Land Any Jet In DCS World! | Basic Landing Tutorial in the F/A-18C Hornet

hey guys spud knocker here as always and as you guys know landing an aircraft is one of the hardest skills and yet one of the most fundamental skills a pilot needs to learn when learning how to operate their aircraft safely and effectively this is true whether you're flying real aircraft like a cessna 182 a boeing 737 or even an f-18c in real life the same applies to virtual aviators in dcf's world or microsoft flight simulator so today i figured we'd hop back and go back to basics and hop into the cockpit of the f-18c hornet and go over the absolute basic most essential parts of landing the f-18 here in dcs world now this video will apply to all the aircraft and dcs world except for potentially the tail draggers now the reason we're using the f-18c for this demonstration is through some internal polling i've done in my discord community the vast majority of dcs world pilots own a couple of modules but almost fly the f-18c exclusively so let's go ahead and hop in the office and get started okay guys welcome back to the office of the f-18c hornet let's go ahead and get started with going over the very bare-bones basics of landing here in dcs world like i said earlier the reason why we're doing this demonstration in the f-18 is because the vast majority of you guys out there fly the f-18c almost exclusively so i figured this would be a great aircraft for this demonstration here now the biggest issue that i see with a lot of new dcs world pilots that hop in and that i do one-on-one training with is they are very behind the aircraft this means we need to make sure that you guys are staying in front of the aircraft and have a plan for everything you're going to do so let's go ahead and pause the simulation here and come up with a plan of how we're going to execute our approach to almight air base before we actually fly through that approach so let's go ahead and pause the simulation open up the f10 map and let's take a look at the map here first thing we want to do of course is find out where exactly almight air base is so it's right here on the map so let's go ahead and zoom in on it and it looks like a pretty typical military style air base one long skinny runway with a long skinny taxiway right off to the side of it with some smaller apron areas now here on the persian gulf map pilots will get very confused between almond hot air base and all maktoum international air base over here so airport that is and so the way we can easily tell the difference between the two is all maktoum international airport over here does have a long skinny runway but it's got a massive taxiway slash apron area and it's got massive terminals around it as well as well as we can see it's a lot closer to the water of the persian gulf than all mean hot air bases of course we can always pop in a waypoint on top of all mean hot air base or pop in the takan uh frequency that is here at almond hot air base as well but when you're new with dcs world i really highly recommend choosing an airbase that has some pretty prominent visual landmarks such as the palm islands here on the persian gulf map and we can also think about the actual runway we need to land on the runway number what that means to us and where the wind is coming from we know via the weather report that the wind is gonna be coming right down the pipe right down the runway at a heading of zero nine zero so we're gonna land on runway zero nine now a lot of new dcs world pilots who aren't really engrossed in the world of aviation don't realize that the runway numbers actually correspond to the headings of the runway that'll be your heading when you're landing on that runway and the heading you'll be taking off on that runway from so runway09 here corresponds to a heading of zero nine zero and the reciprocal heading for the other runway facing the other direction is going to be two seven zero degrees so keep that in mind in that uh when you're taking off going this direction or you're landing going this direction your heading is going to be 270 degrees or due west and if you're landing on this runway runway zero nine and you're coming down this way to land or coming down this way to take off your heading is going to be zero nine zero heading directly eastbound i really really like training new pilots on almond hot air base because it does have cardinal directions for the runway numbers and the corresponding runway headings makes it very very easy to uh know where you are in the traffic pattern and whether or not you're lined up with runway without having to do some you know esoteric math to figure out where exactly you are in relation to the chorus line coming off the runway next let's go ahead and figure out how we're actually going to approach the air base here so we're coming down the coast of dubai we're going to fly past a whole bunch of really easy to use visual landmarks as we come over we've got the world islands the jer mariah palm and the unbuilt uh palm jubil ollie down here and so a good way to get lined up for the runway here at all mean hot even because we're not being actively controlled by controllers is to fly our aircraft all the way down to the palm jebel ali to about the center point here and then once we reach that palm island we'll then turn left to a heading of zero nine zero degrees and we'll try to fly directly to the runway here because we're doing just a very basic overview of landing here in dcs we're just gonna do a straight in approach for landing and when you are brand new in dcs or you're trying to go back to the basics and kind of remaster things i highly recommend just doing a few straight in approaches before you start doing break turns and entering traffic patterns and these kinds of things so because we're keeping it simple today we're just going to do that straight in approach so we're gonna fly this pretty much all visually flying and using these landmarks to actually find our airport and land on the airport and so we'll go ahead and hop back into the office now that we have our plan and we're gonna go ahead and execute that plan for the approach and landing so let's go ahead and unpause it and i'm also going