MigBuster

Very sure this will come out......besides I want to tour Nevada in an open top and do some shopping!

Honestly, we at FighterSweep couldn’t be any more excited about this Milestone Monday. Eighteen years ago today saw the maiden flight of the world’s most feared combat aircraft, the Lockheed-Martin F-22A Raptor, with Lockheed-Martin Test Pilot Paul Metz at the controls. Now before you get all bent out of shape about how it’s not fair to say that because it hasn’t the combat record of the Eagle (valid), has been shot down by all manner of legacy fighters during exercises (valid), and even shot down by fifty-year-old trainers (also valid), just hear us out. The Raptor is a transformational aircraft, one that came along at the perfect time. Why the perfect time, you ask? It’s not as if everyone else has been sitting on their butts for the last thirty years; design bureaus all over the world have been developing and working on new aircraft to beat or compete with our current benchmarks–the Light Gray Eagle, Super Hornet, and the Viper. Many countries, in more ways than one, have met or have well-exceeded our fourth-generation (legacy) capabilities. We’ve actually featured a lot of those very agile and capable designs here on FighterSweep: the Super Flankers we’ve featured recently, PAK-FA, the French Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, Chinese J-20, and others. Additionally, and probably more importantly, potential threat nations have gone down the path of creating eye-watering Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS), buying and deploying advanced double-digit SAM batteries with AESA radars. No matter what we add to them or hang on them, our legacy aircraft can’t penetrate an area defended by such systems–many of which are very mobile and difficult to target. The F-22 can. So what are we saying? The Raptor is a super fighter that for the first time in history has virtually everything a pilot wants in a fighter aircraft. Yes, it is a very expensive beast; no expense was spared, but the Air Force got what it wanted and needed performance-wise for those costs. And as for performance, here’s a fun little anecdote from one of the Raptor’s Dedicated Initial Operational Test and Evaluation pilots: “I did a takeoff where I was at about 570 knots at Edwards, I was prior to the end of the runway, not used to being that fast so I pulled up to 90 degrees nose high. I was single-ship with my own tanker and first chance to try this with a Raptor so I decided to see what she’d do. The mass flow at that point is close to producing max possible thrust; the aircraft continued to accelerate in the climb to .99 Mach passing about 20,000 feet and then slowly began to decelerate. Unofficially, according to the flight test engineers, I would have ended up higher than 65,000 feet on that day and broke every time-to-climb record we could think of for category & weight class. Oh by the way, that wasn’t a Streak Eagle or MiG-25 stripped down bare with weight removed, with no external stores for combat configuration, etcetera. That was in a stock, off-the-line F-22, full of gas, combat-configured with the internal weapons bay full. As an Eagle guy previous I was absolutely astonished; I hope someday we go after the official records because this jet will likely crush most–if not all–of them. One last interesting point is that I did that going straight up after takeoff. That day I ended up blasting past my assigned altitude of 29,000 after takeoff at Edwards. I ended up at 31.5 AFTER a 5-G pull to level out which, at that weight and altitude, should bleed energy fast; however, when I rolled out I was still at 330knots KCAS!!” At the end of the day, the Raptor is an absolute monster. So many of its pilots, many of whom came to the F-22 from other fighter platforms, have all said that when the balloon goes up, it’s the jet you want to be in. http://fightersweep.com/2982/milestone-monday-f-22a-raptor-first-flight/

Oldie but very good film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1kNszWU7hTw

