Flight Training Ground School

Before you even think about going online and having someone gun your brains out, you need to become familiar with the environment. This includes preflight equipment checks, terrain familiarization, determining friend from foe, flight planning and where's the damn starter switch.

Preflight

Some of these items were written before there was a version of Air Warrior for Windows. Some comments will only apply to the DOS version.

The following items should be checked.

• Am I booted appropriately?

  Most Windows 95 systems will not have to worry about this. DOS and Windows 3.1 systems typically have multiple boot configurations due to resource limitations. On these systems, it pays to double check your config.

  Some systems may need to boot clean to have enough memory or to be configured for access to CDROM, sound cards, joysticks, etc. Minimum requirements may be found in Kesmai's AW FAQ, which is included in the Air Warrior 1.20 file set for DOS. This is also a good place to lookup error messages that may be displayed when running Air Warrior.

  The DOS version of Air Warrior will not run under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. You must exit to DOS (in the case of Windows 3.1) or boot under a separate configuration in the Windows 95 case. This is due to both having problems reading joystick and rudder pedal values. [ need definitive writeup on this. ]

  There is now a new version of Air Warrior for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 called Air Warrior for Windows or AW4W.

• Is Air Warrior and/or my hardware configured appropriately?

  The DOS AW front end software knows how to access certain video cards directly. The same goes with sound cards and some peripherals such as joysticks and throttles. Sometimes sound cards have configuration or IRQ problems. If you are having problems with your display or sound, you should check the setup and the faq. You might also want to lookup your sound or video card in the Air Warrior archives to see if other people have had similar problems and managed to find a fix.

  In addition, you will want to verify that you are flying the correct version of Air Warrior. This won't matter until you start flying head to head or online, but it will probably matter to you at some point. Kesmai releases updates sometimes several times a year and these updates can be obtained from the same place the front end kits are found.

  In addition to the correct version, you will need to verify that all appropriate configuration information has been set appropriately. The following panel illustrations are from the DOS AW 1.20 version. The AW4W version configuration is performed by going to the hangar and clicking on the clipboard and other areas. This includes things such as the art and film directory locations, terrain file (if a terrain update has been received or is needed), and user id and password (if flying online). An update will usually erase previous configuration information, so they need to be reset afterwards. In addition, you may need to change serial port configurations when flying head to head versus flying online.

  Many options are also available whether or not you are flying single user (offline) or multi-user. You will want to select options appropriate for you. In fact, the selection of appropriate options is complex enough that a separate Options section is dedicated to that purpose.

• Are all my peripherals plugged in and configured?

  Today's flight sim accessories are quite sophisticated. Some sim pilots have switches between multiple joysticks or have programmable joysticks that need to be configured. One of the most common peripherals vendors is Thrustmaster. If you have their equipment, you can find support on their home page. If you are serious about flight sims, I STRONGLY recommend getting a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) type setup from one of the major flight sim peripheral vendors such as Thrustmaster or CH Products.

  Another common problem is accidently kicking the rudder pedal wires loose causing a full left or right rudder. Getting airborne in this situation is likely to cause a very short flight.

  Lastly, many people don't realize that fast computers need speed adjustable game ports to properly read their values. The above listed FAQ describes common configuration problems such as this and the way to fix them.

• Is there enough disk space for films?

  It's a good idea to record as much as you can of your engagements. You need disk space to do this. The file sizes for these can vary anywhere from 10s of Kbytes to 100K bytes or so. You will have one for each flight that you turn the camera on and you can selectively turn the camera off and on during a single flight.

• Are there any unnamed film files I want to keep?

  The name generator for new films will sometimes cause existing FILM000n.CAM files to be overwritten. When you have a film file you want to keep, you should rename it.

• Do I have a map handy?

  Yes, you might be able to muddle about without a map and yes there's a map in the front-end you can display while flying, but you really want to get a printed copy of the maps. I know some people have purchased poster sized maps from the online providers and Centurion created a nice flip chart of maps that he had at the 1994 AW Conference. You can probably get by with printing any of the terrain maps provided with the front end kits or available in the archives.

  Buff and jabo pilots will want to obtain the field charts for locating targets around a field. While this only shows PAC fields, you should be able to match them to fields in the ETO as well.

Terrain Familiarization

You need to be familiar with the eight points of the compass and their numerical bearings. For instance, north is 0 or 360 degrees, south is 180 degrees and southwest is 225 degrees. You will be given or need to give position reports when flying online and going the wrong way or giving bad info will make you look bad and feel even worse. Worse yet, you might damage or destroy your own country's airbases or strategic reserves. While Air Warrior can give you your current position in sector coordinates (x,y lower left origin), you will need to know your position within a sector and give reports accordingly. For example, you may receive an enemy buff position report of Bz 17 25k 3,5 nw hdg 135. You will need to know that this is a B-land B-17 at an altitude of 25,000 feet in the northwest corner of sector 3,5 heading south east. You must then plot time and distance in your head so that you can be at the appropriate altitude to intercept and at the right place at the right time.

