The Mirage F-1 Hits The Target

hello youtube sidekick here in my brand spanking new mirage f1 in dcs at cobalt so uh the mirage f1 is a new airplane for dcs now it's not primarily a ground attack aircraft but it is equipped for air-to-ground and at least all of the weapons that are available for it right now are unguided it can carry gpus but there doesn't seem to be a system for guiding them yet so it's basically an iron bomber which means it's kind of right up my alley and other channels have done a pretty good job of looking at the module in general and even looking at in some detail but no one has really looked at dropping iron bombs in detail so that's what i'm gonna and now we're sporting two uh ramp 250 250 kilogram bombs one on each wing on the interior and since the range is pretty close let's just set up the weapons panel here on the ground let's go ahead and select our wing bombs uh and then we need to make sure we selected the correct pylons we got a choice from an interior exterior or both we need interior or both either one will work we also need to make sure that we fuse them the default fusing is inert we need to change that and i think that's probably all we need to worry about for now you do need to remember that we are going to have to turn on the master arm switch first we will have to uncover it and then we will have to turn it on before we go to the rain uh let's see i guess there's one more thing we want to do we want to set the bomb site depression i'm going to set it to 100 mils on this dial here talk a little bit about more about how we arrived at that number and how to use it once we get out to the range but you are going to want to program a depression on your bomb site um so uh we've got 100 mils on the bomb site and i think that we are just about ready to proceed so the mirage f1 as we get ready to taxi here uh you know in case it uh you didn't know the mirage f1 is an aircraft that was obviously designed for the french air force uh it was designed in the mid 1960s 1966 i think design started at an entered service in the early 1970s so it is typical of aircraft of that generation let's call them third generation i guess it's uh in dcs terms it's basically uh concurrent with um the f5 and probably uh the f14 uh it's newer quite a bit newer than the mig-21 and quite a bit older it's really a generation older than the mig-29 uh it is uh actually around the same age as the f-15 although the f-15 is certainly kind of half a generation and and it would be the same generation for instance as the f4 uh or the a6 when we finally get to see those areas so one of the things that you will notice because of the age of the aircraft is the response the the engine is it does have a defined period of time that it takes for it to spool up uh both on the ground uh and uh in the air uh and you'll also notice when we get into the air that there is a momentary pause before the after burner lights so you do have to spend some time remembering to stay ahead of the power curve with this aircraft and we will experience that a little uh probably when we're out at the range so that is one of the features of aircraft of this generation and the good news is that i think the mirage f1 actually models it pretty well it does a good job of giving you the feel of what it would have been like to fly an aircraft of its generation and that after all at least for me is what i come here for so i'm really pleased with that all right we have gotten ourselves uh sorted out so let's uh uh put the landing gear gate up so we can put those up easily final checks here let's put the flaps down flaps really only have two positions and we'll spool it up and once the afterburner lights right about there we release the brakes and it's just a matter of keeping it straight down the runway i'm going to pull back to rotate it around 120 and expect it to come off the ground at 150. i don't really want a lot of back pressure because it is possible to tail strike the airplane if you're not careful there's rotate and there she comes gear up flaps up as we're going through 200 knots and then we'll just hold the nose down a little bit to gain some speed and turn the afterburner off when we get to 300 knots right and we're approaching that now and we uh there's standard nuts at the same time if we get the ils marker beacon so we'll pull back uh the engine so about 8400 is max rpm if you go over that you'll take it into afterburner so we'll stay at max power as we climb up try to keep it around 300 knots there's another marker beacon so flying the f1 is actually really interesting and enjoyable experience i'll just have my sort of first impressions views to uh what you'll have heard from other channels if you've been paying attention and that is that it really does have a flight model that does seem to be representative of the aircraft it does fly like what i imagine a third generation fighter would fly like um you certainly it's not fly by wire you certainly do have to fly it with both hands and feet rudder is required to make coordinated uh turns and both the uh trim of the aircraft and the effectiveness of the controls are affected by speed so you do end up having to fly the aircraft a little bit by feel you need to know what the aircraft is doing to know exactly how to control it properly which is good um that is what you would expect i think particularly from an aircraft from this generation so for instance let's just take a look i'm leveling off here i haven't powered back so we're still basically at full power but now i'm going to try and hold the altitude here around 10 000 feet but one of the things you're going to notice is that i don't fly with the nose level on the horizon i fly with the nose level on the horizon at this speed then i will be descending so we do need a little bit of nose up um so the the center line of the display is not really a total velocity vector at least not in this display mode the nav display mode uh it's really more of a kind of a zero angle of attack line i think you'll find that as the aircraft speeds up because we're keeping the power up and so it is accelerating and as it speeds up you'll see i have to keep that uh that center line uh closer and closer to the horizon to keep