Last Wednesday, Leatherneck Simulations released the MiG-21bis Fishbed-N module for DCS, and I’ve been getting to grips with it since then. Here are my impressions so far on the aircraft and simulation. It’ll take a while before I’m comfortable enough with the plane to talk about the campaign or the included single missions.

The MiG-21 was designed as a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor, and its shape reflects that: teensy delta wings highly swept. Overall, it’s quite a slight machine: its maximum takeoff weight is a mere 10,400 kilograms, next to the 17,500 kilograms or so of the Su-25T (also described on this blog.

Takeoff calls for full afterburner: with a rotation speed of 350 kilometers per hour, the MiG needs the extra kick in the pants to get off the ground in good order, especially with a reasonable load. Handling in flight is benign at high speed, and a little wallowy if you get below 450 kilometers per hour or so. That said, the MiG retains good controls authority down to the lowest speeds at which it can fly, and up to angles of attack where most planes would be complaining, or bumping you into angle of attack limiters. It’s even possible to do something like the famed Cobra maneuver a la the Flanker, although not quite as crazy off-axis.

It shines brightest in the linear and vertical axes. Drag is low, and acceleration at afterburner is exceptional. Below 4,000 meters altitude, you have access to a second afterburner mode, which increases the kick in the pants factor still further. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that 0-300 kilometers per hour on the runway takes more time than 1000-1300 kilometers per hour at 2,000 meters. Climb is similarly rocket-like, especially while the second afterburner is available. Even with a full combat load, it’s only a hair away from a 1:1 thrust-weight ratio.

The front office is very 1960s, as is the design (it entered service in 1971). Steam gauges and switches are the order of the day. It comes from the era before pilot workload was a major concern, so switches you’ll need are positioned helter-skelter around the cockpit, although some of the most important functions do show some grouping. For instance, the weapons control panel, at the top left of the front panel, has all of what you’ll need to select and ready weapons.

Speaking of which, the MiG-21 is DCS’s first full-fidelity multirole fast mover, and I only feel a little bad about how much I’m stretching the definition of multirole. Your weapons include a variety of obsolete air to air missiles, from the RS-2US beam-rider to the R-55 let-us-take-RS-2US-and-add-semi-active-seeker-da upgrade to the R-3/R-13/K-13/AA-2 family of IR and SARH missiles. Also available are the R-60 and R-60M, the latter being more nearly obsolescent than straight-up obsolete. The air-to-ground loadout options include a mix of similarly obsolescent things, like 57mm rocket pods (abandoned in general use in Afghanistan, because they were insufficiently effective) and the Kh-11 Grom radar-beam-riding missile (highly effective), and the timeless FAB series of general-purpose free-fall bombs. There are also some esoteric options like the rocket-assisted runway-penetrating BetAB-500Sh. All told, it’s a curious kit, capable at short range in air to air combat, and limited in its maneuverability in that realm, and more than sufficient for oppress-the-rebels-style strike sorties, examples of which in the real Middle East have recently featured the MiG.

Aiding you in finding targets, aiming those weapons, and firing them, is the avionics suite, which really isn’t significantly more complicated than, say, the Huey’s setup. Certainly, it’s less to get to grips with than the Ka-50, and a whole lot less to get to grips with than the Warthog. The kit comprises four systems: the radar, the optical sight, the radio navigation system, and the autopilot.

The radar is simple to use, but no more capable than you’d expect: it’s useful only in the near BVR arena, and to cue radar homing missiles. It has no dogfight modes, and a detection range of maybe 30 kilometers on a good day, if you can tease contacts out of the clutter. (Clutter is modeled for the first time, and is pretty nifty. And annoying.)

The optical sight includes the actual sight unit and the weapons control panel next to it. The former is simple to set up, providing gyro-based aiming for the gun and air-to-ground rockets, and indicating what an IR-homing missile is tracking. (For radar seekers, you’re on your own.) The weapons control panel is effectively an analog stores management system: you pick the pylon with a big honking knob, the master mode (either air to air or air to ground) with a switch, and the weapons paramenters with a variety of other switcher.

The radio navigation system is surprisingly useful¹. The ARK is a standard radio compass, capable of tuning the NDBs scattered around the Georgia map and providing bearings to them. RSBN stations, the other kind of beacon the MiG can tune, function like VOR/DME, providing cues to fly to or from a station along a certain radial course, and distance to the station, with a range of about 200 kilometers. The MiG can provide steering cues to intercept and fly along a radial, or, while flying along a radial, descent cues to reach pattern altitude within 20 kilometers of the station². The third position on the RSBN mode switch is landing, which utilizes the PRMG instrument landing system³. It’s a pretty standard ILS. The NPP (read: horizontal situation indicator, read: radio compass thingy) has some tick marks on its inner dial which provide steering points to construct a standard landing pattern, which I thought a very handy feature. Stay tuned: after I mention the autopilot real quick, I’m coming back to landing.

The autopilot (really, the flight control system; the Russian acronym is SAU) has a few handy features: a straight-and-level mode, a ‘stabilized’ mode that tries to maintain your current bank and pitch⁴, and a pair of landing modes. One flies you in automatically, one provides you flight director cues, like you’d get on a more modern aircraft automatically, and neither seem to be working right now.

Which brings me to perhaps the most exciting phase of flight: the landing. It’s been a while since I’ve flown a simulated fixed-wing aircraft as complicated to land as the MiG. With those tiny delta wings, it requires an insane turn of speed: 350 kilometers per hour, or almost 200 knots, over the runway threshold. To compound that, it features blown flaps: engine bleed air is vented along the wings to provide more lift at low speeds and high angles of attack, as you find on landing. Most planes don’t mind an idle-throttle touchdown; with the MiG, I find myself flying into the flare and very slowly reducing the throttle to avoid dropping it on the runway like a streamlined brick. Fortunately, the brakes are good and a drag parachute is mounted in the tail, so stopping after touching down halfway down the runway doesn’t often present much of an issue. (Unless you shoot a second approach and forget to have the parachute repacked in between, in which case you’re going off the far end of the runway.)

That’s about all I have right now. I’d like to write about, or potentially stream, some of the campaign at a later date, but there are a few things stopping me—general just-past-release issues. Game performance is pretty horrid right now. The MiG’s developers are working hard on optimizations. A few avionics bugs slipped through the pre-release net, and are also being worked on. That said, the MiG was a definite buy for me, an icon from an exciting era past, and given Leatherneck Simulations’ progress on cleaning it up so far, I think it’s more than worth the cost of entry.

1. Quoth me, to skypirates collaborator parvusimperator: “I guess when you have such a short range, ‘divert to alternate’ is not an okay response to bad weather.”
2. In DCS, all of the RSBN stations are at airfields.
3. I’d been so disciplined with footnotes until just now. Anyway, the PRMG system is a lot like the western ILS, except it provides guidance both ways on a runway and fits in a single truck, which is a rare case where the Russians seem to do something better than we do.
4. Or something. I haven’t quite figured it out.

As the most dedicated Russophile among my flight-simming friends, I strapped myself into the cockpit of my early-birthday-present A-10C intending to make like good Soviet propagandist and put it down for every trivial flaw I could find in otherwise-perfect product of decadent capitalism. My final opinion turned out to be a little more measured. The Charlie Warthog is, in a lot of ways, a fine aircraft, and perhaps even the Su-25T’s superior (I would say the jury is still out), but it’s not quite the world-beater I thought it might be.

I’ll start with how it flies. The one-word description is ‘docile’; the two-word description is ‘very docile’. Those big, straight wings yield excellent handling at low speeds, a great roll rate, and all-around pleasant performance. The two podded turbofans strapped to the fuselage in back are high-bypass, which is to say they’re the same sort as the engines on most airliners: the jet exhaust contributes less than the volume of air moved by the fan at the front. It doesn’t make for a fast airplane, and indeed a loaded Warthog struggles to reach the sorts of speeds I consider ‘slow’ in the Su-25, but in any aircraft without an air-to-ground radar, sloth is a virtue (which explains my thing for helicopters). I count this one as even. The Su-25 has better thrust-to-weight and better ability to escape danger, but the A-10 can loiter just about forever and is an easier weapons platform.

Since all fixed-wing planes are basically the same, I got on top of the flying thing in just about no time flat. The two remaining pillars of the Warthog (the systems and the weapons) I learned at about the same time, but I’m going to hit weapons first. The biggest drawback compared to other the other DCS platforms of my acquaintance is the inexcusable lack of dedicated anti-tank missiles. The Su-25T can carry sixteen, plus another six laser-guided missiles, and that’s a lot of semi-standoff capability. On the other hand, the A-10’s gun is worthy of all the praise it garners. It’s effective against every target up to and including the vaunted M1 Abrams, provided you attack from the right aspect, and it makes a lovely, lovely sound.

The guided bomb options (fitted with the GPS-guided JDAM kits and the laser-guided Paveway kits) are good, and can be mounted on most of the hardpoints, but the Maverick only works on two of them, and the Su-25T’s Kh-25 (the Maverickski) is roughly equivalent. The Warthog’s rocket options are typically American, which is to say horrid; the Russians, with their long experience in Afghanistan, have a much better selection (from tiny little 57mm peashooters to 340mm monsters). The Su-25 has better light and medium weapons, and the A-10 has better heavy stuff; in my book, that goes to the Su-25.

Finally, we come to avionics, that traditional locus of American superiority, and the A-10C doesn’t disappoint. The dash holds two color multifunction displays, which control the armaments and targeting, and can display a moving map, and it’s all brilliant. The A-10’s targeting pod (the LITENING, a hardpoint-mounted jobber), through gyroscopes, gimbals, and voodoo magic (I repeat myself), plus a healthy dose of positional awareness, can track a point on the ground even if the wing or the airplane is blocking it, through a complete turn. It features an absurd amount of zoom, plus an IR camera and a standard CCD, and really, it’s hard to say anything bad about it.

