https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1559911/posts
I thought that the discussion back then was interesting. Anyone who remembers what flight simulators were like 18 years ago knows that the level of realism was quite a bit less than now.
I had to edit out the sentence, “Thus we had a continuation of the situation where countries could scrape together enough money to buy high performance aircraft, but not enough to pay for all that flight time needed to make their pilots good enough to face the Americans.” to make the article fit in the Body of Thread box when trying to put this up. So you might want to visit the original link.
However, no amount of simulation will compensate for a lack of real aircraft training, simply due to the G-load dynamics involved.
That’s a fascinating insight. I look forward to real pilots chiming in on whether this is a realistic scenario. Can thousands of hours on a sim and 40-50 hours in a jet really produce a competent pilot?
I bought one flight simulator for my Mac SE back around 1988. It was a WW 2 Pacific theater combat simulator. You can imagine how primitive it was. A few years later my wife got me MS Flight Sim which was a staggering leap forward. But even that was primitive compared to what today’s sims do.
We crushed it in the first Gulf War in part because of simulators. In that case, tank simulators (much easier to “do” than high performance jet fighter simulators). That story goes back to the late 1980s.
Wired magazine article on the simulators:
War Is Virtual Hell
Bruce Sterling reports back from the electronic battlefield.
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/virthell/
Quintessential battle report from that war:
Battle of 73 Easting
by Capt H.R. McMaster (later General McMaster)
https://app.box.com/s/plg2wis5mrd6qlfntfrl1lr79ax0bx1f
Good for training drone pilots too, yes?
Needed: A weapon which will deny entire swaths of the sky to anything that flies except birds.
How do you simulate a hard g-turn that, without a suit, drains the blood from your head and knocks you out?
In fact, we’re almost at the limit of the human body being able to take these kinds of stresses. Future aircraft may be unmanned because of it.
I’m sure that folks that have become gaming combat Aces when faced with real high G forces flying actual aircraft and facing the possibility of being killed will all become real combat Aces.
Edwin A. Link would be thrilled at the advances made in processing, graphics and realism. He was a genius, the fact that he used the Organ Bellows principles to simulate roll, pitch and yaw was brilliant. He had a Theatre Organ in his home, sadly destroyed in the floods of 2011.