to turn off the autopilot the mirror parametric altitude hold that i had and i'm just going to start a gentle descent coming on down and we can see the same visual landmarks that we wanted to use on the map right out here in front of us this is why i really really like using the persian gulf map for training is because the visual landmarks are so easy to use you know exactly where you are in this map at all times we know that's dubai and that's dubai international airport right there we've got the street of hormuz behind us and then bad guy country north of that when you cross and go feet dry over run then when you come back and you see this beautiful flat peninsula ringed by mountains on the eastern side you know you're in good guide territory very very easy to use for navigation purposes with new pilots so we are roughly about two and a half degrees nose down and we're just going to continue just nice and gentle descent coming on down towards the palm jebel ali island before we make that left hand turn to zero nine zero one thing that i highly highly recommend is that you fly your aircraft gently uh use the autopilot to reduce your pilot workload um fly the aircraft gently and smoothly don't be yanking that stick all around don't be slamming the throttle back and forth all around and that will really really help you it's very easy to get behind the jet and kind of get lost as to what your jet is doing what you need to be doing when you're kind of really rocking the jet around a lot using a lot of full deflection on the stick full up and down on the throttle things like that so let's go ahead and take atc off so that way you guys can see me use full manual stick control and we'll go ahead and bring up the controls indicator down here i'm also going to cut that out and replace it up here in the top left in a bigger format zoomed in format so you guys can see that a little bit easier and we'll go ahead and just continue this gentle descent coming on down towards the palm that we need to go to next we'll go ahead and set up our cockpit and make sure we're ready for landing we've got our master arm turned to the safe position we've got our ale 47 sets to standby so we're not going to accidentally fod the runway by dropping chaff on it or anything like that and we'll go ahead and bring up our hsi here on our left ddi and we'll go ahead and go to our fcs page on our right side so we can see where our trim positions are and where our control surfaces are deflected very very easily and then down on the bottom here we'll go ahead and go to our checklist and we can see our aircraft weight down here as well looks like we got a pretty good weight for landing just kind of have a pretty light load out we've got a couple empty fuel tanks a couple little air-to-air missiles a lightning pod on the centerline station so it should be no big deal there and as we come down towards about 5000 feet i'm just going to go ahead and level this off into just a very gentle descent bring the jet on down as you're descending down to an airport for a landing it's really really important that you start your descent a little earlier rather than too late if you're coming down a very very steep angle coming down from like 25 000 feet with only 10 miles left to the airport of your intended destination it's going to be really really difficult similarly if you start descending too far out and you get really really low that can be a little bit of a problem as well but not nearly as big of a problem as trying to descend uh too steeply like i said it's all about kind of finding that kind of nice uh middle ground of flying the aircraft nice and gently precisely and smoothly to make sure that you don't get behind the jet too far so looking at those visual waypoints we talked about on the map we can see we've got the jermariah palm right there at the atlantis hotel on the end very easy to use landmark and we're coming up on the palm jebel ali so we'll just make a gentle left-hand turn here so that way we can get kind of towards the center of that island and one of the big things when it comes to making your landings great here in dcs world is throttle control once you get slow enough in a fighter jet here in dcs or really even any aircraft whether it's a 737 a 172 or an f18 whether in microsoft flight simulator dcs or in real life you get to a certain point called the region of reverse command in which you slow down to a point where you have to increase your angle of attack to a point where you can maintain that altitude by increasing your lift via increasing that angle of attack that's going to require you to bring the power up to a higher setting if you've taken any flight lessons you'll know that as being kind of like slow flight and you're kind of doing the slow flight down into a landing here in dcs world and in real life as well and so we're going to start to use the power to increase or arrest our rate of descent while using our angle of attack to kind of change our airspeed now this is not quite as perfect and not quite as perfectly illustrated in a fighter jet in dcs world but it is a definite occurrence that happens and we can see there's almaktum international right there very close to the water very easy to make that mistake and we'll start to gently bring our jet around towards a heading of zero nine zero or do east trying to execute our plan that we came up with as perfectly as possible kind of right over the center of the palm island kind of where we wanted to be coming around through zero nine zero degrees and we'll go ahead and roll out on zero nine zero like i said we're just flying the jet nice and gently nice and easily and we'll go ahead and push our waypoint up to waypoint two that we know is situated right on top of almight air base we can see that it did come off to the left a little bit so we probably lagged a little bit in our turn should probably turn a little bit earlier but it's an easy fix and if we zoom in we should see the airport right out there in front of us and we can see the runway is a little bit off to our left and if we drew a line directly off of the runway coming down towards us we would be to the right hand side of that line the reason i'm not