http://airheadsfly.com/2015/09/12/on-qra-thats-not-right/ It’s the end to a warm day with the sun setting. We’ve spent the day sitting in full flying kit stretched out watching terrible day time TV. We are on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA). Our Typhoon jets are in their hangars, loaded with weaponry and fuel. We spend 24 hours in the building, living, eating and sleeping next to our jets. And then the speaker, usually silent crackled with static, suddenly screams ‘scramble, scramble, scramble!’ The alarm goes off. Lights flash. The doors to the hangars open. We sprint for the exits, zipping up our rubber immersion suit as we go. I grab my helmet and life jacket from the top of the steps. I lean in and start the APU as I finish getting dressed. When that’s done, I jump in the cockpit as the ladders get removed. Start the engines. Close the canopy. Check in that we are started. On the other side of the airfield, ATC is doing similar actions. The tower is turned on; radio calls are made. You have no idea why the trigger has been pulled, but at £30,000 per flying hour per jet it isn’t done for no reason. I am the wingman for the mission, and as the leader starts his take off roll, I finish my checks and line up on the runway just as the sun drops below the horizon. A fist full of throttles slams forwards into full reheat. I am pressed firmly back into my seat, speed racing past an eye watering 100 kts in seconds. 130 kts, pull back on the stick to set the take off attitude, the jet automatically trimming itself. Gear lever up as soon as the jet bounds into the air to stop over speeding the gear (230kts limit). The gear tucks away; the flaps are automatically controlled by the jet. The HUD switches automatically from landing mode to navigation mode and I snap the radar lock onto the leader. As we climb past 2000’ with NVGs on, I notice my eye is actually watering. Shit. When I ran out of the door, I’d run through a cloud of black flies and one of them has got stuck in my eye and is still there. Nevertheless we check in with our fighter controller to get information on the situation: an airliner needed help but they have solved the problem and are already landing. We are to stand down. As there must always be a jet ready to intercept the threats to UK airspace, the plan is to get the leader on the ground while I stay in the air ready to intercept anything that moves while the leader’s jet is being prepared for flight again. A tanker aircraft has launched the moment we were scrambled, too. I find him with my radar and join up on him. All this time, the fly is still stuck in my eye. My eye is watering a lot to flush the bug out. I am wearing a heavy helmet with NVGs bolted to it and the extra weight of the goggles means that the helmet slides down over my eyes and the oxygen mask pushes down on my nose. As I sit next to the tanker in the dark, my eye begins to swell and my face swells up too. So here I was…. I take a full tank of fuel and then sit 1000’ below the tanker so I can use the autopilot to steer around the sky without fear of hitting the tanker. As my face swells against the tightened mask, a nerve in my face becomes trapped and I start to lose control of my right eye. The right side of my face starts to get numb. I look at my cabin altitude and it tells me that the pressure in the cockpit is the same as being at 9000’. I decide to take my mask off to relieve the swelling of my face and hopefully get my right eye back. This works a bit and I take my NVGs off too to take the pressure off my face. My eye is pouring with fluid by now. The RAF and many other air forces invest heavily in medical education for aircrews. All pilots are trained to withstand G-forces and recognise their personal symptoms of hypoxia. However, that doesn’t help me now… or does it? As I float around below the tanker I notice that the red navigation light on the wing actually looks grey. That’s… not right. It takes me a second or two to recognise it as one of my personal hypoxia symptoms. I put my mask back on and feel the familiar rush of blood and heat to my face. My body begins craving oxygen and I begin hyperventilating. I turned the volume up on my intercom and focussed hard on the sound of my breathing. I declare an emergency and ask the controller to get a medical team ready for me when I land and to urge our engineering team to get the leader’s jet ready as soon as possible. Meanwhile, a replacement jet and pilot was already in work. When you remember that this was now just gone past midnight on a Friday, it highlights the massive support team that pilots work with to make sure the jets can achieve the task. After I land without further problems, I hand over the rest of my 24hr duty to a relief pilot and end up in hospital. I am grounded for a week while my scratched eyeball recovers. I realize that if it hadn’t been for the medical teams educating me and other aircrew, I could very well have ended in much worse problems that night then a fly in my eye. Nick Graham is a former Royal Air Force Tornado and Typhoon pilot who also flew F-16s with the Royal Danish Air Force. He’s is currently an instructor pilot, training future jet pilots in the United Arab Emirates. This is his first blog on Airheadsfly.com.

Ah, wasn't clear from the text.

