Maxim 11: Everything is air-droppable at least once.
Replay yes. But external camera POV is not a feature AFAIK. It’s useless in a real world sense. I understand that external POV is common in PC games, but I’ve never understood how or why anyone would want it. Seems totally artificial and backwards to me.
Given that we had smooth seas and an unmoving deck the 767 can take it. At least once or twice. Our no-flare descent rate would have qualified as a “hard landing” under the maintenance rules and would have required inspections before further flight. But breakage would be unlikely. Pretty much any big jet driver who’s been flying for years has all-but not flared at least once. It’s cringe-worthy and embarassing, and the boss is unimpressed, but damage is rare.
Various sized civilian airplanes, from RJs to A380s, are all built to the same strength standards. They all have to absorb the same vertical impact speed without overt damage. Some manufacturers might build in more or less margin than others to give greater or lesser longevity in service. But just because a 380 is bigger doesn’t make it necessarily stronger or weaker.
As to the deck, I wondered the same thing in that TU-95 thread. Take a read if you haven’t already. Bottom line: if the deck is armored against battle damage the 767 would be a pinprick. If it’s just stout enough to support lighter aircraft, we’d probably dent it and break through after enough tries in the same spot. The 767 may be 11x the weight of a A-4, but it’s only about 4x the weight of the heaviest COD aircraft.
I don’t know. The visual was leaving an ordinary-looking big ship wake. The two most likely possibilities are that the carrier was stationary in the physics model but with a fixed wake in the visual model, or it was moving at whatever the designers thought was typical for carrier flight ops.
For training purposes, giving pilots access to info they wouldn’t have access to in the real situation is a bad idea because they may come to mistakenly rely on it in real situations. But for post-training debriefing purposes, it seems like it could be useful to know what went wrong. Much like an athlete can learn how to improve his technique by watching himself perform.
Also, pilots don’t have any cameras to see out of airliners? Seems like they could be useful, especially multispectral cameras.
I remember you mentioning that flying a fighter involves a lot of twisting and turning to look around. Crew fatigue and reaction time could be reduced with cameras. I vaguely remember something about the F-35 helmet doing something along those lines.
I usually prefer first person perspective too but in some circumstances, 3rd person camera is pretty good, like when you build the contraption and then use it:
While playing the Benny Hill song?
Right, I overestimated the bother of air refueling.
And doing it the other way by relying on air refueling instead of carriers for fighters and other commonly-carrier-based aircraft would require too much fuel and too many refuelings?
The sim replay can replay the entire cockpit and world, the view out the visual, and the motion. So you experience the replay sitting in the seat seeing what was done from the usual POV you saw when doing it. There’s also a screen at the instructors station which displays a map and trail across the sky in both top-down & profile view, with relevant ground features like runways included. That external POV is useful. Seeing a picture of the outside of your own aircraft would add nothing to sim training.
Cameras on aircraft: The A380 has a camera on the belly and one on the tailfin to assist in taxiing. A few bizjets today and eventually many airliners will have FLIR or low-light artificial vision systems to enable seeing though clouds to land without necessarily relying on radio-directed blind autopilots. See Synthetic vision system - Wikipedia for more. There is a lot of research, but also a lot of engineering and regulatory hurdles to ensure the results are really as reliable and as useable as they need to be. But that’s about it so far.
F-35: It has something called the Distributed Aperature System. The idea is you can look “through” the aircraft structure. E.g. a camera on the belly will display on your helmet what you’d see below you if the airplane was transparent. That isn’t relevant to facing one way and seeing what’s in a different direction such as behind you. It’d be very hard for the pilot to keep straight in his own mind where things are with a system that tried to show you the full 360 degree 3D sphere all at once.
Late add / clarification. My comments about sims above were aimed at airliner / bizjet sims.
Air combat training sims (and ACMI systems, although that wiki entry is useless) for decades now have been able to display or replay a fight from the POV of any participant or from an external free-floating POV watching the fight take place in space in front of the POV. Typically the POV can be re-oriented any direction, so you can freeze the fight then move between viewing it from top or bottom or North or East, or whatever other POV gives insight into how the maneuvering & weapons employment was playing out.
For the simpler maneuvering tasks taught in airliner & bizjet sims that would be gross overkill.
I’m on Deer Island right now, looking across the harbor at Logan Airport. Not an aircraft carrier in sight. I feel cheated, somehow.
Sure, that’s impressive, but can you do the carrier landing in NES Top Gun?
Well then obviously the carriers have gone stealth now.
Quite a feat regardless. Just thinking about the relative ground speed. If the carrier was moving at 30 knots, and you had a head wind of 50 knots. Then…for the 767 to barely stay aloft, it would be going about 50 knots faster than the moving carrier?
(what fun it must be to land on a moving ‘airport’)
Assuming a 130 knot speed for the 767 to have reasonable control. But that might be to slow.
Still amazed that it can be done. Even 1 out of 3 tries. Great work.