Lastly, you need to understand relative bearings or the direction to take when you want to go from your current position to another place on the map. For instance, if you want to fly towards an enemy that is up and to the right of you on the radar map, then you must fly northeast or 45 degrees. If you are currently heading 90 degrees or east, the relative bearing is 45 degrees to your left. If you were flying north, the relative bearing would be 45 degrees to your right. Either way, turn the appropriate direction to fly north east.

There are several general things to note about terrain (usually referred to as a theater).

• There's more than one theater. In fact, there's more than one of the same type. There are two European (ETO) and two Pacific (PTO or PAC) theaters (one small, one large). There's a two country scenario theater called TerraFencer (Fencer designed it) used for short scenarios or war nights. There's a huge scenario terrain called Oceania used for large scenarios. More terrains may be created at a later date.

• There are usually three countries in a theater. That usually means a two front war for everyone.

• The three country terrains are basically a triangularly shaped set of countries so that each country has a border with the other two. This is probably illustrated much more clearly in the terrain maps. For two country terrains, it has so far been east against west.

• The small and large ETO and PTO theaters exist due to the swelling number of players and the addition of real-time flight.

  It used to be that all the planes flew around at half their real speed, but many Air Warriors wanted more realism. They wanted real-time speed intercepts to raise the pucker factor [ glossary ]. Hence, the real-time arena [glossary] was born and the old arena became the half-time arena. However, the small theaters weren't well suited for real-time play and the increasing number of players, so the large real-time full realism arena and theaters were created.

  Since you are just learning, there's a decision you must make. What terrain should I use? Personally, I have flown them all. If you are going to fly in the half-time arena, then you will only need to use the small terrains. If you are going to fly real-time, then you may want to fly the small ETO/PTO terrains just long enough to figure out how to fly, then switch to larger terrains to help familiarize yourself with their layout.

• When flying offline, be sure not to mix theaters between your starting field and all of the drone aircraft starting fields. Things will get mightily confused if you start up some of the drones in the PTO and you fly in the ETO.

Friend or Foe

Selecting a country offline is done via the Mission menu item. You select the country for your own plane and the country associated with each of the drone planes. For offline flying, it's probably best to limit it to two countries unless you are going to have everyone real close to each other.

Once you start flying, you will need to figure out who's friendly and who's not. There are two ways to do this. The first is to learn the color associated with each country (it varies with the different front ends so learn it for your front-end). This color will be displayed by the icon and range/type information in your view when it gets close enough. If the range/type information shows a player id instead of an aircraft type, it's a friendly. DON'T SHOOT FRIENDLIES! You will make some very powerful enemies if you do and you run the risk of being persona non grata.

In this example we see the country is identified by the country color legend in the upper left of the view. Two aircraft are in the front view. The one in the gunsight has a red icon above it which the legend to the side identifies as a B-land Ki. The aircraft in the upper right of the view has a green icon above it identifying it as a C-land plane. However, this plane is not identified by type. It has a player number which identifies it as a friendly C-lander. AW4W uses a new 5 character player-id format which shows the CPID (short player ID handle).

The second way is to look at the color markings on the aircraft. This is a fairly new feature of the front ends. The drawback to identifying friend from foe this way (as the P-38 has found out) is you will likely be dead before you are close enough to get a visual id. Learn to use the icons.

Do NOT use aircraft type as a means of identifying the enemy (unless of course you are flying in a battle recreating scenario with aircraft types assigned to each country). In Air Warrior, each fictitious country, has licensed the production of all major WWII types and therefore are available to each country. [ where is the write up on plane type availability that was posted so long ago. ]

Aircraft Aerodynamics

The Four Forces

Lift is produced by the wings and can sort of be thought of as a force which pulls perpendicular to the direction of travel, but in reality it is closer to perpendicular to the wings. Normally, this direction is up and therefore this holds the plane up. However, as an airplane rolls and pitches, the direction of movement changes and therefore the lift vector (direction of the force of lift) changes.

Gravity is fairly simple. It's a force that ALWAYS pulls straight down to the earth no matter what orientation the aircraft is in. An airplane flies because the amount of lift pulling the aircraft up was at some point greater than the amount of pull of gravity. In other words, the available lift must be able to support the weight of the aircraft. The more a plane weighs, the more lift is required to keep it in the air. Now for the fun stuff.

When your thrust is greater than your drag you accelerate. However, as you go faster, your drag increases. Eventually, you reach a balance where your drag matches your thrust. At this point your speed stabilizes. However, while you are accelerating, you have a choice. You can either go faster, or you can use the excess power to climb. You cannot climb if you don't have excess thrust available.

Now, the amount of lift you get varies with altitude and airspeed. The faster you go, the more air is flowing around the wing and therefore you get more lift. However, air gets thinner as you go higher so there is less air available to flow around the wing, but it also means you can push your way through it easier (sort of like the difference between stirring molasses and water). You can go faster as you get higher only to the point where you have enough air for the engine to make more thrust than drag.