From what there is I thought it was more FC3 level than SF2...........a fair bit of detail on operating the Harrier. Eagle Dynamics develop professional flight simulators so that could be why their policy is more driven to avionics and flight modelling. Also be careful please regarding generalisation of race.....it's 2015!

etc - There are WWII and WW1 sims still going and Falcon 4 is still being developed by BMS as per my sig. It is basically the time these things take.........peoples lives and circumstances change. 90% of the time I suspect they are genuine but just cant pull it off for < insert reason here>............some people get burnt out and fed up..........it is humanly impossible to keep doing the same thing for years. Also the level of quality DCS demand is way beyond what sims were in the 90s golden era.........the dev time goes through the roof. SF2 doesn't demand that quality level thus you have pretty much everything........any aircraft/weapon terrain. Would you like to estimate how many decades it would take to get the same level of content in DCS? Lets take Falcon.........the latest flight model is probably the best in the public domain.........the data available allows this for the F-16 - however just the flight model by itself took 8 years!! DCS has gone full blown realistic so that rules out modern jets because there is just not enough relevant info available. However IMO doing modern jets for FC3 could be done.........wouldn't be realistic but would probably bring in good sales. My personal take on CAP2 if it was ever released it would be very basic regarding content and just be another sim that has to be built up over the next xx years by devs or modders. However it would need to be supported by.........whoever is still left. You have to make the most of what you have unless you fancy the thankless task of developing your own modules.

I suspect so...........you never know though........such a poor result. I guess everyone is happy with SF2 & DCS etc - or just aware that even after decades of development the sims are lacking what they want.

Autumn is here and it’s time to reward yourself with some new DCS modules at great savings! Take advantage of this sale that runs from Friday September 4th at 15:00 UTC to Monday September 7th at 09:00 UTC. DCS E-Shop: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/shop/ This FLASH sale is for world USD prices only and does not apply to special prices of Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) countries. DCS: Flaming Cliffs 3: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: A-10C Warthog: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: Black Shark 2: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: P-51D Mustang: $29.99 to $8.99 (70% off) DCS: Fw 190 D-9 Dora: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Bf 109 K-4 Kurfürst: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Combined Arms: $19.99 to $5.99 (70% off) F-15C for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-27 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-27 The Ultimate Argument Campaign: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) A-10A for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-25 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) DCS: MiG-15bis: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: F-86F Sabre: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: UH-1H Huey: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Mi-8MTV2 Magnificent Eight: 49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: C-101 Aviojet: $59.99 to $17.99 (70% off)

Georgia is developing a version of the Su-25 ground attack aircraft that replaces all the Russian-origin parts with European or Israeli substitutes. The effort is being undertaken by the state defense company Tbilaviastroy, which under Soviet times was the center of Su-25 production and now carries out repair and renovations of the aircraft. Hostile relations between Tbilisi and Moscow obviously hamstrung Georgia's work on the Su-25, which relied heavily on Russian-produced parts and subsystems. And the situation got especially bad after the 2008 war between the two countries: "the plant had simply no other way out after approximately 2008, when Moscow imposed a total ban on exports of any products to Georgia of a military or dual use," said Irakli Aladashvili, a reporter for Georgian newspaper Kviris Palitra. Georgia had tried various routes out of this situation, such as proposing joint production with Azerbaijan and cooperating with Israel. But now, Aladashvili reports, citing company director Nodar Beridze, Tbilaviastroy is going all the way and creating a version of the Su-25 without any Russian parts whatsoever. The new aircraft would be called the Ge-31, or "Bora." The Bora's fuselage and wings would be manufactured in Georgia, while engines, electronic systems, and so on will be procured in France, Italy, and the UK, according to Beridze. The Su-25 is still a popular aircraft around the world, so it could potentially have a large export market. It's worth noting, though, that the report comes shortly after Georgia's defense minister publicly called out Georgia's state defense industry, accusing it of making "non-functional" products and operating with murky business practices. Announcing an exciting new product is certainly a way to emphasize your relevance and deflect political criticism. http://www.eurasianet.org/node/74761

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64w68L2Swzo

See here for higher res photos http://www.spangdahlem.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123457185 http://theaviationist.com/2015/08/28/in-pictures-f-22a-stealth-fighters-arrive-in-germany-for-raptors-inaugural-deployment-to-europe/

Any detail on the glitches in particular? Are you running a modded install? I went even further back - the FPS was also poor in SF2 & DCS with the later drivers so was happy to ditch them. I have put a post on the Forums and TK did post that he was installing Win 10 a while back so he might release a patch (never know). Hopefully any patch wont turn SF2 into the tablet version of course

Yes also see http://combatace.com/topic/87013-a-4s-support-rnlaf-f-35s/

Got bored of that quickly they are now in Poland

Must be some variable in there Country/Training??