from climbing but i still don't just put it in the middle of the screen and fly there if i want to fly straight level so again that's that is a feature of this uh of this aircraft it's a little bit different maybe than a fly-by-wire sort of fully functional modern hud that you might be used to again i don't think there's anything wrong with that i think it actually makes it kind of fun flying another thing that you're going to find about the aircraft is that it certainly is very different in turn depending on whether or not you're going slowly or whether you're going quickly because it does have a slightly high wing there's a little bit of adverse yaw meaning the nose tends to track opposite the direction you're turning unless you add the rudder but that effect is much more pronounced at slower speeds than it is at higher speed the other thing that is really helpful in this aircraft is the angle of attack indicator on the left hand side which is not only useful for landing but also useful in turn because you'll find that as you tighten up the turn the angle of attack indicator will actually come on you'll get the green and eventually you'll get the yellow which is indicating that you're getting to the point where you're exceeding the sustained turn rate and once it turns red you'll really be losing speed in the turn regardless of of how hard you're pulling it's the angle of attack indicator that you really want to be looking at it's a very useful indicator wish i had that on some other aircraft i'm sure it's going to come in really handy especially in air-to-air mode but it is interesting to note here the other thing you'll see some lights there in the the upper left of the dash that keep coming on and going off those are the automatic in-flight flaps and slats so like a lot of aircraft of this generation like the a4 the aircraft has automatic flaps and slats to try and increase its lift as it gets slower because of course it's not really designed to fly at 300 knots it's just designed to fly much faster than that and the wings you know did have some trouble generating uh enough lift to be particularly maneuverable at this speed and so it does have automatic flaps and slats but they do add a lot of drag so you will find that you can get into flight regimes between about 250 and 300 knots where it does require quite a bit of power to accelerate the aircraft because you've got your flaps and your slats at the point which again similar to the a4 but and again not really interesting that that is well modeled in this aircraft so all of which is to say we just did a little detour here because i just wanted to show you some of the flight characteristics of the f1 that are important because if we're going to deliver bombs consistently we're going to need to fly the aircraft consistently and you get you need to get to know how it feels okay so how are we going to deliver the bombs here so um in the manual there are site depression tables that tell you if you fly at a certain dive angle at a certain speed and drop the bombs at exactly the right altitude then uh what sight depression use i have experimented with those as per usual i find it a little bit difficult to ensure that we get exactly those numbers every time and i have been less than completely successful in delivering bombs that way so i'm going to use a slightly different method and it achieves the same thing but it's a method that i have been using on this channel for a while and you're welcome to go back and look at some of the earlier videos in the ironbombers guide series making sure we get the master arm so here's what we're gonna do we have a site depression set for um a hundred mills and what we're gonna do is we're gonna dive in from ten thousand feet uh and we're gonna start the dive at 300 knots if we do this right the dive is going to be around that's going to be between 25 and 30 degrees maybe about 27 degrees what we're going to do is we're going to pick an aim off mark on the ground and we're going to put the flight vector over top of that and then we're going to wait for the site to come up to the target to tell us when to release the bombs now this is going to be at around a little bit between 2500 and 3000 feet but i'm not going to be looking at the altimeter i'm just going to be looking at the hud because i find this is the best way um to stay consistent so we picked the name off mark you can see it's just a little bit beyond the target the white shed is our target by the way we're waiting for the site to come up to come up to come up there and we pickle and okay so those bombs dropped a little bit short we'll see how short here in a second when we get the target impact tracking script results now when you're using this aim off mark method i know it sounds funny but uh the rule is if you drop short game shorter there we go we're about yeah 50 odd meters off and definitely sharp so we aim shorter because that means that if our amok aim off mark is closer to the target it means we will not get to the release point until farther along it will take longer for us to reach the release point because we're aiming closer to the target if you don't believe me you can go back and look at some of my earlier videos but it does work so we're going to need to aim a little bit closer to the target so not quite so far beyond the target this time and then uh we're just going to try and do exactly the same thing keep everything else consistent the only thing we're going to change is the aim offer now um i realize that there are other ways of doing this i find for me this is the easiest way to improve my consistency is not to try and pick what exact exactly the right altitude not to try and pick exactly the right speed really kind of to fly this by feel you have to develop a bit of a calibrated eyeball in terms of exactly how far beyond the target you want to aim and of course if you decide to pick a different site depression then you'll end up with a different side picture and then you'll be dropping at a different altitude but really the best way at least that i found to do this to get consistent is to go out to the range i decided to use 100 mils decided to dive from about 10 000 feet this range which gives me about a 27 degree dive