It also feeds into the Sensor Point of Interest concept: with any sensor, from the targeting pod to the navigation display to a Maverick seeker to the little visual designation cursor on the HUD, you can declare a Sensor Point of Interest. It sticks around, and you can slew all of your sensors to it at any time. It’s a very, very handy bit of systems integration, and makes re-locating targets on subsequent attack passes a lot easier than they are in the Su-25.

Still, as good as it is, the designers missed two tricks. For one: by Russian standards, the A-10C’s autopilot is archaic. The Su-25T and the Ka-50 both have modes galore, up to and including ones which will follow the mission route or line up on a target, and the A-10 has… one mode which orbits, and one mode which flies straight and level. An orbit mode being the bare minimum for a single-seat attack aircraft, the A-10’s omission of anything fancier is a significant strike against it, given how much head-down work it expects you to be doing. The second one, I wouldn’t have thought of had it not been for the Su-25T: an infrared jammer in the tail. It makes a great deal of sense. Attack planes hang around at low level, where any mujahid with an SA-7 can take a pop at them, and having a bit of kit which makes rear-aspect attacks difficult is a gigantic win.

In the end, the Warthog is what I expected it to be: a solid ground-attack platform with a gun that’s unmatched in its effectiveness. At the same time, it isn’t quite what I expected. It’s only just entering service now, and being such a modern piece of kit, I have to wonder: why did the Air Force settle for very good, when perfect was so nearly within their grasp?

I, with a metrical title, recount my thoughts on recent Su-25T shenanigans, including the two failed attempts before the one that made parvusimperator’s final report. -Fish

I’ve already written my initial impressions of the Su-25T, so I can skip that part and go straight to the SEAD mission.

As we were getting our armaments in order, kicking the tires, and lighting the fires, I suggested, “Why don’t we try a synchronized takeoff?”

Parvusimperator raised several legitimate objections: “Because I only started flying this aircraft an hour or two ago? Because it wanders all over the runway? Because we’ll crash into each other and die?”

“Pessimist,” I said. We lined up on the runway in rough formation, him as the leader ahead and to my left. We held the brakes in, ran up the engines, and released the brakes as we started rolling… and somehow, most of the way down the runway, I passed him. As little sense as that made, it wasn’t hard to get back in formation—I just slowed down and let him pass me. We turned toward the target, three SAM batteries 100 kilometers southeast of our airfield. Two of them were medium-range area defense systems: one 9K37 Buk and one Improved Hawk. One 9K33 Osa provided short-range support. Soon after we left the field, we were already getting painted by the I-Hawk’s search radar. The radar warning receiver made a little ‘boop’ every now and then as the beam hit us. Range to target, according to our instruments, was about 90 kilometers when we started getting the radar signal, and parvusimperator’s anti-radiation missiles had a range of about 50 kilometers. We drove in to that range at about 500 meters above ground level, whereupon parvusimperator lofted the first missile at the I-Hawk’s search radar. By that time, the Buk had found us, and we turned in that direction. After parvusimperator launched his missile, the annoying solid tone my radar warning receiver was blaring into my ears turned into an annoying fast beeping.

“I’ve been launched on. Going defensive,” I said, feeling very professional as I rolled out of formation, left a cloud of chaff in my wake, and dove for the deck. Looking out the right side of my cockpit, I could actually see the missile’s smoke trail off in the distance, headed in my direction. Fortunately, my dive to the deck and my turn to put the missile on my three-o’clock ran it out of energy before it could hit me. Parvusimperator, who had been watching his missile in, was less lucky: although he had fired on the Buk battery before the missiles launched, the battery’s search radar had cued the launcher’s fire control radar onto us, letting it launch its missiles and guide them to us even after parvusimperator’s missile knocked out the search radar. He took a hit and punched out, and we restarted. Our second try didn’t go much better—owing to a DCS bug, the anti-radiation missiles blew up moments after leaving their hardpoints.

On the third try, we finally found a little more success: parvusimperator launched from nearly maximum range on both of the long-range SAMs, and tagged the short-range one with one of his other SEAD missiles. Lacking his fancy ELINT pod (which gives him HUD cues toward radars, and therefore targets), I had to resort to more desperate measures: first, my FLIR targeting pod, which proved unhelpful, and finally my good old Mark I eyeball. I found the smoking husk of the Osa, dropping a cluster bomb on it for good measure, and headed north from there, following the threat heading indicator on my radar warning receiver and eventually finding the Hawk battery just as parvusimperator did. I made one pass with rockets and destroyed the launcher, and was looping around for another when parvusimperator tagged the last vehicle with a laser-guided missile. That done, we climbed to our rendezvous point, formed up again, and went home.

