the attack petered out and we made the target. Meanwhile, in North Africa, Willi Jedermann is enjoying the sights, sounds and company, the latter mainly consisting of the Desert Air Force, including a Kittyhawk which nearly caught our hero on a solitary transit flight. The maker's whimsical mission briefings alone are worth the price of admission. I think I've said it before, but it's worth repeating what the Bard would have had Mark Antony say at Il-2's funeral, which is a long a way off as it ever was, perhaps longer: Antony: Here WAS a combat flightsim! When comes such another? First citizen: Never! Never!

Not interested in playing any game or sim online, so the lack of that feature in WoFF, or its presence in RoF, is not a factor for me. At the moment I'm spending most of my sim time working on stuff for Britpack '44-x for Panzer Elite. Apart from firing up Atlantic Fleet for the odd sea battle, most of the rest of my sim time is being spent playing one of my current PWCG campaigns in RoF, which I find provides a different but not massively inferior SP campaign experience to WoFF. Will be back with WoFF when the fancy takes me and I have more time to spare.

Hauksbee, we should not condem WW1 planes based on pilots - often inexperienced - who 'gave a dog a bad name' because they were flying machines they could barely control based on poor, primitive or limited flying training. I cited an expert opinion (backed up by a demonstration) on the DH2 in a mission report, and reproduce this again here: "Led by Lanoe Hawker, No.24 Squadron (DH2s), Britain's first single-seater scout squadron, arrived in France on 8 February 1916 in great excitement but was immediately absorbed in a crisis of its own. The day after their arrival, one of the flight commanders, on the first flight of a DH2 from a French airfield, got into a spin and failed to recover. Five days later, another pilot spun in, and this time the machine caught fire. It had happened before, earning the DH2 the grisly sobriquet of the 'spinning incinerator'...Hawker responded by taking up a DH2 and, according to his biographer, spinning it from every conceivable angle, engine on and engine off, and demonstrating how, with correct remedial action, and provided there was sufficient height, it always recovered." Ralph Barker, 'A Brief History of the Royal Flying Corps', Constable & Robinson, 2002 Granted, actual or alleged prone-ness to being crashed by novice pilots - or more experienced ones who are careless or unlucky - is one criterion for judging the effectiveness of a wartime aircraft, but is not necessarily the most important one. I don't have it to hand, but in the Profile Publications DH5 booket, a pilot is quoted acknowledging that the type was a better machine than its reputation indicated.

See: They say it's an historical skin, of a pilot in 46 Squadron IIRC, but I reckon Biggles has a secret admirer, in the WOFF artwork department :)

Friend or foe, Biggles is a well-travelled fellow, in sim-landl! :)

Mmmm...looking at that screenie, I'm tempted to track down my Crimson Skies CD and see if I can get her up and running!

One of two Sopwith Pups shot down (both in flames) on a single mission, current Jasta 11 PWCG campaign, September 1917: This was the other one - he tried to get away, but the flames grew and he keeled over and fell to earth in a near-vertical spiral: I'm also meeting Camels, and got this one: Home sweet home - the airfield of Phalempin, with the nearby factory chimneys making a good reference point: There's little time for rest, though - I'm soon off again, leading another patrol up to the lines, in fine weather thank goodness. Tommy, beware!

Jaguar en route (SF2 NATO): Mirage airborne (SF2I, stock 6-Day War campaign):

A short hop over the 'lake' map (a multiplayer haunt?) in a (for me) very-rarely flown plane, the Gotha.. My front gunner seemed a bit blasée about the whole thing... ...but I moderately enjoyed the trip, especially after I had begun to dump the bombs, and the kite felt slightly less barn door-like... After that, it was quickly back to life as Richard Hippel with Jasta 11...

Any of the campaigns in European Air War. Because they feature(d): 1. The theatres I am most interested in (Battle of Britain and the daylight air campaign against Germany). 2. The ability to fly in a great selection of fighters from the above. 3. The ability to pick from a selection of historical units that operated each of the above types. 4. Reasonably large formations. 5. Decent map and audio briefings. 6. All the trimmings like a log book, awards, convincing menu screens like a nosy hangar and a Nissen hut type billet with a radio with selectable wartime music and background noise. These days, campaigns (static or dynamic) for IL-2 mods like Dark Blue World come the closest to the EAW ideal for me, with much superior visuals compensating for fewer trimmings - campaigns like this one, and this one. Well-written briefings for campaigns composed of fixed mission sets can more than make up for more 'dynamic' features, while the scripting can add variety you just didn't get in the somewhat repetitive EAW campaigns. For World War 1, I find I get as good or better from both Wings Over Flanders Fields and Rise of Flight with Pat Wilson's Campaign Generator. Both hit the WW1 equivalents of most of the reasons I gave for favouring EAW campaigns. Ditto for modded First Eagles 2.

