How do you approach a Spit?

[Shane]

very good description, mtmn... and i'd like to highlight these two concepts...


"People are creatures of habit, and are therefore predictable.  Some may seem less predictable than others, but once you figure that persons patterns out, they're generally pretty predictable as well."

and

"...I may look harmless enough, but I'm dictating at least part of your attack."

then you did a good job outlining how you apply it in your merge.  It's not so much about the plane(s) - they're just a variable as much as alt, speed, fuel, etc. are - it's how one thinks and executes.

[titanic3]

  I know people learn differently and maybe it's just me, but I never bothered to look up a trainer or read a guide or anything. I learned by doing it, flying until I got it right. It was all instinct for me, doing what I can to get on the other guy's six. I was doing moves that I didn't know what they were called until long after when I actually bothered to read.

Do I need improvement/can improve? Sure, everyone can. But to get to a point where you can consistently land kills is the most important, and IMO, 80% of it is instinct and 20% is training for the average guy.

Myself was more like 95% instinct and 5% training. I had no one to teach me (played H2H when I first started for a year), I read almost nothing about ACM and gunnery until long after I realized I was already doing it, and it wasn't until last year that I picked a plane and focused on it (109K4). Every now and then I'll ask to DA someone and it helps me more than can you imagine. You can see how you compare to all kinds of players and work on it until you it right (shoot someone down).

TL;DR: Flying is mainly instinct and DA matches was how I learned. IMO, forget the rule book and guides, pick an opponent who is willing, fly against him and see how fast you can get on his 6 and shoot him down. It's all instinct.

[Big Rat]

Remember a lot of proper ACM is counter intuitive and it often takes an instructor or a better player (that knows the trick) to show the how and why it works part of it.  Teaching proper ACM and also being able to do it, is a rare skill that takes quite a while to develop.  Think about something relatively simple for most of us vets to do like a rolling scissors or barrel roll defence and then try to describe it in words to a new pilot.  That is much harder then the actual move is, I found a lot of this out after becoming a trainer.  Also flying against those that are better then you, or of similiar skill, isn't this also a form of training.  This is how I learned as well.  But I could have cut out a lot of time with a proper trainer, that I learned the long hard way.  The proof is in the pudding as they say, I think most here that have worked with a trainer for a couple of sessions, will tell you they learned more in about 3 hours of training time then they would have learned in 6 months otherwise.

 
BigRat   

[morfiend]

I know people learn differently and maybe it's just me, but I never bothered to look up a trainer or read a guide or anything. I learned by doing it, flying until I got it right. It was all instinct for me, doing what I can to get on the other guy's six. I was doing moves that I didn't know what they were called until long after when I actually bothered to read.

Do I need improvement/can improve? Sure, everyone can. But to get to a point where you can consistently land kills is the most important, and IMO, 80% of it is instinct and 20% is training for the average guy.

Myself was more like 95% instinct and 5% training. I had no one to teach me (played H2H when I first started for a year), I read almost nothing about ACM and gunnery until long after I realized I was already doing it, and it wasn't until last year that I picked a plane and focused on it (109K4). Every now and then I'll ask to DA someone and it helps me more than can you imagine. You can see how you compare to all kinds of players and work on it until you it right (shoot someone down).

TL;DR: Flying is mainly instinct and DA matches was how I learned. IMO, forget the rule book and guides, pick an opponent who is willing, fly against him and see how fast you can get on his 6 and shoot him down. It's all instinct.

  I find this an interesting take on things!   I would like to comment on some of it though.

  When learning a new skill a person goes through a couple of stages,the first being the basics of W5{who, what,where,etc} then you get to the cognitive stage where you know the basics but still must think about what you have to do.Then with time, experience and many hours of repetitive practice you eventually get to the instinctive stage.

   At this stage you no longer have to think what to do next you just do it,pare and counter,he reaches in you throw the uppercut without think and it lands because of all the time and practice you've done you know that will work. Same with flying,fighting,golf any sport or activity,it's just the way we learn.

 I've trained people over the years,not just in AH but in other endevors such as boxing,flyfishing and TKD.

   Every single person went through these stages and hopefully at 1 point a light went on and things clicked,thats when it becomes instinctive.


 YMMV.



     

[mtnman]

one question while we've got you in loquacious trainer mode...could you walk through how you go about initiating the rolling scissors when someone is trying to saddle you?

