all right cool hey guys spud here and today we have yet another recording of a one-on-one training session with one of my patrons in this training session the student wanted to go over the very basic foundational skills of flying the fa-18c hornet when i have students that are brand new to flight simulation or dcs world in general i like to go over the fundamental skills of flying their chosen aircraft from startup to take off navigation and systems management are all high priorities on my list to teach these new pilots because dcs is a combat focused flight simulator a lot of new guys want to jump straight into a dogfight or dropping laser-guided bombs but we can't do that effectively if we don't know the basics of the aeronautical environment we find ourselves in seemingly mundane tasks like properly receiving taxing instructions navigating between waypoints or aircraft systems management are fundamental skills to being an effective dcs pilot and makes the pew pew stuff much easier less frustrating and more fun when we get to it there's of course a very good reason why pilots being trained in real life spend months if not years learning to fly before they ever learn how to fight or see a live weapon on their aircraft and it can be very difficult for those who are interested in taking a deep dive into dcs to find information and study about the flight part of combat flight simulation this video was created using thrustmaster flight sim peripherals check out a discount code pin in the comments down below for their entry-level hotas for those of you who would love to jump feet first into dcs world with the correct equipment this training session was conducted on a fox 3 managed solutions server and man they are the best most hassle-free to run a dcs world server we have a 15 off code also pin in the comments down below to help get your virtual airwing off the ground so let's go ahead and get started guys i'm going to be facing a heading of 310 degrees when i'm on my approach to land as well as you can when you line up on the runway check your heading and make sure you're actually on the correct runway because if you messed up your taxi instructions then you could get in the way of other aircraft who are say trying to land or trying to take off so i'll have you line up on the runway here and just uh go ahead and hold on the runway while i get into position behind you and i'm going to follow you out we're going to fly to waypoint one and we're going to climb up to 15 000 feet to start off with as well as we are going to fly at an indicated airspeed of 350 knots and if you look at your heading tape on your hud you can see we're at a perfect one zero degrees so the runway number in front of your nose there matches our heading so that's perfect okay so what we'll do is you'll for take off in the f-18 the procedure is of course use full afterburner and you're going to be going down the runway you're going to start rotating which means pulling back on that stick nice and gentle about 100 knots and then you're just going to let the airpla airplane fly itself gently off the ground you don't want to yank back and really rip that nose up because you might strike your tail on the ground another thing is if you disengage your nose wheel steering at about 70 knots indicated that'll make your takeoff roll a lot easier because you won't be over controlling your directional control on the runway another thing to note on the fa-18 is your air speed indicator bottoms out at 48 knots which is a little strange but if you ever are taxing you need to see how fast you're taxing you can always look at your ground speed on your hsi which right now is reading zero which is next to the little plane symbol on your hsi on your mpcd so that's pretty cool um and we are good to take off so uh looks like it's going to be a slight left turn to a heading of i'm sorry it's basically straight out to our a heading about 3-1-0 for our waypoint one so you're cleared for takeoff whenever you're ready okay [Music] nice looking good start that gentle pull back on the stick get that nose up there try not to leave the runway get get those gear up get those flaps up nice job and try and pull her out of afterburner here just try to go for full military power so that's going to be full power without afterburner and when we're on our initial climb out it's probably especially with your with the wingmen if you look over your left shoulder i'm right here with you it's probably best to try and climb somewhere around maybe seven and a half degrees nose up and when you have somebody trying to fly in formation with you you want to be make nice gentle movements on your stick so that way you don't shake your wingman off all right so if we look up on our heading tape on our hud we're flying about 300 degrees you see that vertical tick mark we talked about earlier on the right hand side of your heading tape that is your waypoint so go ahead and bring that tick mark into the carrot on your heading tape there you go nice gentle turn i like it and then start to roll out just before you get there beautiful nice job nice and gentle flying i like it cool and let's keep that climb coming let's go for 15 000 feet looking good 2 000 feet to go 1 000 feet to go and start gently bring that velocity vector to the horizon there you go nice job so you want to try to you want to make sure you're not overshooting or undershooting your altitude it takes a little bit of getting used to to kind of get it perfect cool all right so hold that altitude of fifteen thousand feet we've passed waypoint one so let's select waypoint two and fly me towards waypoint two nice job watch your air speed though want to be about 350 indicated cool nice job right at waypoint one heading about three four seven degrees or so try and pull that power back get us to 350 knots indicated all right once you get to 350 knots we'll talk about how to use