Couldn't resist posting this one - a simple 'over the shoulder' shot certainly, but it has a nice sense of purpose, direction and depth, with the aircraft in the foreground, superimposed on the cloud in the middle distance, and both overlaid on the terrain which rolls out towards the invisible horizon. And it encapsulates how Rise of Flight brings us back to...well, to the rise of flight, with the airman alone in the vastness in his fragile plane, as he flies towards the ultimate visible representation of the horrors of war, not knowing what fate awaits him over the lines...

Some say the wings come off a bit often, but I don't mind. The fellow in the Sopwith below might disagree, though...

Age of Sail (AoS2, anyway) was rather good, I thought. It would still be on my HD and played when I fancied a bit of Napoleonic naval action (sic) - if I didn't get ugly banding in the skies. The music score was so good I left it playing during gameplay, with the ship's bell sounding merrily at intervals. Anything MP only, I'm not interested in, however pretty.

Back-to-back missions in Sopwith's trend-setter! For most non-multiplayer combat flight simmers, can anything be more frustrating than losing the pilot you have been carefully guiding through the perils of a single player campaign? The answer, of course, is 'Yes' - losing two campaign pilots, one after the other. It happened to me in Wings over Flanders Fields, yesterday. First to get the chop was my current German fighter pilot, who was flying an Albatros D.III with Jasta 5 in May 1917. The mission started normally, but soon after this picture was taken, shortly after take-off... ...I noticed friendly flak bursts behind, in the direction of the airfield we had just left. Their target was a marauding flight of S.E.5s, and although I got one of them after a tough dogfight, when I turned back in search of the rest of my own flight, all I found was two more S.E.s. I did not survive the wounds which resulted, despite managing a forced landing. Turning for succor to my concurrent Roland C.II two-seater campaign, things went rather better...for a while. We soon ran into a flight of our opposite numbers, in the form of some Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters, and although they started with a height advantage... ...we seemed to be getting the better of them. I forced down one with hits from my forward-firing gun, but then allowed myself to become distracted, watching while my observer had a crack as the Sopwith went down... This lack of attention to where I was going caused me to commit a cardinal sin in the WoFF Roland, which is to say, I let the nose come up too high, in a turn. I only noticed and recovered from the resulting loss of height in time to clip some trees with a lower wingtip. The crash in a field which followed robbed me of my second campaign pilot in the space of an hour! They say when you fall off a horse, the best thing to do is get straight back on, so that's what I did. Except this time, I was in the mood to fight for King and Country, rather than Kaiser and Fatherland. And replaced both pilots by parallel ones - one each in Rise of Flight and Wings over Flanders Fields. For a mount, I chose the Sopwith Triplane. I recall that my first serious knowledge of this machine came with one of the very first books I ever bought, the little Hippo Books Aircraft of World War 1, by well-known aviation writer JWR Taylor.This informed its readers that '...Triplanes were flown operationally only by Naval squadrons, who gained complete supremacy over the enemy in the spring and summer of 1917.' That's as may be, but the Triplane seems to have been a modest improvement over the delightful Pup and was soon overshadowed by the Camel. And it's not the most attractive of aircraft, to my eye - when RFC ace James McCudden wrote that he thought the reported Fokker Triplane was a rather quaint thing and expected that seeing one shot down would remind him of a Venetian blind collapsing, I suspect it was the earlier Sopwith Triplane he was picturing in his minds eye. Neverthess, the Germans were sufficiently impressed by the 'Tripehound' to embark on a serious bout of immitation, with many planemakers churning out triplanes, only Fokker's being particularly successful. For both RoF and WoFF careers, I named my pilot Richard Collishaw, potentially a sibling of famous Triplane exponent Raymond Collishaw. Would the name bring me luck? Let's find out, starting with Rise of Flight! ...to be continued!

Glad you like the reports, and trust you will also like WoFF if/when you take the plunge! Gotta get back to earth for a while now, I've still got missions to make for Panzer Elite's upcoming Britpack '44-x mod.

There is a photo of a model which looks to be of the actual aircraft in the pic Olham posted, in the July 2017 Airfix Model World mag, in a note about an upcoming IPMS exhibition. I think the model is the same one illustrated on East Midlands Model Club's site, here: http://www.eastmidsmodelclub.co.uk/uploads/1/3/4/6/13468680/albatros-bii-rnas-1024x681-1024x681_orig.jpg Only difference seems to be the lack of a roundel on the model's tail The model's roundels have plain red outer rings - and the image info says it's an Albatros B.II, RNAS! So it was a captured aircraft, all right, but possibly not by the Russians! EDIT - there's some info here on the Aerodrome - apparently it is believed to have been a pre-war purchase: http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/showthread.php?p=11723

The Lebed 12 was supposed to have been based on captured German aircraft, and from Stephen1918's FE/FE2 version, I think we can see a clear resemblance to the Albatros B-type, despite the different motor:

Imperial Russian cockades on the Nieuport 17 in RoF, Tarnopol autumn map: And on Stephen1918's Anatra DS in First Eagles 2, Lemberg map, summer: