AH vs real WW2

[SPKmes]

I would have to say I would fear better in the real world than I do here. purely due to the fact that I can not get the feel. I have never flown before but I liken it to driving sims for this particular case. in a game I have no chance of feeling the inertia, weight, and the greatest, truest sense the gut. If i was to drive like I do in sims I would be dead, or at the least un-insurable.(and yes I do push the boundaries of my vehicle on a regular basis, please don't tell my mum). I don't believe these sims this help me much on what I know of myself and learning style.

[Chalenge]

In RL you got sucked up off the street, in some cases, and thrown into flight training. Sent out to the field and off you went. I can't see why any one of the people that play here wouldn't make excellent fighter pilots. Many of the aces of days gone by were just average schmucks till they hit the sky.

Oh I think the 85% rejection rate of WWII combat pilots has something to do with it. Higher at some points in the war.

[Dream Child]

Interesting topic, but a lot more training would have to be done for an AHer to succeed in WWII. There is only a little teamwork here, and then only if you're lucky. The planes physics are wrong here. (Here's hint #1: The center of gravity is forward of the center of lift on a real airplane. If you really lost your elevators and horizontal stabilizers, you would pitch nose down, not nose up, and would oscillate badly all the way down.) The torque is wrong and is way under stated, and then disappears with a little speed. (The Spit 14, for example, couldn't go to full throttle until about 50 MPH, due to not enough rudder control.) There is no feeling for what the plane is doing. There's no sense that the ground is coming up at you really, really fast, and you're going to die if you don't pull out NOW. There's never an engine problem, or some other mechanical/electrical/gun malfunction. The 163's don't blow up all by themselves here. And, possible most importantly, the planes here don't compare the same as in real life, so if you think you're going to drop your flaps and turn fight with <insert favorite turn fighting plane here>, you're likely to find yourself wondering what happened, as you get out turned by something that's not supposed to turn that well.

Now having said all that, there are some people with excellent ACM skills here, but that's only a small part of the equation.

[morfiend]

    UAV


               


                 


                   

[Guppy35]

I can pick my plane, pick my side, pick my job, pick when I fly, pick the airfield, pick the fight, the weather is always good, I don't have to worry about cold, mechanical difficulties, engine management, fuel, metal fatigue. Fear and dying are not part of the equation.  hard to compare I think.

That being said, my son flew lots of flight sim stuff.  When he was eleven I bought him an hour with an instructor on his birthday.  The instructor was impressed with what he knew and how he handled the Cessna 152. 

That he'd 'taken off and flown' in a flight sim and had a general understanding of how aircraft worked and how the controls worked certainly made a difference.

[Angus]

Flew a stick-controlled aircraft the other day for the first time.
The owner (commercial pilot) said something like "it's obvious you've done this before".
Understanding does indeed make a difference.

[Bubbajj]

My point was that there is no way to tell who can do it and can't until it's being done. Besides all of the disqualifiers, old, fat, dumb, weak (of which I fall into some of the afore mentioned categories), any one of us could have been an Eric Hartman, given the right circumstances. As far as correlation? No way to know.

[Brooke]

Assuming the AH pilot also had good eyesight and the nerves to fly in WWII combat, then I think a good AH pilot would be a good WWII fighter pilot.  AH is realistic enough so that it's ACM skills translate to real aircraft.

Many years back, I and two friends went to Air Combat USA.  One was a commercial-rated pilot with 1000's of hours in all types of aircraft, with some aerobatic experience, but not a great deal.  I was an Air Warrior pilot with some experience in real planes (private-pilot level) and a lot in Air Warrior.  The third was an Air Warrior pilot with just about zero experience in real planes but again a lot in Air Warrior.  In the combats, I and the other AW pilot handily beat the commercial pilot.

Flying a real plane takes learning, but I think that learning ACM and gunnery takes enormously more.  This is born out in AH, where just learning to fly is quick, but becoming good at fighting takes a long time; and it is born out in real life, where pilots learned regular flying and navigation fairly readily, but only through longer experience or a great innate knack or both did they learn to become effective fighter pilots.  ACM, situational awareness, gunnery -- these you can learn about in Aces High, and it would (and in my case did) translate to real aircraft.  Learning how to run a real airplane (how to manage the engines, the fuel, navigation, etc.) is something AH doesn't teach, but that is more-standard stuff that all pilots seem to master without great difficulty.

[BMathis]

Yikes; by the time I got back to reading this thread it has Exploded

[ian5440]

i think one of the biggest differences would be the stress the body goes through in comparison to the game

[lyric1]

Well just based off physical size a number of us would not make it in the WW11 era. As most planes were not designed to hold guys that were tall & that is not factoring in girth either. Health would be a major issue as well as sight. Then the flight training would weed a lot of us out as well. Quite a few would not make it as a fighter jock & probably ended up in bombers or transports. I am sure a few would get to the end & make it to.

[Brooke]

i think one of the biggest differences would be the stress the body goes through in comparison to the game

I don't think g's would be a deciding factor.  6 g's isn't that bad.  The wear of long missions and mental stress would be a much, much higher bar, I think.

[Chalenge]

Heck even not tucking the corners on your bed would get most of the guys here cut! 

Your ego is writing checks your body cant cash!

[Platano]

I believe that anyone in AH with stardard Fighter Pilot Training could've been a good pilot in WW2, of Course meeting these Qualifications:

Good Eyesight (Or Airforce Requirement)

Deemed Physically fit (no health issues) to handle Dogfighting G stresses.

Quick Reactions, Work Well under pressure (One being you may lose your life any second now)

If anyone that plays this game qualifies with all of the above and of course recieves the standard training everyone else recieves, (Learning the engine control and management and all the other yummy complex stuff  ) I dont see why that person would not make a good WWII fighter Pilot.

I mean doesnt having an understanding of what your trying to do make it easier to do? (ACM, Deflection shooting, Angles of attack etc...)

[Brooke]

Heck even not tucking the corners on your bed would get most of the guys here cut! 

Your ego is writing checks your body cant cash!

Me?  No, really, 6 g's isn't that bad.  I've experienced 6 g's, it didn't seem that bad.

Let's put it this way.  Your opponent has 200 regular flight candidates to take through basic WWII-standards flight training and then into combat.  You can have 200 such regular flight candidates, or you can take 200 good AH pilots who are otherwise (physically and psychologically) as qualified as the others.  Whichever group you pick, you'll take them through the same WWII flight training and then into combat.  Which would you rather have?

I would rather have the AH pilots, and I think that they'd be on average much better at air combat.  This isn't based on ego -- it's just based on my judgement of it and a very limited amount of related experience.

If a country had AH back in the days of WWII, I think they'd have used it a lot in training, and I think it would have been very effective.