Delta 6's Flight School: Angles and Dangles

Angles and Dangles:
Where the action is

"That guy had to have been pulling about 6 gees, so I tried to pull 8 and get in front of him. Next thing I knew I was looking at the ground. I must have blacked out when I tried to pull lead."
Warbirds A6M2 pilot after attempting to pull lead on a Bf-109 F4.

Gee Forces

    Gee forces are quite simple. Right now, while reading this you feel one gee, or one gravity. If you were in a plane pulling two gees, you'd be twice as heavy as you are right now. Pilots can pull between 4 and 6 gees before blacking out, depending on the aircraft you choose to fly. As a student pilot once said "Positive gees smash you head into your ass and make blood pool in your feet. Negative gees stretch your spine and make the capilaries in your eyes pop". That's how it works. And the more gees you have to pull the more speed you loose.
    Ok, here's how the whole thing works. You pull two gees and you feel heavy, while your aircraft stays at the same speed because you aren't pulling up that hard. If your nose gets too high, or you keep hauling on the stick, you'll loose speed. Why? Two reasons really, but they both depend on the same thing: thrust to weight ratio. No prop aircraft has a 1:1 thrust to weight ratio. If it did, you could accelerate straight up. Most modern fighter aircraft have 1:1 and in one case, a 1.1:1 ratio. This means an F-16C has 1.1 times more thrust than weight.
    If you pull up harder, excess momentum is bled off so you loose speed. Think of it this way. You're driving a car at 90 mph. You turn a little too tightly, so you loose some speed, but you're still on the road. Same thing for aircraft, only it's you pulling back on the stick and creating a change in the angles. When you're flying straight there's no angles involved. Yet when you turn, you're fighting against momentum. The aircraft's momentum wants to keep going straight, while you're telling the plane to break into a hard right turn. Since you're fighting the angles, creating gobs of drag, and don't have a whole lot of thrust to play with, you slow down.
    Energy fighters have a tendency to loose speed faster than other aircraft. In short, here's why. Speed, mathematically speaking, is refered to as energy. Hence the terms energy fighter, e-fighting, etc... Energy fighters usually weigh a ton (actually several tons, but that's beside the point) so they don't turn all that well. It's similar to when you try to pull a sharp turn in a truck; you can't at high speed due to all that weight. Either you'll spin out, really dump your speed, or outright smack something. Same thing with an aircraft.
    Now if you have a good wing design, combined with a relatively light weight airframe, you get a plane that turns quickly. Regardless of speed, the aircraft always handles well. Hence the reason for the Spitfire's excellent performance. The reason for the poor turning capabilities of the Bf-109 is simple; high wing loading due to weight and a small wing area. One thing that astounds most, is that a Bf-109, despite it's higher weight, can out-climb just about anything. To quote one guy (you know who he is); "If you're in trouble in a 109, just point the nose up and let it climb like a homesick angel". This is the result of a powerful engine mounted to a well designed and light-weight airframe. Despite the poor wing, it can climb better than most any aircraft. Unfortunately for the 109, designers had to keep adding more weight to let it compete with newer enemy aircraft. With all that weight on such a small wing, it turned like crap.
    Before writing this page, I was asked why the Fw-190 stinks in both a turn and climb. The answer to that is not exactly easy. While an early FW-190 can climb well, it doesn't turn tightly nor is it any fun in a stall. Eric Brown said "The stall came at 127 mph indicated speed, the left wing would drop so quickly the aircraft nearly went inverted. If a pilot did not have his wits about him and pulled up hard, the plane could go into an incipiant spin". He wasn't kidding. The wing design gave the aircraft remarkable stability in level flight, and it added to the high roll rate the balanced ailerons gave. But in a stall it gave out too fast, which caused it to dump the left wing.
    As for the poor rate of climb, that is due to the engine not producing enough power and the wing design. The engine used was a BMW 801D radial in most models. This engine gave it's best performance at lower altitudes, where it accelerated as well, if not better, than some other aircraft. While the wing added quite a bit of stability, it was not designed for fast climbing. Matter of fact, when the 190 was still a prototype, they had to redesign the wing to give it better climbing ability. Seems the higher mucky-mucks weren't happy with Focke-Wulf's original plane, so they said "Change it". It got changed, the climb rate improved, and roll rate shot through the roof.

Deflection: the Zen of aircraft quick-draw

Deflection is simply an angle which does not match yours. So deflection shooting is firing at an angle which doesn't match the angle that you are currently at. Cross-tracking targets are a good example of this. Put simply, if you're flying a heading of 180 and someone flys right across your nose on 090, he's cross-tracking you. Shooting at this angle is very difficult, and most pilots can rarely even score a hit. Here's an example of a cross-tracking target:

This Corsair pulled away from my wing man, who he'd just shot to pieces, and started a hard left turn. He crossed in front of my nose about 300 yards away, at a 90 degree angle to me, and I fired. All I did was waste ammo; how could I even expect to tag a guy flying at that kind of angle?

