I've done ACUSA a total of 3 times now.
The marchetti's are a blast to fly. Very responsive, lots of feedback when you enter an accelerated stall (or get close to it), and will spin REALLY fast if you get into a low speed stall.
Eat a light breakfast, and maybe a little ginger before you go up (I've gotten sick once, nauseous once, and the third time I was totally fine. Go figure.)
Amazing but true, these silly little computer games really help you in the real thing. Each time the instructors were very impressed with us (I did it with a couple of buddies who also fly multiplayer air sims)
You will not be prepared for 2 things:
The Gs. It's one thing to pull 6 Gs in a sim. It's quite another to try and track your opponent with your head in a 4.5 G turn, while steering your plane, 'grunting' and enyoing a loss of hearing & color vision.
Spotting you opponent. If he gets on your 6 you're going to have a hard time steering the plane, keeping him in sight and evading. If you ever loose sight of your opponent you'll be lucky to survive that fight.
As a final note, there's one dangerous side effect of this. You *will* annoy your friends for a long time to come due to uncontrollable babbling about HOW AMAZINGLY COOL IT WAS!
~Lemur
p.s. When doing this, Head On shots are a very bad idea