The DCS Su-25T Frogfoot is the only attack aircraft in my simulated stable right now. In the interests of cooperation, parvusimperator learned to fly it a few nights ago, and has recounted his experience with it here for your edification. -Fish

As resident NATO-trained attack pilot, I took to the Su-25T without too much trouble. It certainly helped that this sim uses somewhat simplified modeling, so startup was a breeze. I can’t help but feel that the A-10C and the Su-25T are designed for very different missions. The A-10C has JDAMS and LGBs, some of which are quite large (2,000 lb. class). It also has Mavericks, which are a nice blend of fire-and-forget-ness and range. On the other hand, the Su-25T carries Vikhr ATGMs, and why the A-10C can’t equip Hellfires is beyond me. It would really improve tankbusting capability. Alas, the Su-25T only carries 16 Vikhrs, which some Soviet pencil-pusher probably figured was enough. However, the A-10C at least has some weapons that can do the same job as the Vikhrs. As for Vikhr employment, they’re very fast, but you have to maintain the target lock until impact, just like a Sparrow. The speed makes up for any inconvenience.

The bigger oversight in the A-10 is the inability to carry ARMs. The Su-25T can carry an ELINT pod to help you find SAM radars and Kh-58 and Kh-25MPU antiradiation missiles to kill them. With the A-10C, you have to rely on the Maverick, which basically means you can only kill Osa and Strela-1 SAMs with any degree of safety. Strela-10s can be engaged with care.

The A-10C’s avionics really put it ahead of the Su-25T. The MFDs, Digital stores management, moving map capability, and, most especially, Litening Targeting Pod capability dramatically improve flyability. The Litening pod’s electro-optical sensors are stabilized, so airframe buffeting doesn’t show up in your display. It will also remember where it was pointing provided you don’t exceed it’s G-limits, which is next to impossible in the A-10C. So the pod will helpfully remain pointed at the bit of dirt, Soviet armored vehicle or terrorist’s left nostril that you were looking at before you decided to turn to bring weapons to bear or evade ground fire. This also lets the experienced Hog-driver orbit either around the target area or next to the target area while he searches. The one advantage of the Shkval and/or Khod on the Su-25T is that since it is forward-aspect only, you always see an indication of where it’s searching in your HUD, making searching with visual references in front of you much easier for the novice pilot.
The Digital Stores Management System (DSMS, pronounced diz-miz) is super convenient, and analog systems don’t even come close. DSMS lets you select which pylon you want to launch stores from (helpful for balance), tells you how many rockets you have remaining, and lets you set fusing options and targeting modes (e.g. CCIP/CCRP). The A-10C’s presentation of CCIP and CCRP are better, as they help you fly onto the correct path to hit your target.

As mentioned before, the Su-25T handles better than the A-10C full stop. It’s faster and more agile. Ground handling is a bit tricky, and that is the one handling vice of the type. The Su-25T is also not well equipped for loitering, using thirsty turbojet engines.

I will also add that the Su-25T’s weapons encourages close flying, so I got to test how well the Rook could withstand 12.7mm BMG rounds the hard way. Several passes over M1 Abrams tanks had resulted in my plane being positively riddled, causing Flight Instructor Fishbreath to recommend that I return to base twice. I did no such thing and pressed my attack until I was happy I killed enough tanks. Afterwards, damage assessment from my instructor indicated that my plane was riddled with holes and it was missing several panels. However, handling wasn’t very impaired, which impressed me (and was the reason I had kept attacking, since it seemed like nothing important was damaged). Airbrakes deployed fine on my final approach. Given damage to my wings and flaps, my instructor suggested not using flaps to avoid a spin if only one of them deployed. At approach altitude, I agreed. Passing the outer marker, I put my gear down. But main gear did not budge. I opted for a belly landing, and continued with the approach. As my plane jolted to the ground, I deployed my parachute, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Eventually I skidded to a stop and shut down my engines. Now I could take a look at the external view, which showed that the part of the tail holding the braking chute was completely shot away. But despite all of the damage and missing bits, the Rook brought me home alive, and earns that special place in my heart, along with other ugly-but-tough planes like the Hog and the Wildcat.

With the newfound SEAD ability, Fishbreath and my now-proficient self decided we would go SAM-killin’. I took the ELINT pod and ARMs to kill SAM radars, and he took rockets and cluster bombs to kill TELs and command vehicles. We took off simultaneously, and then held formation like pros into the target until we started getting lit up by search radars. Our targets were an MIM-23 Hawk battery, an 9K37 Buk (SA-11 Gadfly) battery and an 9K33 Osa (SA-8 Gecko) battery. My plan was to hit the Hawk and the Buk with long-range Kh-58s, and then nail the Osa with a Kh-25MPU. Fishbreath would then destroy remaining launchers and command vehicles with cluster bombs and rockets. Closest to our ingress route was the Hawk battery, and it is very unnerving to hear that it has locked onto you while you wait for the battery to come within range of your missiles.

