180 degree turn with NO E burned??? Please explain the physics and how to...

[FLS]

Max the half Cuban 8 is an aerobatic maneuver. It's just an Immelmann with a descent to regain speed.

Practicing aerobatics is a good way to develop your flying skills even though it's not BFM per se.

[Chilli]

A teachable moment here:  I watched the film (now I KNOW that he is going to loop head on), still I had followed the same path as in the film (attempting to keep my eyes on the target), WHERE is the latest point that I could have avoided the HEAD ON, and WHAT maneuver would you suggest is the most consistently successful (NOT LEAVING my butt vulnerable to the deflection shot)?

Ignore the lag for the moment.  Also, please do not read too much into my questions (I don't expect miracles in my ACM overnight).  Small things that I can improve on and learn to look for to replace my history of past mistakes  will go a long way.  For this I am greatly appreciative. 

[morfiend]

I'd suggest you dont fly your gunsight at the enemy,instead fly for position,the shot will come!

  So what does that mean? Simply use an offset,vertical or horizontal or both,fly a  path that will place you in his rear hemisphere. Preferably above and behind the enemy,once in position you should be able to get position to take a shot.


  Hope that helps!!


   

[Kingpin]

Good posts Kingpin! Printed out the former and the latter. The Half Cuban 8 diagram was an "A HA!" moment for me. Can you suggest an online source for more BFM diagrams?

<S>

Hi Max,

First off, whoops!  I meant to say BFM is Basic Fighter Maneuvers not "flight" maneuvers.  (That is what happens when you type these things quickly and post before proof-reading!)  As FLS said, technically the Half Cuban 8 is the name of an aerobatic maneuver which combines an Immelman and a dive (descent).   I tend to treat most aircraft maneuvers as BFM insofar as creating a lexicon for discussing ACM in the context of Aces High.  That said, FLS makes an important point, in that you should understand the basic elements of each maneuver, because that is what will help you learn to perform each maneuver correctly before you start adapting and applying them to ACM.

As far as a single list/source of maneuver diagrams, I have yet to find just ONE definitive site that shows every maneuver in what I feal is an easy-to-comprehend format.  Some BFM are more complex than others and therefore can be harder to grasp in a single image.  So, I would suggest starting with a Google Search for Basic Fighter Maneuvers (BFM) and look over a few lists of maneuvers.  Take note of any maneuvers you aren't familiar with and then search those maneuvers specifically. I would recommend reading a description of the maneuver, then looking at a variety of diagrams and possibly YouTube videos of them as well.  Whatever helps you best visualize the maneuver until it "clicks" for you is really the key. 

If you find any maneuvers you don't fully understand either how to perform or how to apply in combat, feel free to post them here in the Training Forum and we can discuss how to perform them as well as how and when to apply them into your combat maneuvering.  And you can always fly with a trainer in the Training Arena to practice and learn how to apply them.

<S>
KP

[Chilli]

I'd suggest you dont fly your gunsight at the enemy,instead fly for position,the shot will come!

  So what does that mean? Simply use an offset,vertical or horizontal or both,fly a  path that will place you in his rear hemisphere. Preferably above and behind the enemy,once in position you should be able to get position to take a shot.


  Hope that helps!!


   

It does help, sincerely thank you.  I think that you were the first to point me in that direction some time ago and even went on further to discuss what is meant by flying in a "vertical plane" to the enemy (keeping the target in the vertical plane that extends from above the pilot's head; extends from below the pilot's seat; extends from the nose of the aircraft; and also extends from the tail of the aircraft.

   It sounded like Yoda asking to "use the force" but it served me well. 

Is there a way that I should be flying this "vertical plane" even when I have inadvertently placed myself nose to nose, and avoid his HO shot and maneuver into that illusive sweet dead six spot?

[Chilli]

Sorry, it was too late to edit my last post and realised that it sounded like I wanted an immediate fix all answer.  Not the case at all.

Going to let this specific issue go.  Flying the same plane and practicing doing lazy 8's, half Cubans, etc. for a while.  Then will try and FIND a place in game where it will HELP me feel more confident in my merges and sorties.

 

[Kingpin]

I think that you were the first to point me in that direction some time ago and even went on further to discuss what is meant by flying in a "vertical plane" to the enemy (keeping the target in the vertical plane that extends from above the pilot's head; extends from below the pilot's seat; extends from the nose of the aircraft; and also extends from the tail of the aircraft.

Hi Chilli,

I'm glad you are not looking for the "quick fix", as all of this will take time and practice.  Like The Force, you've just "taken your first step into a larger world."   

I think what you are referring to in your post above was "flying your lift vector" (see picture below).   That is a very important concept to grasp and will greatly improve your ACM.  Your lift vector placement determines where you are turning toward, while your speed determines the rate and radius of your turn.  When you start thinking in terms of lift-vector-placement and rate vs. radius fights (something called "circle flow") you are well on your way toward becoming an ACM Jedi.

With the image below in mind, think about how you could be offset horizontally (and/or vertically) at a merge (to avoid a HO) and use your lift vector placement to turn into your opponent's rear quarter at the merge, rather than pointing your nose at him...