which seems seems pretty fair uh if i start the dive at 300 and basically throttle back i tend to hit about 450 at the bottom of the dive and if i get the aim off angle right i can usually get i can get to the point where i'm certainly within 50 meters maybe even within 35 i think that is going to be pretty good results for the f1 it is very sensitive uh to winning to all of those parameters and it is uh at this speeds um it isn't it is difficult to fly exactly accurately one of the things that happens for instance is the trim does change dramatically as the aircraft dives and you don't want to be pushing and pulling on the stick so getting it trimmed just right is one of the things that you'll have to work on okay so we're rolling in again looking at the white shed i'm gonna aim beyond the white shed but not quite as far beyond it so we roll over we put the lift vector over the target come up and roll out you're gonna need some rudder as you roll out you've got a nice uh ladder there so you get the ladder over the target so you know that the site is going to come up to it slowly move the the flight vector up to an aim point and just try to hold it there until the sight gets to the target and then pull off now you'll notice that we're getting a message that says that the aircraft has been damaged i don't think that's from the bomb i actually think in a funny way something is going on there's a bug somewhere when the aircraft re-arms i seem to lose one of my pylons and i think that's what the damage is reporting because i haven't seen any effect on the aircraft and it seems like we're pretty high for that to be the problem so let's take a look at our results here those are pretty good results actually we're just a little wide this time so we weren't lined up right but we were just about exactly the right length so that that aim off distance seems to be a reasonable aim off distance now one thing that sure is nice in the f1 is having that uh afterburner you get back to altitude pretty quickly unlike uh for instance the a4 where sometimes it can seem like it's taking forever to get back up to altitude just be careful not to keep tripping it there and make sure we've overshot our 10 000 feet so now we need to do a little uh adjustment here and and so you will find uh it does take a fair bit of care and attention to get to 10 000 feet and 300 knots uh and if you overshoot either one of those there's a little bit of work to get back down to it and like i said at 300 knots you are going to be flying a little bit nose up you are going to have the slats and the flaps deploying or cycling and that's going to affect your drag so you're going to have to change the power setting jockey the power setting so i guess all i'm saying is you are going to have to fly this aircraft even to fly it uh at 300 knots uh for the roll in uh it's not going to be automatic you are going to be flying the airplane and as far as i'm concerned that's fine you know that's the whole point if you fly it well if you fly your approach approaches consistently then i think you'll be able to get consistent results and there's probably a lot of people out there are going to be able to fly it more consistently than i do um this is just the way that has worked for me uh spending uh you know a couple of days straight i'm just trying to figure out a way to give me results that i can live with so part of it is getting it lined up so you're getting the right picture out of the cockpit so you're seeing the target in about the right spot on the screen and just trying to adjust that a little bit and we're aiming for that consistent dive picture and we're aiming for a consistent aim off mark if we start at 300 knots at the top of the dive we're going to have a fairly consistent speed and again the big thing is to stay very quiet on the stick once we're lined up you don't want to be pushing and pulling because that will affect the sight picture a lot okay we're rolling in again nice coordinated wing over to roll in we're going to bring the ladder up to the target and then we're going to try and roll out keep the ladder through the target we're going to bring the flight vector up through the target to our aim off mark carefully carefully we're just going to try and hold it there and wait for the site to come up to the target and that is what i in a former life would have called a target round so we got the target that third try um and i think you know all of our uh drops have been within 50 meters so far and that one was right on target so i think this is a system that can work uh like i said you do have to uh there you see your results pretty decent so i i also like that we are dropping at a bit more than 2500 feet i'm still not probably as high as you like to be dropping you know in the era of the mirage f1 ground uh defenses were getting pretty fearsome almost certainly there would have been ir missiles there certainly would have been radar guided aaa dropping at 2500 feet to enemy that knew you were coming i'm not sure how survivable that profile would have been even in the in the day of this jet but this wasn't its primary mission and you can see uh as aircraft were developed for the strike roll um you can see that they you know like the a-10 which was beginning development around this time the time that the f1 was entering service and they were really fixated on being able to add a lot of standoff even before the advent of uh targeting pods uh it really was about the living developing ways to deliver ordinance accurately uh from greater distances but with the f1 um if you can get up to 3000 feet and hit the target accurately i think you're doing pretty well so one more time we're coming around the corner here again it's just timing the turn trying to stay at 10 000 feet trying to stay at 300 knots get ourselves set up for a nice consistent roll in and then pick our line so that we're going to be just about just the right distance from the beside the target and again this is all just you just i think have to learn how to calibrate your eyeball you just have to do this enough times to feel where you have to be to get that consistent roll in get that consistent approach similarly you got to fly the aircraft and learn how it feels at 300 