This is not a post about using your throttle in combat. I hope everyone is doing that
. This is about your plane weighing more than it needs to, and running out of fuel before you can RTB. It won't radically change the way you fly, but it might just give you an edge. This advice is not much use for 'furballers' but great for 'cherry-pickers'. It's also useful for anyone doing long range penetration or escort missions.
It has come up in another thread that a lot of pilots are flying around with their Throttle and RPM maxed out all of the time. While AH allows you to do this (presumably to make life bearable for those who don't have a HOTAS), it's not the best way to fly a plane.
If you throttle off and reduce RPM a little while in safe airspace, you'll still get a reasonable speed, often at a huge reduction in fuel consumption. This can mean as much as double time aloft for some of the longer legged American fighters for a reduction of maybe 75mph in airspeed. This means you can carry less weight of fuel (and therefore maneuvre better), or even just make it home sometimes when you wouldn't otherwise - albeit at a slower speed.
If this seems like a lot of effort for a little gain, well, the same could be said of the rudder. It's a sim, and it's up to you how you want to fly it.
I've linked a few sources of pilot's docs which can be used as rough guidelines. There is still debate about the
accuracy of HTC's modelling of fuel consumption, but there is no doubt that you
will get more efficient use of your fuel in AH if you throttle back and reduce RPM.
Flight charts for U.S. iron at Zeno's(bottom right 'More neat Stuff')
Spitfire mkXIV pilot's notes Mosquito FB.6 - Edited Pilots notes Yak-3 in Russian (may be relevant for Yak-9s)
Bf109 manuals Early P-40 manualThere is a lot more stuff out there, for example, somewhere there's a site with 4 or 5 diff. Spit manuals, but i've lost all of my links.