I got a look at the Boeing Aerospace simulator facility in the early '80s, and I think some of what I saw was left over from the X-20 program of the early '60s. The sims did have visuals, but not computer generated. They built models of the terrain that would be flown over, and a camera on tracks and gimbals moved past the model to take a video image that would be projected in front of the sim. Interestingly, the models were turned up on one edge. If anything needed work, you didn’t have to tiptoe across the model to access it, just put up a stepladder. As long as the camera and controls tracked properly, you’d never know the difference. Kinda clever, really.
I would be surprised if the wheel loading of a mostly empty airliner wouldn’t be lower than that of a fighter jet.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that the captain of the carrier could make it a lot easier for the pilot by popping a wheelie just as the plane lands, so the deck is going uphill, and therefore the plane stops a lot faster.
You’re welcome.
In terms of pressure, they’re both probably about 200 psi. In terms of total force, much different. Extremely high contact pressures (e.g. an iron rod slamming down point-first) might pierce a hole in the deck, but high that’s not the kind of damage I was thinking about. Shot in the dark here: a pair of 767 main gear struts at maximum compression (during initial touchdown) might be applying a total load to the deck of 500,000 pounds, compared to 120,000 pounds for a superhornet. Can a carrier deck bear a total load of 500,000 pounds in two concentrated areas like that? I think LSLGuy’s upthread summary is about right, in that if the deck is not battle-armored, then repeated landings by a wide-body passenger aircraft may eventually wreck it.
It was 20 nautical miles due east of the airport steaming east. And this was a few days ago so its probably in the mid-Atlantic by now, if not approaching Europe. -)
Speeds: At very light weights, 125 knots is good. I suspect the carrier was stationary in the physics model, despite the visual wake. So I think we had 125-50 = 75 knots or about 90mph closure towards the deck.
Moving airport: Assuming a glass-flat sea, there is no difference between landing on a moving runway on a windless day vs. a stationary runway on a windy day. Its all just vector math. In that sense we land on moving runways every day everywhere.
The real Navy has to deal w a pitching, rolling, yawing, swaying, surging, and heaving runway to boot. That mighta been fun when I was 20, but’s too adventurous for my aged blood today.
If SIS can do it for their sportscars, there’s no reason the USN can’t do it for their carriers.
Sounds like a lot of fun! Whenever I have spare sim time at the end of a session and the instructor says “anything you’d like to do?”, I just shake my head and say “get me out of this thing.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the sim, but I’m not in the frame of mind to be playing in it.
That said:
During my initial BAe146 endorsement the instructor was fairly “old school”, putting more emphasis on pure handling skills than is fashionable these days. We did a couple of exercises for a bit of fun and handling practice.
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He set the weight of the aircraft low, the equivalent of being empty with a bit of fuel. Put as at the end of the runway with a 100 knot wind straight down the centreline and got us to take off, hover, and land back on the piano keys. If you kept the nose pretty well aligned with the runway you got the illusion you were flying something like a Harrier jump jet. With the right combination of power and attitude you could gently climb, descend, fly backwards, forwards, sideways etc.
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The second was to take-off on runway 19 at Brisbane, Australia, jink over to the river and fly under the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges. Then pull up into a right wingover while the instructor fails three of your four engines. Next you try to make it back to the airport for a landing on 01.
I had to have two goes at this one. On the first I overcooked the bank at the top of the wingover, didn’t have enough height to recover, and put a smoking hole in the ground. Second time was a winner. The main challenge was to slow down in time to land without getting too slow too early. One engine is enough to extend the glide but nothing more.
All good fun, but most of the time I just want to get the debrief done and get back to the hotel and have a beer.
The new Sims must be amazing. I do ask though:
Is control feed back correct and proportional in all flight modes, tiller steering and ground maneuvers, etc.?
Even up to point of impact that poor Richard had to endure? / If he wanted to go all the way down fighting it, how long would the Sim act correctly?
For me in the little stuff, eyes are important but ears ( Cessna wings talk to you ) butt tells me stuff, control feedback, engine sounds, oil on the outside surfaces, smells of many types have saved my ass.
Point: I have never been in a big iron sim but all the little ones are so lacking as to making it hard to do well because I am shaking my head at the crudeness of it all.
Desk top PC sim can be useful for learning some things in a general way.
Since a tail wheel rating is now required, I don’t think a sim will work.
Old joke from a little airport where the Seniority #one American Airlines pilot in the late 60’s flew his personal aircraft. Buzzard Roost, ( Herb Harkcam )
Little plane driver being schooled by old grizzled airline pilot: Tail wheels are what it is all about. Best stick & rudder pilots fly a tail wheel and don’t like ANY tricycle geared plane !!! Little plane pilot says, “So you want them to make your B-767 into a tail wheel aircraft, right?”
Err… who?
(Just checking to see if you mean Col. Doolittle…)
D’oh!! :smack:
You are right, of course.