knots uh just exactly how nose up it has to be you know it's something that requires practice and i again i don't think that's a bad thing at all all right we'll just go for that we'll add some insult to injury here see if we can hit that building one more time so again we get the lift vector on the target we're pulling up trying to keep the angle of attack indicator from going too far into the yellow rolling out slowly using the rudder as we roll out using the rudder to get ourselves lined up put the target the site uh below the target pull up to our aim off mark try to hold it there and go and we're not aligned as well as i would like to be on that one maybe a little bit late see what the target impact tracking script says about that so as you can see even when uh you know what mark you need to be hitting um at least i i still find it pretty challenging uh to fly the aircraft consistently enough to hit it yeah you see we're off uh we're 50 meters long that time didn't look a whole lot different than the sight picture the last time part of it was i just pickled late um but yeah if you want to get good at dropping bombs in the f1 i think you're going to have to spend some time uh working on it i think it will repay the effort though because i do think that you you will be able to drop bombs effectively it can actually carry a fairly substantial payload you can get four bombs uh under the wings and you get another four on the fuselage you get eight bombs uh and if you drop them in a ripple um you know you can do a fair bit of damage i don't think that you're going to be doing any precision strikes in the f1 at least not until the gbus are enabled but i do think that uh with a little bit of practice you can certainly take out you know larger installations i don't think that you're going to be using this against uh point targets like uh tanks or infantry but you could certainly be using it against airfields runways and that sort of okay well let's do one more uh see if we can test out our system here but uh going after another target we'll go after the the big circular target and again uh so uh so we need to sort of this is going to be a test of like i said the calibration of my eyeball uh picking an aim off mark that's about the right distance away from this target even though i'm looking at a different target so it's a good test of the system that we're developing here um so again just to reiterate the way that we're going to do this we we are trying to drop our bombs at the same height same angle same speed every time but the way we're doing that is by rolling in at the same altitude same distance from the target same uh speed and then what we are doing is picking an aim off mark that will bring the site over the target at essentially the right altitude if we find that we're picking it our bombs are dropping short we pick a name off mark that's a little shorter if we find our bombs are dropping long we pip and pick a name off mark that's longer and that will adjust the altitude to correct the difference but this way we don't have to be checking the altimeter and trying to pickle as we see a number go by we just watch the site on the hood and we pickle as the site comes up to the target again if we get ourselves calibrated right i really do think this is a better way to be consistent than trying to look at the numbers in the cockpit at least it is for me i find when i'm trying to check the numbers that's when i start flying erratically and it affects my accuracy and with the f1 you really have to be very quiet on the controls so let's roll in we're going after that big circular target at the end of kind of the line back in the woods there and again nice smooth rollover try and stay coordinated in the wing over bringing the ladder up to the target we're rolling out with rudder and we're using rudder at the end to finish it off and keep the ladder on the target which means that the site is directly below the target we're going to name off mark around the base of the trees there i guess we're just going to hold it until the site comes up here nice all right well uh you know don't ask me to do it again uh but i think that i've demonstrated that there is this technique that you can use to get pretty decent results um you know we were within 50 meters and pretty much all our drops were probably averaged about 30 25 or 30 meters away which i think for this aircraft is pretty darn good especially dropping the bombs at 2500 feet so i'm gonna call that a successful iron bombing range day uh as per usual here let's uh we'll just do a nice little wing over and go back and take a look at the range area i'm certainly going to be interested in spending a bit more time in the mirage f1 as i said i like the aircraft you really do have to fly it you do have to fly it well to be effective certainly in an air-to-ground mode i haven't tried the rockets yet i haven't tried the high drag bombs yet looking forward to giving those a try uh if there's other things that you would like me to cover or if there's other experience that you have in flying the aircraft that you think would help other people get better at dropping iron bombs from the f1 please feel free to add that in the comments below and as always if you would like to see more of these videos it really does help if you subscribe to the channel get the bell on uh and also you know tell your friends and also like the videos and adding comments is always a useful way of subscribing here we go by the range let's just go up get that lovely afterburner kicking in and we can get the nose up high you know what why don't we go up here and do a split s it's pretty interesting as we pull down through this just keeping trying to keep that angle of attack indicator just cycling between the orange and the red that's really helpful in doing this kind of maneuver looking at that keep our speed up all right well uh that's gonna be my first uh day on the range with the mirage f1 i hope you guys have enjoyed that uh look for a few more videos coming i think and for now this is gonna be sidekick signing off

Channel: Iain Christie

Views: 7,697

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Id: f6DEwh2UMXU

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022