the auto throttle which is super nice it's basically like cruise control in your car by default it's mapped to the t key on your keyboard and when you press it atc should pop up on your hud beautiful now your jet is base is in auto throttle mode so the aircraft will attempt to maintain 350 knots indicated as you climb descend turn all that good stuff it will automatically modulate the rpm of your engines to maintain that air speed that's that'll stay that way as long as you don't make any like giant throttle moves right yeah exactly so if you slam your throttles forward or pull them all the way back to idle they the auto throttle will kick off it will flash at first and then it will disappear to let you know that it's gone next thing we can talk about here is the autopilot the different autopilot modes so we want to press the a slash p push tile on your ufc and then we got a whole bunch of options when it comes to the autopilot the most basic one and the one you'll be using 99 of the time is b out for barometric altitude hold so if you press the little circle button next to it you'll see a little semicolon and that's letting you know that it is currently holding your altitude now would if we have an altitude hold mode on whether that's barometric altitude like b out or radar altitude r out we can then engage what's called cpl or coupled mode where the jet will automatically fly you to your currently selected waypoint so if you go ahead and press coupled mode it'll fly you directly at waypoint 2. make sure you pres if it if the options go away hit a slash p again because those options do time out pretty cool right now it's just flying you completely automatically now on the hsi where we select our waypoints there's another button underneath those little arrows that's called that says sequence 1 seq1 and if we press that button it'll show the sequence of waypoints for us on our hsi and so to fly your current flight plan that's loaded in the mission computer of your jet you basically just have to fly your aircraft on top of that dashed line so while flying in a flight simulator with autopilot turned on may be a little bit on the boring side once you get into more intense things with your jet like say trying to find targets with your targeting pod or setting up weapons you know guiding a cruise missile into a target things like that the autopilot will be very very helpful so you can reduce your workload in the cockpit and concentrate more brain cells on those additional tasks cool we're almost to waypoint too so let's go ahead and select waypoint three and your jet will automatically fly you to waypoint three there he goes so see how the autopilot is pretty abrupt and it kind of like slams you into that turn yeah we can actually tell the jet to fly a little bit more gently and it's very very easy to do so the way we do that is on the top row of buttons on your hsi you can select the data portion on the top right this kind of brings us into all the different options we have available to us that we can change and adjust on the fly for our aircraft our navigation our attack can stations these kinds of things so we want to select the a slash c option at the top and the second from the top on the left hand side says tac blim if we click on that and switch it over to nav blim the aircraft will fly a lot more gently for you in autopilot cool while we still have autopilot going on for us why don't we go ahead and start setting up our bombs so to set up your weapons we want to go to air-to-ground master mode that's air-to-air master mode by the way cool and so we can see that automatically populates our stores page on our left ddi if we click on 83b at the top row of buttons that's going to select the four mark 83 slick dumb bombs that we have loaded onto our aircraft we also see a whole bunch of new symbology that's up on our hud the biggest thing that we need to take care of right off the bat is we need to make sure that we get our fusing set correctly or else our weapons aren't going to explode we see on the hud it says dud and that's letting us know that our fusing is not set up correctly we need to fix that so to do that we want to go to the stores page and then on the left hand side it says m-fuse and e-fuse for the mechanical and electronic fusing for the weapon we want to go to m-fuse and select nose and e-fuse and set instant beautiful all right now let's go ahead and fence in so master arm on and external lights off so that way we are set up and ready to go for combat one thing i neglected to tell you to do is on your hsi page down your mpcd go ahead and press the hsi button on the top right so you go back to your navigational page there you go now you can see your navigation again all right and you said turn off external lights yes there is actually a switch on your throttle that you can map to your hotas in dcs that is a toggle switch that that turns on or off all of the external lights on your aircraft so if you'd like to map that we can wait here yeah all right no problem give me give me a sec to pause okay we're paused so it is called x turn exterior light switch on slash off it's by default l on your keyboard and so if you have kind of a button that's kind of out of your way on the throttle like a way off to the side that's a good that's a good place to put it awesome great job so one thing that i've noticed about your your seating position in the in the aircraft just looking at your stream here um and if i'm off because the stream is a little weird then no problem but i recommend trying to fly the jet a little more zoomed out the way i like to set up my cockpit is i like to have the bottom row of osb buttons on my two ddi's at the bottom part just barely touching the bottom of my screen and then as much of the canopy bow in my picture as possible so about if you can see my yeah about right there is where i usually fly the aircraft from and the more you're zoomed in the more you kind of get tunnel vision right but the more you're kind of zoomed out in a normal seating position in the aircraft the more likely you are to see like a threat coming at you like a mig or a sam launch or something of that nature it's just artificially limiting your situational awareness the more you're zoomed in if that makes any sense yeah it does cool all right so we'll go ahead and unpause again all right so the aircraft is flying us towards waypoint three still so that's perfect um on our hud we have some new symbology do you see that vertical line coming out of your velocity vector yes that is called your fall line and essentially that line is how we aim dumb bombs a lot of people think that we aim the bombs with the cross that comes up that line called the ccip cross however we don't we actually use the line to um aim our weapons what we do is we want to fly the jet to put that nice long vertical line somewhere on our target we then wait for the cross to come up from the bottom of that line and then once it crosses over our target that's when we press the weapon release button to drop the bomb and have the weapon impact the target all right so we're almost at way point three let's fly to waypoint four all right so see how much more gentle the jet flew at that time yeah definitely um all right so we have an indicator as to how far the ccip cross is below the field of view of our hud and that is the little um horizontal line that's crossing the fall line do you see that guy the one with the like upturned wing kind of things yeah so that's the pull up cue it's your velocity vector gets below the little wing lines then you're going to receive a big x on your hud and betty is going to say pull up pull up and let you know that you're in danger of hitting the ground so that because if you get target fixation then that is going to be a good reminder to be like hey dummy pull pull away from the ground you're going to crash um but the other little horizontal line the one that's just a straight flat horizontal line is a representation of how far below the field of view of your hud the actual ccip crosses which is your aim your not your aiming device your timing device of when to press the pickle button so the lower down to the bottom of the fall line that horizontal line gets the closer your ccip reticle is to actually popping up onto your field of view of your hud i like to use the autopilot a lot in the f-18 when i have wingman with me because as you can see the jet flies very steady very gracefully while being flown by the autopilot and so your wingmen have a really easy time staying with you so if you look off your left shoulder you'll see me right in formation with you that's pretty awesome yeah it's pretty cool and the jets gonna start rolling out beautiful all right so we are now flying out towards a armored division's assembly point here in damascus and what we'll do is we'll skip way point four and we'll fly direct way point five and that'll take us to damascus international airport and that way we'll have a nice big airport to drop our bombs on a big target that's easy to see let's go and select waypoint five nice nice nice and go ahead and kick off your autopilot and let's climb up to an altitude of eighteen thousand feet and i'm now off of your right hand side kind of undershot the altitude just a little bit there okay so do you see those fires off of the left hand side of your nose at about 11 o'clock 11 30ish yeah so that's damascus international airport that's where we're going to be dropping our bombs there's a whole bunch of airplanes on the ramp down there that we're going to be using as targets there's no aaa there's no sams it's just a nice open range for you to just practice dropping your bombs now the best way to drop a dumb bomb is to use what's called a roll in maneuver where we stay offset to the right-hand side or the left-hand side of the target and then we roll almost inverted and pull our nose down onto the target roll back wings level and that should give us a nice steep dive angle wait for that ccip cross to get up onto our hud drop our bomb and then pull up hard to get away from the target there's a few reasons why we do this positive gs are far better for our aircraft as well as our bodies it's far more comfortable than pushing the stick forward for negative g's we can see the target because it's not disappearing under our nose and we are not going to run into our own bombs on the way down the chute because we're pulling positive g's and if we accidentally release a weapon we're going to be pulling back on the stick getting away from those bombs rather than flying in formation with them or pushing the aircraft down into a bomb that's already released so i'll tell you when to start the rolling because i'm in a nice tight formation with you here let's push up the speed a little let's go for about 400 indicated if we can all right and start to roll in start almost upside down to the left and pull back on the stick pull back pull back pull back there you go we're now on the dive you see those fires down there on the nose beautiful good job keeping that dive pull back on the power a little bit we're going pretty darn fast try and drop your bombs on the base of one of those fires down there if you can you're just looking for that ccip cross to crawl up that fall line once it crosses your target press the pickle button nice weapon away good separation pull up pull up pull up get away from that target there's people down there who want to kill you right very good job remember i told you to pull the power back on the way down but now our nose up coming back up we've got to push that power forward so we don't get too slow we want to make sure that we stay probably at or above 400 knots whenever we're flying in combat so that way we don't have to worry about getting not having enough energy to evade a threat nice we'll climb back up to eighteen thousand we'll build up some separation away from waypoint 5 since waypoint 5 is on top of our target we'll turn back around and we'll do it again the steeper the dive the quicker i see cip cross is going to come back up on the hud which means that we can drop the bomb from a higher altitude that's important because the lower we get the more types of weapon systems will be able to reach up and kill us everything from heavy triple a to a kid on the ground or the bb gun if we get too low all right nice looking good all right let's go ahead and let's make a turn to the left or the right your choice and we'll head back towards waypoint five it's looking good so on this time when we egress away from the target area once we drop the bomb let's pull up and turn as we're pulling up because if we can get multiple axes of change from the point of view of a gunner down below us then it'll be even harder for him to hit us with his anti-aircraft gun so if we're turning and climbing that's the best thing we can do cool try not to dive yet don't dive yet don't dive yet want to stay high and we want to stay offset to the left or to the right of the target nice don't dive yet so see how from your perspective you can't see the target anymore yeah come 15 degrees right but that's what we want to avoid right we can't see the target we can't drop a bomb on it more importantly we can't see the people down there trying to kill us so see now you can start to see some of those fires down there so come a little bit further right then roll back out and start that dive down on the target nice there you go so that's why we want to avoid flying right at the target because we won't be able to see it weapon away nice and you're turning and climbing this time i like it beautiful good job [Music] all right you got two more chances you got two more bombs left so see how you're pushing forward on the stick to get back to the horizon yeah try to do some climb again for me and this time instead of pushing that nose forward to get back down to the horizon just roll your jet up onto a knife edge 90 degree bank and see how your nose starts falling down to the horizon ah yeah yep if you're a real pilot in the jet that would be a lot more comfortable than pushing forward on the stick negative gs suck they feel terrible and your aircraft is stressed for positive gs rather than negative g's and when you roll up onto that knife edge you're descending without even putting any stresses on the aircraft or your body pretty cool right yes so what you're doing there is all of the force of lift coming out of your wings is basically going straight up through the top of your canopy you can think of it that way and then when you roll up onto a knife edge no more lift is going up it's all in the horizontal so your aircraft then falls down to earth all right i'm on back up to 18 000 for another bomb run and let's turn her back around to the target area now normally in a combat situation like in one of my missions if you're tasked with dropping dumb bombs you want to drop all four of these bombs in one pass one pass hall ass kind of situation the reason being is the more times we reattack a target the more likely it is we're gonna get shot down nice good job being offset away from the target see how you can see it now so we want to wait come just a few more degrees to the right we want to wait until that target down there touches our canopy bow from our perspective in the cockpit and then that'll be a perfect time to start that rolling about right now go for it nice good job waiting for that cross nice and pull off nice job okay we got a little extra gas want to try playing around with the targeting pod all right so let's climb back up to let's go for 15 000 feet ah scratch that we'll go back up to 18 000. this is going to be a little more switchology intensive but it'll be great because we already know how to use the autopilot so we can use that to our advantage so what we'll do is we'll set up kind of a lazy orbit around the target area and we have our targeting pod on our belly station which is nice because the targeting pod hangs down underneath everything on our jet so we won't have to worry about masking the pod quite as much when using the targeting pod you want to stay pretty far away from your target area if you get too close to it then your your targeting pod is not going to like that very much because it's going to try it's going to the little motors and gimbals inside of it are going to have to work a lot harder to give you the same thing and so you may have a hard time finding targets if you're too close to a target area so about uh 10 miles out go ahead and turn right to a heading of about 2 3 0. i'm going to turn left and so that way won't run into each other go ahead and when you're ready turn your auto throttle on at an air speed that you desire and then also turn barometric altitude hold on in your autopilot cool and if you look off to your right you should see our target area perfect right there all right so on your right hand ddi or your left it really doesn't matter but uh this works for now go ahead and go to the menu page and then click on the flir button up on the top right yeah your attack menu there you go okay so we now need to tell the targeting pod where to look we've got a couple different options for that on the right hand side we have vvslv where the pod will be slaved to our velocity vector up on our hud so we can actually say point our nose at a target and then designate it with the targeting pod but the easiest way to do it is to simply go down to our hsi and since we're already have waypoint 5 selected we can tell the jet that waypoint 5 is our target that we want the targeting pod to look at by clicking the wp dsg button for waypoint designate okay that's cool yep um so one thing that we need to fix here though is our waypoint is currently up in the sky above the airport rather than down on the ground at the airport which is kind of a problem so the way we can fix that is pretty easy on our um on our hsi we want to click on data we want to then go to the ufc button on the top left and give me one second get our altitude for the airport at damascus and then we want to okay it's 2008 so go to elevation click on the little circle for elevation uh click feet and then type in 2008. enter cool and so go back to the hsi click on hsi all right and then go ahead and hit click the undesignate button on your stick cool now we can hit waypoint designate one more time and we should be pointed right at the airport so the reason why we are not able to see the airport at the moment and the targeting pod is blanked out is because the targeting pod is trying to look behind you and it can't see through its own body so if you turn the aircraft 90 degrees right by just moving the stick to the right not 90 degrees of bank but 90 degrees on the heading there you go that may have kicked off your autopilot yep so you got an autopilot caution announciator so go ahead and click autopilot again a slash p and then click barometric altitude hold there you go and then roll out just a nice gentle bank here roll out a little cool cool cool right there just leave that bank there and make sure you get barometric altitude hold turn back on all right so now we have to tell the jet that we want to use our right ddi to control the targeting pod so the way we do that is we use the sensor control switch and we want to go sensor control switch right do you have the sensor control switch mapped yeah i think i might have hit it the wrong way though yeah that was your weapon select switch so you selected gun so it's very simple just go back to air to ground mode so i'll pause it for you so you can get that rebound it was called sensor control switch left forward right aft and depress cool so i'll unpause it here you just need to navigate back to your flir pod page and we can see that the pod is pointed right at our airport that we were just bombing we can see that evidenced by the fires in the field of view of the targeting pod so go sensor control switch right so you see the little diamond that popped up on the uh right ddi yes cool that is letting you know that you now have your yours uh your throttle designator controller is slaved to your targeting pod on that screen so you can now move your targeting pod around using the throttle designator controller and using the zoom arrows you can zoom the pod in and you can zoom it out you can also change the field of view by clicking on the wide button top left left top there you go and really zoom it in and then zoom it out this is how what you would use to basically guide a laser guided bomb or find a target for a j dam etc so go ahead and move it down and let's see if we can find an interesting target here we'll keep moving it down there you go see see the aircraft on the ramp there and now go ahead and put the crosshair over one of those aircraft now to set that aircraft as a target you go throttle designator controller depress oh that's uh that was the wrong thing hold on i gotta see which one i have a map here yep pause that's a yeah so it's going to be throttle des yep depress yeah there it is let me know when you're ready for the unpause yep all right so our targeting pods blanked out now not because you did anything wrong but because we mask the targeting pod your target's behind you again so turn about 90 degrees to your left left left left left left there you go so not with your bank angle but just turn the jet gently and just let it turn to the left and we should unmask your targeting pod here in just a sec so if you look at your f2 view of your jet while you're while you're turning here if you zoom in on your belly on the targeting pod so the eyeball of the pod is that ball on the front of it so if you fly directly over your target that ball is going to rotate back into its body again and it's not going to be able to see anything and that's why it goes blank like that so you just have to maneuver your aircraft so that way that ball the eyeball of the pod can see the target again and that's why being far away from the target is ideal so that way you can just zoom way in and not have to worry about blanking the target quite as much so you should be able to see something now caught back into your cockpit there you go and so we can see obviously we're at a different point of view from the target because we've just maneuvered around and try moving your your crosshairs to the left a little is it not moving now okay go sensor control switch right again oh that's your that's your weapon select switch so go back to air to ground go back to the flear page there you go so that just reset the field of view of the pod so now you're back where you started and you just have to find that target again so zoom out on your pod yeah when you're zoomed out you'll be able to see more obviously so you can kind of get bearings on where the pod is looking so you're in narrow field of view so it's really zoomed in go ahead and zoom it out there you go now we can see the airport a little bit better kind of get your crosshairs in the general vicinity and then zoom it back in we can also change the mode that the pod is in so there's a button labeled ccd on the bottom left there go ahead and click that we can go to the thermal camera so that doesn't look so great so go ahead and use the con the contrast knob on the bottom right of the bezel and move that around and now we're using a thermal camera so we can see in the dark to find targets you just have to adjust that contrast to be able to see stuff and so to set that aircraft there as a target for say dropping a bomb on it or being able to see it as a stored target or even me being able to see where your pod is looking