    Not as easy as most think. Firing at this kind of target, at least in the game, is easier than the real world. The large neon sign above every plane tells you exactly what he's doing, and aiming at that sign can give you a cheating angle to hit him. I've done it, mainly due to the small size of contacts at any distance. Only when you get up close can you spot an enemy plane. Unless a situation dictates otherwise.
    Gunther Rall was a master of snap-shots, long range gunnery, and hi-angle shots. He got this good from firing at poorer-trained Russian pilots for just about five years. One trick Marseille used was to pull up from under an enemy plane, wait until it just touched the top of his propeller spinner, then open fire with everything. It works, I've done it. Mastering it requires a mastery of the bounce, which in Warbirds is near impossible thanks to icons. Aces High somewhat fixes this problem, and while not perfect, it does allow a good bounce every now and then.
    Another trick was to use the gun sight edges as a marker for a given distance. So at 350 yards and in a hard turn, simply putting the enemy plane on the edge of the sight and matching the center up would almost make a certian hit. Here's the same thing, only with more detail just in case you didn't get it. Place an enemy plane on the outer edge of your gun sight. Once there, draw a mental line between the center of the sight and the target. This lines up the guns on the target. Once you've got him level with the bull's eye, shoot. If everything worked, he's now going down.
    Each situation calls for new tactics. This is a given and true in every form of war. I can list a few examples here, but I can't list every fix for every possibility. The basics are:

Always match the angle between the enemy plane and your bull's eye. This will guarantee a hit if everything lines up correctly.
Never pop a snap-shot at a target you aren't sure of. Doing so wastes amunition.
Only fire when you know you will strike the intended target. Aside from saving ammunition, this allows you to make precision shots even in crowded skies.
If the enemy starts to cross-track, pull slightly away then hard towards him once he passes. This places you in a position to possibly fire a snap-shot at a very short range.
Never fire a cannon unless you have:

Firing from the largest cross-section on target will improve the chance of a good hit as this increases the size of the available target area. Making a slashing attack from 2 or 10 o'clock will gave you a better chance for a hit than a dead-6 o'clock shot since the target area is larger.

That covers just about everything I know. If I missed something, or you know a better way, by all means contact me.

Making the sucker flinch

    There's a perticular maneuver, which only helicopter pilots use often, that can make a shot nearly impossible for the enemy pilot. Turn into him. No, I don't mean become the enemy, I mean turn your aircraft around and pass him from below. If he's far enough away, say 1,000 yards, then you might have a chance.
    It only works when pulled off perfectly. If you come around too soon, he gets his shot; too late, and he's already firing. So, you need near perfect timing combined with a gullible enemy that has a slow reaction time on the controls. Yep, I'm thinking the same thing; an energy fighter. When pulled off against energy fighters, especially when he's at high speeds, makes him over-shoot. This costs him altitude, while you get away scott free.
    Ok, here's how it's done. First check the distance, and make SURE you have enough room to come around. Depeding on the plane, you can turn as short as 700 yards away. Though in some circumstances 700 yards will get you killed. In the Bf-109 G6 and K4 I find about 1,200 yards right. You need to be below him, and at high enough speed to make it around quick. Once everything is set, reef it around in a hard turn. Don't stop pulling up, once you've come around start a zoom climb to change everything around on him. Again, make sure he's above you, or it won't work properly.
    Now here's WHY it works. When you turn, you start closing the distance faster than he can account for it at high speed. You also change the deflection angle, and make him dive for an attempted shot. He looses altitude, builds up even more speed, and increases the distance between the two of you. Not to mention he's going to enter compression, which will make his possible reactions even slower. About the time he passes you, you're beginning a climb and trading that extra speed for altitude. Everything is now in your favor. You have altitude, position, and hopefully a lot of ammo.

Strike, parry, counter

Yep, those three words are the basics of sword-fighting. I strike, you parry, I counter. Simple isn't it. The same rules apply in the air, where you have speed, altitude, maneuvers, and guns at your disposal. Say you're rooling around down near the deck, and some yahoo decides you look like a good kill. After a few minutes you're stuck in a classic tail-chase; you screaming along with an enemy fighter behind you. Using a climb-dive-climb-dive porpose maneuver, he might be able to close range. First he pulls up slightly to gain a little altitude, then he'll to dive back down to close. Wait until he's almost within guns range, and as soon as he is, just pull up. Hard. He lost a little speed when he did that pop-up, while you've still got all of yours. So, you haul your plane straight up and pray you've got better speed retention than he does.
Another example is when you pull up beside an enemy plane. If you keep pulling up, he's going to attempt to swing in behind you. As long as you keep the nose high, he's going to pass under you as he stalls. This is when you drop down and hit him with a top shot. You already know, or can probably guess, that the top shot presents the greatest possibility of a pilot kill. It's not all that different from the "Rope a dope" trick really. Granted, that trick rarely works in crowded skies, but this one allows you to get a sense of how hard a pilot can push his plane.

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