Accompanied by the Bomb Run theme from Dr. Strangelove, I shoved my throttles to the stops and bore in on the Hawk battery at full power. I launched one Kh-58 at it, and then turned to engage the Buk. By now I was much closer to the Buk, so I was able to launch shortly after acquiring it. I then promptly turned away hard to stay out of range of the missiles and avoid reprisals. Once I noted that the missiles had hit their targets, I engaged the Osa battery with a Kh-25MPU. After impact, I thought my threat display ought to be clear, and at first it was.

After only the briefest of moments, it became clear that there were still active radars. I detected radars from the Buk and the Hawk still active. I thought that we probably only had search radars left, but I decided to silence the infernal beeping of the RWR just the same. I rolled in on the Buk, locked it up, and fired my other Kh-25MPU. Bozhe moi! It blew up just in front of my nose! Clearly capitalist spies had gotten to our missile stocks. Also, I was out of ARMs. I would have to use other missiles. And, unfortunately, I couldn’t directly cue these with the ELINT pod. So I got my flightpath so that the radar icon was near an attitude marking on my HUD, then switched to air-to-ground mode and engaged the Buk search radar with a Kh-25ML. That target down, I decided to finish off the Hawk sensors. After a few tries, the same technique worked like a charm. Fishbreath finished off the battery with some rockets, guided in by smoke from the burning radars.

Landing the Su-25T with its parachute was quite fun. The return from this flight was my first proper landing in a fully functional plane and ILS cues made it a breeze.

It was all going so well last week. I got over my inherent fear of an aircraft who’s normal state has the wings moving faster than the fuselage and is, by definition, unsafe. I got over the fact that the cockpit has minimal visibility (except to port, where the door is), is claustrophobic, and has not much more advanced than switches. I even got over the fact that there’s a 70’s TV in front of me that gets only one channel. And hey, I guess I can get over the fact that I’m trusting some stupid satellites for my position rather than letting my INS do its own dirty work. My first takeoff wasn’t too bad to begin with, but I started messing with the cyclic too early and left my tail on the ground. Apparently this isn’t an optional part (or so I’m told–it does about as much as a pet platypus), so I tried again, being more careful with the cyclic this time. Worked great, and I was able to accelerate, slow down, and do some snazzy looking turns. And in spite of myself, I started to like the Akuloshka. I was having fun and she (or do the Russians call it a he?) was very responsive and agile. Alright, for a guy who just climbed out of an A-10C, this isn’t saying much, but it was still a blast.

Then my instructor told me that ‘Flight director mode is not for real flying’. Figures. I picked it up easily, so it must be a useless skill. Apparently the Kamov Design Bureau decided that one man was enough for flying and gunnery if they gave him an autopilot to do all the flying work so he could concentrate on the missiles. Great theory. So now I had to put this plan into practice. First, I had to be conscious of where my controls had last been centered from the autopilot’s perspective. Second, I had to be aware of the limitations of the autopilot’s control authority. This all came out okay with some practice and trying to keep my control inputs small. All of it that is, except hover mode. Which, basically makes you get in a hover before hover mode can do anything. When I just had to damp my forward motion, I got into a hover okay. But then I flew around a bit and tried again, and I had introduced a bit of sideslip. Sideslip that just wouldn’t go away and stay gone. I focused on getting rid of it, and then tried to kill my speed, and oh look, sideslip’s back. Did you forget to completely zero out the horizontal inputs? Probably. Or maybe you kicked in too much on the pedals, and you’ve got a bit of a turn coming. Lovely. Now time to correct again, but oh wait—no, you’ve got more forward velocity.

After much cursing, and not much help from my instructor beyond “small inputs” (although to be fair, he can do very little when he can’t see my control inputs—a two-seat trainer would be great), I decided that I was getting entirely too frustrated. You know you need a break when you decide that you’d rather figure out your CDU than work on aerial maneuvers. And at that point, I was ready to code coordinates in my CDU rather than keep wrestling with the autopilot. Which brings me to another gripe with Akuloshka—where are the acronyms? Where are the barriers to understanding? How are we supposed to minimize actual words in our procedural checklists?

But, after a little research and practice, I finally figured out how to not move at all. In the air. It’s a bigger accomplishment than it sounds like, believe me.

The DCS summer sale started yesterday afternoon (or the minute after midnight, Moscow time), so I grabbed the P-51 and the Huey. I haven’t had a chance to get into the latter yet, but the P-51 is very cool. I have HOTAS cheat sheets for the Ka-50 and the Su-25T (smart of me, if I do say so myself; remembering which buttons do what is the hardest part of any return to flight simming after a break), each of which takes up about a full page of notebook paper, with avionics and attack procedures on the other side. For comparison, the P-51 cheat sheet is about half of the front of a notecard—everthing else is used rarely enough to just throw the actual switch in the clickable cockpit.