just hit tdc to press and your symbology changes there to that little diamond that's letting you know that that point on the ground there where that airplane is is now your target and if you turn on your hmd and you look outside the cockpit see that big long arrow on the field of view of your hmd yeah yep that's pointing you towards the target and there should be a nice diamond on the ground right now it's underneath your aircraft so that's why you can't see it and then if you move the pod again you're going to have to redesignate that point on the ground by clicking your tdc depress and setting that point as your target and if you roll back to the right hand side you'll be able to see your target through your hmd so roll about 30 degrees of bank to the right and look over your right shoulder keep going keep looking further look further look further that's not your airport that's your airport so keep looking further to your gripe see see that diamond on the ground yep that's where your targeting pod is looking and if i look through my hmd i can see where your targeting pod is looking so therefore i can then use my hmd to get my targeting pod directly on top of where yours is looking which is super cool so we can collaborate with attacking targets so say if you're out of weapons but i still have a weapon i can clobber that target for you if you've already found it for me so how much gas do you have left 63 370. cool all right why don't we go ahead and head on back to our or do you want to see me bomb the target through your because i have one bomb left do you want to see me bomb the target through your targeting pod that would be pretty cool all right stand by i'm 40 seconds out 30 seconds out all right and you're in perfect position now to make sure that your pod isn't going to be blanked out as i'm attacking the target so i'm just dropping a dumb bomb here so hopefully my attack will be accurate but we shall see and bingo bingo weapon is away and my weapon didn't come off crap now you should be able to see it explode down there yeah i saw it cool yeah so pretty cool right um and basically that's kind of covers the basics of the targeting pod and then from there you know it just gets a couple little things about maneuvering the aircraft and and using the actual um laser in the pod to say designate for a laser guided bomb things like that but anyway i'm low on gas now so let's go ahead and head on back to king hussein air college and make a landing so go ahead and fly towards let's go fly towards waypoint uh seven for me and i will join back up on you on the way back to our airport we'll talk about a couple other cool things about the hornet [Music] i think you're flying away from way point seven right now yeah i think so too okay it's just gently bringing you back around so if you don't want to wait for the autopilot to do its thing you can just simply fly your jet manually to the waypoint all right and about to cross each other so i'm gonna get back turn to get back in formation with you cool all right so yeah now you're flying towards the waypoint so that's perfect okay so let's say that uh we are in real trouble and we're low on gas and we've been shot at or maybe our aircraft is damaged and we just can't have all this weight on the aircraft anymore don't do it now but you can press that push to jet that yellow push button that's black and yellow underneath your master arm switch to jettison all of your external stores except for the sidewinders on your wing tips as well as any amm rams or sparrows that are on your cheek stations and no targeting pods cannot be jettisoned so everything else would be jettisoned off of your aircraft so that would be kind of an emergency situation but if we had to jettison something off of our aircraft more selectively like say you're getting into combat and you've been jumped by some migs and you got to get rid of those external uh tanks but you want to keep your bombs so you can potentially finish your bombing mission after you shoot down the migs we can select which station is the jettison so in order to do that on the left hand side of your iv there is a jettison station select panel to get rid of our fuel tanks let's select the l1 and r1 buttons and then the select jet button which is the red button just above your parking brake has an outer kind of silver wheel on it we want to move it to the store's position with a couple right clicks and then when you press the jet button that red button your external fuel tanks will come away and boom there go your fuel tanks and your jet is now a heck of a lot more maneuverable and a lot less draggy keep in mind though that uh it's not really the norm to drop your fuel tanks if you are in a kind of a normal situation because squadrons don't really deploy with all that many of them so you're expected to bring them home unless there is a reason for you to get rid of them such as an emergency or an air-to-air engagement or something of that nature now there's a couple other really cool features about the hornet that allow you to stretch the aircrafts endurance and range as much as possible that's called the fpas page so if you go to your support menu and then click on fpass i believe fpass stands for flight performance advisory system but don't quote me on that when you look at that page fps left bottom um and then if you if that new color of the ddi bugs you can use that contrast knob on the bottom right of the bezel of that screen to get back to that kind of more neutral green color i don't know why that bugs me but it does what this allows you to do is see different metrics to allow you to fly to a waypoint or to get to a point where you have the maximum range the maximum endurance out of your current fuel load that you have on the aircraft so right now we currently have waypoint 7 selected and it says nav 2 waypoint 7 and it gives us a time of how long it's going to