I'm not too bad in a rolling scissors but only really end up in those situations fairly randomly as opposed to setting a trap to initiate it...

using the barrel roll defense on someone who is cutting throttle and lining up to saddle me generally ends up with me in the tower :s

I haven't left this hanging, I just haven't had time to go through my videos and find some examples yet.

With the barrel roll defense, a key point is setting up the correct angle for your opponent to attack from.  This allows you to keep your speed nearly as high as your attackers, but still have the rate of closure you need.  This way, he can slow down by cutting throttle, but is still forced to close at a rate that allows you to get the overshoot.

And actually, an opponent who attacks like that is EXACTLY what you want to see, since it's what allows you to draw him into a rolling scissors...

[Tank-Ace]

I know people learn differently and maybe it's just me, but I never bothered to look up a trainer or read a guide or anything. I learned by doing it, flying until I got it right. It was all instinct for me, doing what I can to get on the other guy's six. I was doing moves that I didn't know what they were called until long after when I actually bothered to read.

Do I need improvement/can improve? Sure, everyone can. But to get to a point where you can consistently land kills is the most important, and IMO, 80% of it is instinct and 20% is training for the average guy.

Myself was more like 95% instinct and 5% training. I had no one to teach me (played H2H when I first started for a year), I read almost nothing about ACM and gunnery until long after I realized I was already doing it, and it wasn't until last year that I picked a plane and focused on it (109K4). Every now and then I'll ask to DA someone and it helps me more than can you imagine. You can see how you compare to all kinds of players and work on it until you it right (shoot someone down).

TL;DR: Flying is mainly instinct and DA matches was how I learned. IMO, forget the rule book and guides, pick an opponent who is willing, fly against him and see how fast you can get on his 6 and shoot him down. It's all instinct.

Same here; only formal training I had was about 10 minutes in the P-47 covering just some very basic tactics (ie, don't get caught low and slow, get close before shooting, etc), and MAYBE 1/2 an hour in the La-7, which was mostly just winging up.

[Karnak]

The spitfire hardly defined England's 'unbroken spirit'. Even saying that it exemplifies that spirit is greatly stretching a point.

I mean the UK had at one point, what, like 50 operational spitfires during the Battle of Britain, while the Hurricanes bore the brunt of the work? No matter how laughable giving so fearsome a name to so sedate a fighter is, it sounds as though you ought to be praising the Hurricane over the Spitfire.



Or did you mean to say it defined the spirit of letting the USA bear the brunt of the work later on in the war?

I didn't realize there was anybody still relying on the German "Intelligence" reports from the summer of 1940 as their source for RAF availability.

Tank-Ace,
Don't be so pro-German, anti-British.  It is too stereotypically Luftwaffle.  The British never lacked for operational fighters during the Battle of Britain as they were building them faster than they were losing them and much faster than the Germans were building Bf109s at the time.  What the British were running short on were pilots which were far harder to replace than a mere Hurricane or Spitfire.  About 1/3rd of the RAF fighters that fought in the Battle of Britain were Spitfires and about 2/3rds were Hurricanes.

[Tank-Ace]

I didn't realize there was anybody still relying on the German "Intelligence" reports from the summer of 1940 as their source for RAF availability.

Tank-Ace,
Don't be so pro-German, anti-British.  It is too stereotypically Luftwaffle.  The British never lacked for operational fighters during the Battle of Britain as they were building them faster than they were losing them and much faster than the Germans were building Bf109s at the time.  What the British were running short on were pilots which were far harder to replace than a mere Hurricane or Spitfire.  About 1/3rd of the RAF fighters that fought in the Battle of Britain were Spitfires and about 2/3rds were Hurricanes.

Don't take my post so seriously, I was just returning fire.

[nrshida]

Or did you mean to say it defined the spirit of letting the USA bear the brunt of the work later on in the war?

Wow. What an ignorant and offensive comment.

[JOACH1M]

Don't take my post so seriously, I was just returning fire.

Returning fire originally shot by you? 

[Tank-Ace]

Yeah, its still returning fire  .

[JOACH1M]

Yeah, its still returning fire  .

But you started it...

[Tank-Ace]

But you started it...

Yeah, and your point is...... oh right, theres no point to be made, so you can't have a point.

[JOACH1M]

Yeah, and your point is...... oh right, theres no point to be made, so you can't have a point.

No, my point is that your trying to save face for something you said earlier. It just takes a non-ignorant person to realize it. 

[Shane]

dudes, the war was over almost 70 years ago.  the spits won.    this is just a game.