Engine start was correspondingly simple: open the air intake, turn on electric power, turn on the fuel pump, and start the engine turning. Ground handling proved a little more complicated, since the P-51 has two modes on the ground. The first, activated by holding the stick aft of neutral, has tailwheel steering, but only up to 6 degrees off of a straight line. It’s easy to control, but it also has a turning circle more suited to a battleship, so I found myself trying to use the other mode, too. Holding the stick forward of neutral unlocks the tailwheel and lets it swivel freely, which might be described as ‘ground loop mode’. Eventually, I got my toe brakes properly calibrated, which made it possible to straighten out and re-enable tailwheel steering after making a sharp turn with the swiveling tail wheel. Once I got that down, I was able to actually make it to the runway to attempt a takeoff. Three of them, in fact, two with the takeoff assistance set to full, and one without any takeoff assistance at all. It didn’t seem all that hard to me in either instance, but that might just be my many, many hours in simulated prop aircraft showing through, or possibly the results of the manual’s recommendation to trim in five degrees of rudder before takeoff for the torque. Anyway, the trick is to hold yourself in place with the wheel brakes, run the throttle up to 30 psi of manifold pressure, then release the brakes and slowly feed in power up to 50 psi while holding the stick back to keep tailwheel steering. Pull the tail off the ground at 75 miles per hour or so, keep it straight, wait for the plane to fly itself into the air, and Bob’s your uncle.

The first step in the post-takeoff checklist is to set the fuel tank selector to the fuselage tank as soon as possible. It’s behind the pilot, and it turns the otherwise-friendly P-51 into a Camel-esque spinning monster, and skipping the drain-the-fuselage-tank-before-having-any-fun step after my first takeoff resulted in an inverted flat spin at the top of a loop about 500 feet above the ground. Oops. After picking myself out of the burning wreckage, I gave it another go, set the fuel tank selector to ‘fuselage’ until the engine sputtered, then put it back to one of the wing tanks and did some maneuvering.

It was fantastic. The Mustang is small, light, and fast, and is easy to flog around the sky. A nudge of the stick to the left, a bit of rudder, and some back pressure, and hey presto, a perfect four-G turn. It has more than enough power to go vertical (especially considering my most recent prop flight hours have been in Rise of Flight), climbs well, stays rock-steady in dives, and turns much better than its reputation suggests. After a few minutes of that, I decided I’d give a landing a try, so I eventually found the runway I took off from and settled in on an approach. With flaps and gear, I found 120 miles per hour easy to hold, so I flew that most of the way in. The problem was that going that speed forced a very shallow approach, so I flew the last half-mile or so before the runway completely blinded by the Mustang’s giant snout. Still, I managed to not drift completely off the runway, and touched down going about 90. That was slow enough to hold the stick back for tailwheel steering, so I didn’t even flip the plane or anything.

On the final flight, I turned the machine guns from SAFE to DAKKA and came back around on the airfield to strafe the radars. As I suspected from its dive performance, it’s a good gunnery platform, and I popped two of them before I realized I hadn’t been paying much attention to my engine gauges. I also realized that my engine gauges were saying things that would have caused flashing lights and audible alarms in a more modern aircraft, such as, “Your oil is almost on fire,” and, “All your coolant has boiled.” Oops again. Seconds later, my engine made a very loud clunk, going from 3000 RPM to 0 in the space of about a tenth of a second. As good a chance as any to try a deadstick belly landing, I figured, so I found myself a nice open field just past the airfield, lined up, and set her down, a little beat up but certainly fixable.

I think it’s worth the $16.

This is the second of three articles on DCS World aircraft, and the first written by me. The first overall, on the A-10C, can be found here.

I come bearing counterpoints. John wrote quite a bit on the A-10 and the DCS model of the C variant, and it would be silly of me to say that it isn’t the premier single-seat attack aircraft in the world today. It’s the whole package; the only thing it could really use is a radar, and that would take another MFD to use well (A-10D, anyone?). I’m here to talk about an older aircraft, a simpler weapon from a simpler time, a time when the only thing Soviet designers had to worry about was taking on NATO armor in the Fulda Gap. I speak, of course, of the legendary Su-25.

“The what?” you say. Yes, okay, fine. It’s not actually iconic over here in the west. It is, however, the first thing anyone from the former Soviet bloc thinks of when someone says ‘single-seat dedicated close-support aircraft’. See the picture in the spoiler tag below.

Spoiler for

I don’t think it’s arguable that it’s orders of magnitude prettier than the A-10. NATO calls it the Frogfoot, which is clearly an attempt to drag it down to the A-10’s level. In Russian, it’s nicknamed the Grach, which translates to ‘rook’, of the bird-of-prey variety. I like that name better. It’s pushed through the sky by a pair of Soyuz/Gavrilov turbojets producing about 10,000 pounds of thrust a piece at sea-level speeds of up to 975 kilometers per hour. My handy-dandy unit converter says that’s about 530 knots. Quick, for a ground attack plane, but speed brakes and maneuvering flaps keep it controllable down to 350 or 400 kilometers per hour. The turbojets are thirsty, but external tanks can be carried on four of the eleven hardpoints (ten under the wings, one under the fuselage, capacity about four and a half thousand kilograms), and in any event, it’s not a deep strike aircraft by any stretch of the imagination. It mounts a 30mm cannon internally, the GSh-30-2 two-barreled autocannon, which fires a smaller round than the A-10’s cannon and carries a smaller ammo load. On the other hand, the Su-25 is a meter or two shorter and narrower than the Warthog.