take us to get there the fuel remaining when we do get there and the pounds burned per nautical mile so that way we can kind of plan out our fuel usage and know hey when i get to my target waypoint i'm going to have x amount of fuel left to be able to fight with things of that nature below that line is kind of like our optimum metrics so for optimum range or optimum endurance it gives you an altitude to fly at a mock number to fly at and a time till you get to 2 thousand pounds at those optimum altitudes and box which is pretty cool we also get a caution and advisory when we get to a certain point where the fpas page is thinking uh oh we don't have enough fuel to get home and so that's why we have the little home option on the button on the bottom right so we can select up or down which waypoint is our home base so if you are flying along and that thing is yelling at you a ton and telling you giving you cautions and advisories every time you move your throttle you can select a new home waypoint that is closer to you so that way it doesn't yell at you so much so i do that quite a bit when i know i'm gonna have a tanker or an intermediate base i can land at so i don't have to worry about my gas too much make sense yes cool so that's a really really useful tool and i use it all the time especially after usually after a strike and i'm like oh geez can i make it home to the carrier do i have to hit a tanker all that good stuff so we're getting closer to our home base here so why don't we go ahead and let's start a gentle descent let's bring it down to 5000 feet about 5 degrees nose down and make sure we fence out so make sure you get our master arm set to safe i like to bring up my fcs page again as well as my hud repeater page now let's go ahead and start to slow the jet as well let's bring the air speed down to about 300 knots indicated so you can see how much more slippery your jet is now that you've gotten rid of those external tanks right you can go a lot faster a lot easier the waypoint 7 is going to be get us nice and lined up with the runway so we're going to turn from waypoint 7 to waypoint 8. what we can also do is we can actually draw a coarse line that's going to correspond with our runway at our airport we can do this with both a tack hand and a waypoint so go ahead and select waypoint 8. and then at the top right of your mpcd bezel there's a thing labeled crs you want to click and hold on that until you get csel pop up on your ufc you want to click on that guy and then enter in a heading of 310 degrees and enter and that'll paint a nice coarse line on your hsi for our runway cool then you can bring up the hsi on say one of your ddi's so it's a little easier to see and you can zoom in the scaling with the center top button so you can see the line a little bit easier and basically what that did for us is if we fly our jet on top of that line it will bring us straight into the runway got about five thousand yep exactly that'll be perfect because that'll be give us about 3000 feet agl which will be perfect for our run into our airbase have you done any overhead breaks to landing or mostly just straight ins well practicing both of them okay uh do you want to do an overhead or a straight in altitude um alright all right let's start making that right-hand turn to get onto that line and follow that line into our home base okay so that line wasn't perfect i can see our airfield at our 11 o'clock you see the runway uh it's not yet on our nose okay yeah i should cool all right so let's go ahead and fly it just like a carrier break so go ahead and bring us down to 800 feet agl you can use your radar altimeter for that if you need to and we'll go for 350 knots obviously the hook's going to be up because we're at an airfield kind of offset slightly to the right of the runway so go ahead and come left a little bit so we can get back into line with it nice nice nice keep bringing us down looking for 800 feet agl good air speed i like it nice good job nice just a hair low about 100 feet low [Applause] all right go ahead and break over the middle of the runway oh that was a little early that's okay why have something set wrong because it's showing 2900 oh gotcha you just have to turn on your radar altimeter i will show you how to do that in just a moment because usually when you do this right the aircraft carrier is at sea level so it's not a concern but because we have a field elevation about 2200 feet we either have to do some mental math or we just need to turn on our radar altimeter on our hud so it popped up a little high on that so just make sure that when you're in a break like that you're really trying hard to keep your velocity vector right on the horizon so that way when you're in the brake you're not climbing and try to anticipate that balloon effect from the flaps right so either push the stick forward or let out on some power whatever you need to do to try and get that ballooning effect out of the flaps to go away and you're going way out there for your downwind so go ahead and turn towards the runway did you get your gear gear and flaps down remember that when you're on the downwind which is where you're paralleling the runway after the break you need to start slowing the aircraft down get your gear and flaps down and so that way you can turn immediately to the runway and land the aircraft [Music] alright just pull just a little bit of power and give a little bit of nose up trim we want to try and get your velocity vector in the e bracket on your hud because that's going to give you that perfect angle of attack for landing and you'll also notice that when you get your velocity vector up in your e bracket you're going to get that nice yellow donut on your aoa indicator or angle of attack indicator and you'll be perfect for landing you just want to gently use that throttle to keep that velocity vector on the runway we're in what's called the