[nrshida]

He's got the bug. Oh yes.

Inspired by Kingpin's excellent image I see it's now possible to try to build on an important point I touched on earlier:

...you lost this fight most pointedly because you did not neutralise a perfectly in plane nose-to-nose arrangement...

In plane manoeuvring.

If you look at that jet, and imagine another blue arrow which emerges from the centre of the aircraft and shoots out the left wingtip, and another shooting out the right wingwingtip, then there is your 3-9 line. Now if you stuck a virtual Rotring or Staedtler or Messerschmidt compass (they always seem to be German) in the centre of that jet right down one of those 3-9 lines and drew a blue circle, one that went through both the lift vector and the arrow coming out of the nose, you could draw a blue circle around the aircraft. So if you looked up out the cockpit you'd see a line going fore-aft and right down through your nose and back through your stab: the axis upon which your elevators act. When you pull back or bunt then your nose would travel on the circle. The 3-9 line is the axle for elevator turning.

If you do a competition-winning Immelmann at an airshow, then your blue circle slides on a great big piece of paper hung upright in the sky. A 2-dimensional surface upon which the manoeuvre is performed, a plane.

Plane: 1 a flat surface on which a straight line joining any two points on it would wholly lie.

In the case we've described, all the points of our circle, and the arrow heads of both our lift vector (and the 'thrust' vector) and the centrepoint of the plane are points on this surface.

So with ACM there are at least two aircraft involved. In your fight with Hammerdown the moments before the HO, neither of you used much aileron. Your 3-9 lines were both level with the horizon throughout and because you'd been chasing him as 'gunsight on' as possible you were both in exactly the same plane. Your big pieces of paper were hanging in the sky as one. You were manoeuvring and travelling in exactly the same plane.

Now the consequence of the turn rate and radius is very clear he's only got to pull round enough go match your flightpath and the gunnery solution drops in his lap as a gift! Your response is to deny or complicate his gunnery solution considerably by making it a 3D problem rather than a 2D one. So as you saw him pulling up over the water, even by the halfway point of his move when he's vert you should have anticipated the danger and rolled 45 degrees to one side and pulled up*.

Like Morfiend said here would be an appropriate moment to take your gunsight OFF the opponent and fly for position. Since you've rolled by using your ailerons your plane of manoeuvring has rolled with you and is now NOT ALIGNED with that of your opponent. Even if he adapted and was able to put his guns in your direction it would be a momentarily and difficult shot, an eye-blink at best as you are traveling quickly across his nose. You can easily jink out of those. Now look at the possibilities of relative position and energy, you'd easily get above and he wouldn't have the energy to follow. Now you can choose a better position to put your gunsight back in his general direction and pressure him.

He can't run, he can't hide, he can't pressure you, he can't dictate the fight, he can only sit in his cockpit blubbing for his mama and quickly leafing through the speed index of his copy of ACM for Dummies - Quick Access Version wondering what happened.

So in summary the solution to being in a situation where you are losing a nose-to-nose arrangement is to get out of plane. To cut inside you when you are above corner speed is suggestive that he is slower and further suggests your follwing move: take the fight into the vert. Punish him if he follows you up and punish him if he doesn't.

I learned this by-the-way not from reading manuals or having sessions with Trainers but trying to turn nose-to-nose with those bloody hover-flap Vought Corsairs at the furbal lake about 10,000 times, back in the day when I thought bloodymindedness was the answer 

I know it looks complicated from all the text, but if you plod though it section at a time, making diagrams for yourself or just imagining if you're good at that and doing the fighter pilot's hand thing you might reach an epiphany worthy of a Christmas present. 

Good luck. Keep at it.

*Actually here you might reverse your roll as you cross and pull and really describe a 3D flightpath, but that complicates the basic point.

[Chilli]

Thanks man, I actually followed that fairly well, which means your explanation was simple enough to get a not so simple plan, and I have at least one alternative to practice upon merge.

* When you say possibly reverse roll at crossing, do you suggest 45 degree reverse roll or something more?  More like 180 degree reverse, which would aim my "circle" to the left of his lift vector?

[nrshida]

* When you say possibly reverse roll at crossing, do you suggest 45 degree reverse roll or something more?  More like 180 degree reverse, which would aim my "circle" to the left of his lift vector?

Yeah. That's rather more technical to explain with text, but reverse your roll and try for a lead turn. <- that might be better shown by a trainer.

[Chilli]

Doh!    "Lead turn"??  All of my turns seem to have lead in them (joking of course).   

I don't want to assume that I know the technical meaning or how to execute, so I will be googling this as well, but I like the way that you have explained so far, and here I think that you have a precise direction that you are heading (literally, since we were discussing the film and diagram).



In the above diagram, the right hand side there is the label, "attacker pulls lead".  Not exactly what I was assuming, since they are both turning, but close enough to what I imagined.

[FLS]

Lead turn is like lead pursuit. It means turn in front of your target. But not so far in front they get your 6.