The variant modeled in DCS World is the Su-25T, a dedicated anti-tank upgrade of the basic Su-25 which never entered high-rate production; there are only ten or twelve of them out there in the real world. Which is a shame: the T model keeps all of the features of the base model, and gives some serious (and deserved) attention to the avionics suite. The Su-25T has a proper HUD in place of the original Frogfoot’s electro-optical drop-computing sight, along with a Shkval TV targeting system and laser designator mounted in the nose, and, as seems to be standard on Russian single-seat attack aircraft, it has a serious autopilot. Capable of simple things like route-following and level flight, it can also hold a radar or barometric altitude, an altitude and a bank angle for automatic orbiting, an attitude for hands-off pointing, and an automatic-ingress-to-target mode that makes accurate release of unguided bombs almost trivial. The Shkval can be augmented by a variety of targeting pods: a low-light TV pod for nighttime operations, a FLIR pod for better target acquisition (opinions are divided on whether the FLIR pod actually can be mounted to the Su-25, and it’s actually labeled as the LLTV pod in DCS, but I’m definitely not complaining), or an electronic intelligence pod. The ELINT pod, which can provide ranging and localization for two sorts of anti-radiation missiles.

That’ll do as a segue to weapons. The Su-25T can mount quite an array of them: the aforementioned anti-radiation missiles represent the major capability gain over the Warthog, enabling the Rook to take on air defense suppression missions. Also on the list of armaments is the SPPU-22 gun pod, a dual-barreled 23mm autocannon on a mount that can swivel in the vertical. Combined with the Rook’s imaging sensors, laser rangefinder, and autopilot, the SPPU-22 can be flown on target and deliver tens of seconds of highly accurate cannon fire with very little pilot input. The BeTAB-500 and BeTAB-500 ShP concrete-piercing bombs also make an appearance, both 500-kilogram weapons; the latter has a rocket booster that fires once it’s gone vertical, which serves to launch it through a runway and crater the ground beneath it. The most notable deficiency in the weapons list is a limited capacity for fire-and-forget weapons: TV-guided weapons, either the KAB-500Kr bomb or the Kh-29T missile (picture a Maverick, but with three times the warhead) can only be carried on the two innermost hardpoints. Although Kh-25 laser-guided missiles (Maverickskis, really) can be carried on the next two sets of hardpoints out, the poor field of view on the Su-25T’s sensors requires that the aircraft be flown more or less straight at the target until the missiles hit. The Vikhr missile, which is also the primary armament of the Ka-50 attack helicopter, can be carried in two launchers of eight missiles each; the A-10 can’t even come close to that number of precision munitions. The rest of the weapons list is less exciting: rockets in a variety of sizes, including the S-25 340mm rocket and the S-25L laser-guided 340mm rocket, unguided bombs from 100 to 500 kilograms in size, including a rack of four 100-kilo bombs, and a few sizes of cluster bombs and submunitions dispensers. On the whole, it can carry weapons that make it suitable for nearly any mission the A-10 can be used for (with the exclusion of lots of precision bombing; on the other hand, though, let’s see the A-10 do SEAD). The avionics are more primitive (particularly when it comes to targeting and maps), but the autopilot is better, and putting an IR jammer in the tail was an inspired move. And, to quote my A-10-flying buddy, “Your plane handles so much better than mine.”

Is that really an important quality for a ground-attack airplane? Yes, yes it is. The Su-25 has a better thrust-to-weight ratio than the A-10 empty, and a better TWR fully loaded. It turns better to get back onto the attack after making a pass, accelerates better, and goes faster, which makes, say, tossing a guided bomb a little easier to pull off. Now, nobody I fly with is going to win any medals for Best Simulated Ground Attack Pilot, and John does seem to hit on more of his attack runs, but with those caveats in mind, I found myself getting in one and a half or two attacks to John’s one A-10 run. Better handling leads directly to an increased violence of action, and while I think I’d probably choose the A-10 for precision and its capability to loiter in low-intensity conflicts, I also think the Su-25T is at least as good as the Warthog in a hypothetical Third World War scenario.

It’s not all roses. Visibility out the back is abysmal, and the takeoff roll at full load is nearer two miles than one. It has a drag parachute for use on landing, not as a luxury but because it doesn’t have any other way to slow down. For compactness reasons, it uses turbojets instead of turbofans, and sans external tanks it doesn’t have much loiter capacity (the A-10 can, I believe, shut down an engine to save on fuel and extend its time on call). On the other hand, it’s durable, agile, well-armed, and easy to employ. It’s a great little package, and although I haven’t flown the A-10 yet, I don’t think it could win me over.