region of reverse command where we're using that throttle for our altitude and our stick is for our speed so you got too much throttle that's why you're floating up so see how high you are yeah too fast too high would it be helpful to watch me stream while i land the aircraft yeah okay i'm going to go ahead and pause and i'm going to stream you go ahead and go back to spectators in dcs and that way you can just easily watch my stream without having to worry about the um without having to worry about uh crashing the jet or anything all right i'm going to how do i i want to let me stream there it goes all right screen screen 1 go live cool let me know when you can see my screen all right i'm going to go ahead and go around here get some more air speed all right i'm seeing i could eight wax oh i might watch my stream on discord like don't worry about dcs yeah so that way you can see my cockpit all right so i also have my controls indicator up which is that red box on the bottom right of my screen so you want that way you can see where my rudder is my stick as well as my throttles can you see my screen yeah i got you okay perfect all right betty doesn't like how low on gas i am that's okay i'm gonna land in just a second okay so there's my airport over there one thing i did notice as you were flying your aircraft was you tend to look forward a lot right we know what's happening here because we're flying a jet don't be afraid to look over your shoulder i can keep track of where that airport is just by looking over my shoulder there so we'll go ahead and we'll turn back towards our airport into the upwind really try to practice keeping that velocity vector on the horizon as you turn right so that way we can avoid climbing while we are turning so there's our airport over there all right so what i was talking about with the radar altimeter is this switch right here we can switch from barometric to radar and when we have a little r next to our altitude box that's letting us know we're using our radar altimeter for the source there and that's showing us how high above the ground we are so there's our airfield so we're now what's called the in what's called the upwind leg of the traffic pattern i'm going to slow down to the normal 350 knots and feel a little turbulence there coming off the desert which is totally normal going for about 800 feet over the runway there we go so you can see my jet shaking from the turbulence there at an air filter we'll kind of want to break over midfield so once we're over the middle of the runway and we're going to roll throttle idle and we're going to pull not super hard just about three g's worth of pull that we can see there on the hud trying to keep that velocity vector right on the horizon to maintain our altitude we're gonna drop the flaps drop our gear keep an eye on where that runway is we're going to roll out power still at idle i'm going to push forward on the stick see how those flaps want to balloon me up pushing forward on the stick and then as the jet slows down we're going to naturally need to pull bring in more and more power and start to bring in some nose up trim so you can see my throttles are starting to come up almost to around 70 percent there on the controls indicator starting to get that velocity vector up into the e bracket looking over my shoulder and when the runway is about 45 degrees behind my wing that's when i'm gonna start turning so we can go ahead and start to turn in the turn we're going to need extra power because we are killing some of our vertical component of lift just a nice gentle about 30 degree bank looking over my shoulder a little too much power so we know we have too much power when we see our velocity vector climb above the horizon so we just need to pull back on the power a little bit to let that velocity vector come back down we want to always be nice and gentle with the throttle movements we never want to bring the power all the way to idle and we never want to bring the power all the way to full the gef 404 engine in the f-18 has a long spool up time so if we move the throttle to idle and we start syncing like this oh it takes a long time for those engines to develop power to arrest that descent so as we start to come down we just want to be nice and gentle with those throttles always moving the throttles always it's called stroking the throttles in the way that you're always moving them back and forth just to get what you want start to get that velocity vector on the runway i'm a little high right on speed though just keeping that velocity vector right on the runway look on the controls indicator you can see my stick is nice and centered right in the center there i'm just using the throttle to maneuver my jet rather than using the stick just moving the stick left and right just nice and gently to get a little bit back on the center line looks like we're gonna be right in the touchdown zone it's a little bit of power into the touchdown and off the centerline crap and power to idle as we're rolling down the runway speed break out and if we pull the stick all the way aft once we're slow enough that can help slow us down as well and of course getting on the brakes helps so does that help make it make any sense of how to land absolutely awesome so in aircraft there there's this weird thing where once you're slow enough you get into what's called that region of reverse command where moving your throttles is how you control your up and down your altitude and then you don't want to pull back or push forward on the stick too much because that kind of messes up that whole kind of situation if you had it perfect with the throttle you just want to just very gently bank the aircraft left and right to search for that center line and we want to make sure we don't pull the power all the way to idle we want to keep that power in make sure those engines stay spooled up make sense yes it does