Hi there Basically you stick the aircaft in the aircraft folder and any other bits that come with it in their respective folders - see #1 for file structure and mod folders + should cover some other issues you may need to cover. http://combatace.com/topic/44026-converting-older-planes-to-work-in-sf2-%E2%80%93-a-basic-guide-by-migbuster/ Good luck for all upcoming operations btw

by Rebecca Amber Staff writer 8/27/2015 - EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- A-4 Skyhawks have taken to the skies over Edwards in support of operational test of the F-35A for the Royal Netherlands Air Force. They are part of a tactics development and evaluation exercise initiated by the 323nd Test and Evaluation Squadron and supported by the Joint Strike Fighter Operational Test Team from Aug. 17-28. "Each service and each country has their own specific test events that they want to test for themselves, for their own service and their own country requirements," said Rich Radvanyi, JOTT Planning Cell chief. The JOTT has five operational test squadrons composed of the 31st Test and Evaluation Squadron, the Marines' VMX-22 squadron, the United Kingdom squadron 17®, the Dutch 323nd Test and Evaluation Squadron and Navy squadron VX-9. In support of the exercise, the Royal Netherlands Air Force also brought in six F-16s from the 162nd Fighter Wing, Arizona Air National Guard to serve as either allied or adversary aircraft, along with a KDC-10 Air Refueling tanker from the Royal Netherlands Air Force 334th Transport Squadron at Eindhoven Airport, Netherlands. The JOTT contracted Draken International to provide the small fleet of A-4s that were employed as adversary aircraft with a variety of types of mission sets. For instance, if the test plan required the F-35 pilot to fly against Russian tactics, the Draken pilots would present the same tactics that a Russian fighter pilot would present. "A lot of the Draken pilots are former military or some are even current guard or reserve pilots. A lot of them had been adversary air pilots before, so they replicate the tactics of different adversary countries," said Radvanyi. Draken International pilot Jeff Scott, who retired as a lieutenant colonel after 27 years in the Marine Corps, has been flying for 17 years and received his wings in an A-4. "I flew F-35s before I retired and now I'm on the other side flying against them," said Scott. The test event will enable an initial assessment of 4th and 5th generation fighter integration, including Link-16 interoperability aspects. The lessons learned will lay the ground work for future cooperation between 4th and 5th generation fighters and will help shape F-35A tactics for the RNLAF. "There's really nothing better than actually going out there and flying and putting the actual aircraft against an actual threat and seeing how it works," Radvanyi said. "This has been very, very beneficial." During the two-week test event, the JOTT organized one large force engagement each day with as many as 12 aircraft flying at a time. While only four Skyhawks flew at a time, there were up to six on the ramp at times. "It's been a unique opportunity to see a type of adversary aircraft that you wouldn't normally see," said Radvanyi. "The A-4 Skyhawk is not in service with the U.S. military anymore so it's something that would not normally be seen by the crews that are flying here now." According to Scott, Draken International purchased their A-4s from the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Their fleet differs from the A-4s that were once use by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps because they have been upgraded with F-16A avionics like APG-66 radars, radar warning receivers, heads-up displays and a digital data bus. They also have electronic attack pods that can be used to simulate special presentation requirements for test events. "It's a very reliable airplane," said Scott, adding that the team at Edwards has been "excellent, everyone has been very supportive." Skyhawks were mainly flown by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy's Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron flew the A-4 Skyhawk II from 1974 to 1986. Skyhawks were also used by the armed forces of Argentina, Australia, Israel, Kuwait, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and New Zealand, and they remained active with several air services into the 2000s. http://www.edwards.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123456902

If anyone is unsure the article is purely for comedy purposes and parodies the reports from recent AOA tests. Being the Internet though this could certainly end up on places like Russia today!!

Okay a better res T-50 video

http://fightersweep.com/2911/from-the-cockpit-exercise-sentry-eagle/