John and I have been putting in a fair few hours in Digital Combat Simulators lately. It’s a line of high-fidelity flight sims that can be enjoyed in multiplayer. This is the first of three articles on the aircraft we fly, his take on the A-10C. -Fishbreath

Disclaimer: I’m not an actual fighter pilot. I can try to write like one anyway.

The Fairchild-Republic A-10C Warthog (technically its the Thunderbolt II, but no one calls it that) is one of the ugliest planes you will ever lay eyes on. However, it is also the finest ground attack machine ever devised. It is well armored against ground fire, so you can fly as low as you please and not worry about machine guns. In fact, it’s one of the few modern aircraft where you don’t have to care about machine gun fire, because the ‘Hog is built to absorb damage. Losing a hydraulic system is no problem, because the thoughtful designers put in a second one. And if you lose that one too, you have a manual system of cables and pushrods, just like your grandpappy’s P-40 Warhawk. It’s not power assisted, but it will get you home. The fuel tanks are self sealing, so holes in the wings won’t cause you to return all that JP-8 to the earth. Your engines are separated, so if one of them eats a SAM, you still have another functioning one. Oh, and the gear don’t retract all the way, which the fighter pukes will no doubt object to on the grounds of drag, but this way, should your gear fail to drop because they’re too shot up, you can have a much more pleasant belly landing. The ‘Hog’s toughness rivals that of Rocky Balboa, and this toughness will make you love it, even though it’s hideous.

One of the prominent features on the Warthog as you approach it is the gun. This is the General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger autocannon, and it is the greatest aircraft gun ever built by human hands. Thor wishes he has one to shoot lightning bolts at nonbelievers. This gun was not built for the Warthog; the Warthog was built around this gun. It weighs over two tons fully loaded. The ammunition drum is the size of a Volkswagen, and holds 1,150 rounds. Rate of fire can be as high as 4,200 rounds per minute, but the pencil-necked ‘whiz kids’ have limited the nominal rate of fire to 3,900 rounds per minute. Two kinds of rounds are carried: armor-piercing incendiary and high explosive incendiary. Normally, there are four armor-piercing rounds per high explosive round. The armor piercing incendiary rounds contain a depleted uranium core, which will tear through the armor on most tanks. Some studies have linked these rounds to cancer, just in case tearing through the armor of a tank and setting it on fire is insufficient to kill the target.

But all of these features were on the boring old A-10A too. This is the A-10C. What’s different? Well, we have proper multi-function displays (MFDs) now, which let you select and aim weapons, set up a moving map and interface with the brand-new navigation system. The cockpit is now night-vision goggle (NVG) compatible, in case you have to save some army guys late at night. The A-10C is now compatible with a wide variety of smart munitions, including laser guided bombs (LGBs), which are perfect for tank-plinking. Some guys from accounting have told me that tank plinking is a waste of a rather expensive piece of hardware¹, but no one listens to the guys from accounting (just look at the JSF project).

Okay, enough blabbing about engineering. Flying impressions. Well, it’s pretty wallowy. It looks like a ‘hog, and it flies like a hog. The boys at Fairchild-Republic picked an engine that has next to no oomph for the A-10. Shove the throttles to the firewall and you feel like you’re trying to run in molasses. You accelerate slowly. You climb slowly. And if you want to do both at once, it will be a long day. Fortunately, the A-10C has big fuel tanks, so you can take your sweet time over the battlefield. Turning is an adventure. You might feel that a nice, straight, boring wing (like on your grandpappy’s P-40) would make for a stable platform. And it does. So long as you keep your turns very gentle. Exceed a standard rate turn and you’ll start bleeding altitude and airspeed really badly. So don’t fly like you’re in a Viper and you’ll be fine. The low speed and stability in level flight makes weapon employment a breeze, even without the use of the autopilot. The LITENING targeting pod is a really great tool, giving you a wonderful perspective of the battlefield, though the field of view is narrow. It can provide a good picture to the MFDs from much farther out than the Maverick’s IR seeker. The A-10 carries a large payload of stores, so you won’t object much to sacrificing a pylon to the LITENING pod, and you’ll be able to dish out plenty of damage. Cueing the Maverick from the LITENING pod takes a little practice, and definitely takes time. At closer ranges, it’s easier to just use the HUD display and the Maverick sight directly. LGB employment is pretty simple when using CCRP (Continuously Calculated Release Point) mode. Nearly all of the work is done for you once you’ve found a target with the targeting pod. You then tell the aircraft that you’re ready to fire, and the aircraft calculates the best time to release the bomb, even if you’re in a climb. The targeting pod handles laser designation, and then your target explodes. Despite low engine power, takeoffs are easy, although long. Landings are similarly easy due to the low stall speed and stable airframe.

1. JDAM and LGB kits for standard dumb bombs are actually way less expensive than Mavericks. -Fishbreath