drawing a chorus line on my hsi for you guys is to show you guys that it can be done completely visually by trying to follow that plan that we came up with by looking at that f10 map we just want to make sure we're lined up to the runway as far out as possible and that we're not too fast as you guys can see we've been flying through this entire demonstration at roughly about 300 knots or a little bit above 300 knots if you're new in dcs world or you've just been having trouble with your landings i recommend just flying the whole approach to the runway at a lower airspeed so that way it's not too difficult to actually slow yourself down to landing speed and get to that runway so as you guys can see on the controls indicator there and if you're listening to the wine of our engines i'm starting to slow the aircraft down by pulling the power back at this point we're about 10 miles out from the runway i'm gonna go ahead and pop the speed brake out and get ourselves set up for landing it's incredibly incredibly important to make sure you're lined up with the runway as far out as possible for a really nice straight in approach to allow yourself to have a really good approach for that landing so we're under 250 knots i'm going to start to bring up the power just a hair i'm going to drop the gear and drop the flaps and see our flaps are down to full and we can see our gear is down and locked at this point we're going to start to feel a massive balloon from the extra lift from those flaps and when i feel that massive balloon i'm going to pull the power back until we start to get to it down to around 140 knots now as a general rule of thumb this is not a perfect rule of thumb but a general rule of thumb here in dcs world is that most of the fighter jets in dcs world like to be right at around 140 knots for landing and as we start to get down to that 140 knots that's when we're getting into that regional reverse command that we talked about a second ago in which i now have to bring my power back up you can see my throttles are back up towards the middle of the throw of travel of the throttles in the throttle quadrant and now i'm going to go ahead and reduce my hud brightness a little bit so that way i don't lose the runway because it's blocked out by my symbology and i'm just going to gently fly the aircraft nice and gently trying to keep that 140 knots bringing some nose up trim to increase that angle of attack as i just fly the jet nice and gently down to the runway and you can see my throttle movements are nice and gentle but i need to bring that velocity vector up to the runway instead of pulling back on the stick i'm just increasing my throttle very gently nice and slow nice and gentle be patient patience is always key in dcs world and any flight simulator you fly and in a real airplane too of course just coming in nice and slow making gentle throttle adjustments you can see my throttle has never gone up to full power and it has never come all the way down to idle very very important when people get into power oscillations bring the throttle back and forth really really quickly that's where i see pilots start to get into that point where they start to drop like a rock and hit the ground way short of the runway or go flying way past the runway had a little bit too much power there we saw our velocity vector start to climb way up above that runway just bringing in just a hair a little bit of nose up trim nice and gentle with everything we're doing nice and slow nice and gentle nice and easy if you find yourself really squeezing and white knuckling or controls your throttling your stick just ease off it fingertip pressure on everything relaxed muscles are fast and precise muscles tense muscles are slow and imprecise so we're just keeping our velocity vector right on that touchdown point we want and we're just making these gentle throttle movements all the way on down to the runway and we can see our lost our vertical velocity up there above our air speed box is a little bit high for my taste so we're as we come down to the runway we're just going to increase our power just a little bit to arrest that descent rate i'm gonna pull just back on the stick just nice and gentle start to reduce the power a little bit got into a bit of a float situation there and just a nice gentle there probably a little bit too much power on my part right at the end there but it's better than slamming the aircraft right down onto the runway and it's better than hitting that nose wheel on the runway if you guys find yourself bouncing way up into the air after touching the runway with your wheels it's probably because you're hitting that nose wheel first before the main wheels and that in most aircraft will bounce you way up above the runway and the f-18 is probably the most forgiving aircraft in dcs world to learn how to land because it's got very strong landing gear with a very wide wheelbase whereas the f-16 is probably one of the most difficult aircraft to land in dcs world if you guys want me to fly through the same demonstration in either the f-16c or fly in the f-18 again but with a crosswind please let me know in the comments below and if you liked the video please give us a like and a subscribe it is always very very helpful so now we're past the whole short line and this is the end of our demonstration as you guys saw i did float a little bit too much there got a little too much power right at the end but it's better like i said than slamming the aircraft right into the ground so i hope you guys enjoy this video like i said and uh fly safe out there and stay healthy guys

Channel: Spudknocker

Views: 91,077

Keywords: dcs, dcs world, dcs f-16, dcs dogfight, dcs landing, dcs landing tutorial, dcs landing pattern, dcs landing f16, dcs f18, dcs f14, dcs f/a-18c, f/a-18c, persian gulf, traffic pattern, landing, tutorial, dcs world crashes, dcs world dogfight, hornet, super hornet, f/a-18, f/a-18 carrier landing, f-18, f-18c, landing was a little rough, how to land, dcs f-18 dogfight, dcs f18 tutorial, dcs f18 tutorial 2020, jdam, litening targeting pod, lgb, cold start tutorial, f-18 cold start, a10

Id: h93dMHKBpug

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020