[wil3ur]

You're basically trying to time your maneuver to coincide with your opponents attempt at a front shot (HO).  As they try to follow you through the merge, you should already be 40-50% done with your turn as they pass, so you're finishing your maneuver onto their 6 as they're still trying to figure out how they didn't get guns on you.

[JunkyII]

I'm a big fan of Kingpin

[nrshida]

Doh!    "Lead turn"??  All of my turns seem to have lead in them (joking of course).   

I don't want to assume that I know the technical meaning or how to execute, so I will be googling this as well, but I like the way that you have explained so far, and here I think that you have a precise direction that you are heading (literally, since we were discussing the film and diagram).

We can explain the lead turn and start this fighter-hands business at the same time. Saves me opening Photoshop today and is also really handy for getting people to think you're a weirdo on trains and in restaurants. So let's suppose two aircraft are duelling and both happen to have decided in advance that the Immelmann is their set move. They pass at the same altitude just very close side to side, like two cars speeding on the road from different directions.

So get lefty and righty hand to represent them and use your thumbs for the 3-9 line (they turn around that axis / axle / imaginary line, when you pull back on the stick).

In the first case they both wait until they see which cigarette each other is smoking and pull back at exactly the same time as their wingtips pass. So get your left and right hand and do that now in front of your face. Given identical aircraft and even back pressure (and an equal merge speed) you can see that your two hands will mirror their circles (no cheating) meeting again in a nose-to-nose arrangement at the top.

Now let's repeat with a variation. Righty hand pulls first before they pass, as he's given up smoking and doesn't want to even see one, let's say with three hand's lengths in between. He pulls as hard as the first merge we did. Lefty still goes flat for a hand-length - reaction time. So at T1 he's able to just see the belly of Righty hand. By T2 there's only a single hand length between them when looking from above and lefty also turns up on his Immelmann. Righty is now at say 45 degrees to lefty's 10. However if you now run though the ACM in a single frame advance - one hand length of movement at a frame, you can see righty hand has screwed the pooch and is in heaps of trouble. He turned too early. His lead turn has worked against him. Too much lead. He's already going up before they pass and as lefty reacts to follow not only can he afford to turn less hard (he's got more space to do it in) - if he wants to - he is also falling automatically behind the 3-9 line of righty on the upstroke. Sort of obvious because he went up first and lefty followed. We could continue to the top of their respective Immelmanns and note that the remerge at the top has some vertical separation lefty would also be inside the turn of righty. In reality this won't happen, Lefty will mount righty from behind like he does his wife in a Rodeo stylee, telling her 'this is how your sister likes it' and seeing how long he can stay on for. Righty gets shot down and smack talked. Standard AH procedure.

Righty, bubbling with rage, his dog whimpering in the corner after a good hiding, decides to HO that bastage Lefty in the next fight. So same setup for the remerge only on the way in lefty remembers righty's wife told him in bed once he'll HO when butthurt and is wary. On the way into the merge lefty - as well as approaching from the side - pushes his stick a bit and gets lower by half a hand length. When there's two hand lengths between them, the setup differs from the first as lefty is to the side (horizontal separation) and below (vertical separation). Righty, fangs out, is re-actively pushing forward and ruddering for that shot. So he’s slightly declined. Lefty is flat and safe from guns. At two hands spacing lefty starts his turn upwards, now he’s lead turning but with good timing and position, so at one-hand’s spacing righty same position reacts - reaction time. When their 3-9 lines pass righty has reacted and he’s level but lefty’s already tipped up 20 degrees - he’s angles rich. He's gained degrees on that fettler and he can either keep those or exchange them for energy later in the fight. What's happened in this case is that lefty’s already going around that circle both in advance of righty and not allowing him the position to drop in on his six. The centreline of that mutual Immelmann is sort of inclined in lefty's favour raltive to this boiled egg thing FLS keeps talking about.

If you follow some permutations through now for the second merge, while you're in Stabucks - three things will happen. You'll start to wonder how this is all effected if you tilt those planes we discussed earlier, say a Chandelle as first move versus an Immelmann, or both Chandelles, mirrored or not. You'll start to think not about single pieces of BFM / ACM but how they stream together seamlessly and relatively like 3D chess. Oh also, you'll probably get arrested for making strange hand gestures in public. I was doing it on the train one day then realised two women had stopped talking to each other and were looking at me wondering with blank expressions as if I was a slightly disturbed mime artist on his day off who needed some help. No thank you says I, I'm only doing 1-on-1s today.

So those examples are a bit contrived but we're not at Top Gun, just a bunch of hobbiest ACM-heads arguably no more weird than crazy golf. Plus there's more smack-talking opportunities. That's not what I do in a merge by the way so don't come here later saying your HO-avoidance merge didn't work. I'm just trying to create a scenario for illustrating / get you and anyone else that's interested thinking and experimenting.

I bloody hope so. Yesterday was my first day in the MA since AH2. The only merges I could get started with an opponent on my high six. Even a +e Ki-84 blew through a possible merge with my Mosquito only to die tragically at the hands of the field gunners at Starbucks. Deadly accurate that waitress. Pleny of coffee no doubt!


Sure hope Arlo is enjoying secretly reading all of this. I planned to only give him cinders this year.