Another way to increase lift is to increase your angle of attack. This is the difference in the direction the plane is pointed versus the direction you are traveling. If you stick your hand out a car window while you are moving and keep it flat, it is flying like a wing. The air is moving in the same direction your hand is pointed. However, if you tip your hand up slightly, your hand is pointed in a new direction but the wind has not changed it's direction. This difference is called the angle of attack. Your hand will want to move up when you do this. The increased angle of attack increased the lift. Your hand will also want to move backward. That's because any increase in lift has a corresponding increase in drag. When you increase your angle of attack beyond a certain point, the lift will go away, but the drag will be huge. This is called a stall. You have increased the angle of attack beyond the point where lift is created. The only way to recover from a stall is to reduce the angle of attack. Changing the speed does not matter. [ find MPEG showing stalled airfoil. ]

Energy

When you are sitting on the runway, you have neither potential nor kinetic energy. Once you start moving down the runway, you start to build kinetic energy up since it is related to your airspeed. As you lift off the runway, you start to build potential energy up as it is related to altitude. During your climb, your altitude and potential energy increases, but you neglect to watch your airspeed and climb too steep. Now your airspeed and kinetic energy starts to fall off, but you are still gaining potential energy. Eventually, you have little airspeed and little kinetic energy, you stall and start to drop like a brick. Your potential energy is being converted to kinetic energy as your altitude drops and your airspeed builds. In the end, you have less total energy than before the stall since you burned some up maneuvering.

As you can see, kinetic energy represents energy useful for maneuvering at a given instant, but potential energy is a resevoir which may be tapped to use as kinetic energy. Another way to look at it is airspeed gives you the power to maneuver and altitude is your resevoir for converting to airspeed.

Energy management will become an important part of your air combat training as the lessons get more and more deadly.

Compression

Air Warrior's Aerodynamics

As with real aircraft, your plane will climb until it has no more excess thrust and drag will be created as you pull back on the stick (changing your angle of attack) to maneuver. You must take great care to be gentle with your maneuvers until you are familiar with how the planes fly. If you aren't careful, your airspeed will drop and your angle of attack will increase (to compensate for the loss of lift) and eventually you will stall and spin in. However, forces such as torque and P-factor are not currently modeled. Slips are not modeled either and spins are a horrible hack, but are better than most sims treatment of them.

Compression is modeled in Air Warrior as well. Some planes are less prone to it than others though. In AW, compression causes you to lose control of your plane (i.e. you cannot move the control surfaces). The only way to recover is to slow down by either applying air brakes if your plane has them and/or by throttling back.

Stalls and Spins

Some planes are hard to recover from spins. You will need to learn the idiosyncrasies of each to determine how to recover. Some like to recover with throttle back or engine off. In fact you can damage your engine sometimes if you don't do this (watch your oil pressure). You will practice stalls and spins later in your flight training.

Flight Planning

Missions

Fighter Sweep

Why would you want to limit your fuel load? Mainly because your plane flies like a pig when it gets heavy. Refer to Lift and Gravity, The Four Forces for a review. If you really understand the four forces acting on the plane, it should become obvious after a moments reflection.

In addition, different planes have different flying qualities. This will become more obvious as you gain experience. This also means that certain planes are better suited to certain missions. For a fighter sweep, you may want a plane with a lot of ammo or heavy firepower [ Ammo chart ] such as the FW-190. If you prefer less kills, but a greater life span, you may prefer a better armored plane [ Durability chart] with speed.

Jabo

In the olden days of arena play, there was one radar per country [ is this right? JK ] which covered it almost entirely (small ETO/PTO terrain). Without it a country was blind to the attack of others although the airfield towers would broadcast warning messages of approaching enemy aircraft. This made it a prime target for jabo strikes where a small group of fighters would attack a single point (the tower at the capital field) to take the radar out.

A jabo mission usually is a hi altitude diving attack. Good planes for this are those which do not compress easily, such as the P-51 ( Refer to Compression, Aerodynamics for review), or have dive brakes (e.g. the P-38 and F-4U) to control the descent speed.

Occasionally, you may see a jabo mission which tries to sneak in under the radar at less than 200'.

Field Capture

The jabo strike is responsible for destroying the tower, which is a requirement for capturing the field. Although destroying the ack, which will tear up a gooney bird and the drunks (paratroops) it drops, is not a requirement, it must be taken into consideration. We will cover this in more detail later.

The C-47 is responsible for getting the troops to the field. They usually fly below radar coverage to give the enemy as little warning of its approach as possible. It is a very slow plane (~150kts) and climbs like a dog which is another reason to keep it low. Lastly, you want the troops on the ground as fast as possible, so you want to be as low as you can get and have a safe drop (the drunks refuse to jump at <500').

Field Defense

Your best bet for defending a field from an ongoing attack is to find something with good low speed maneuverability (e.g. the Zeke) and/or great climb rate (e.g. the Spit and Bf-109). You probably won't be landing much, so you're most vulnerable when you are slow and climbing after takeoff. Low speed maneuverability and climb rate are your only assets in this situation.

Field Resupply

Buff Escort

Buff Intercept

Tactical Buff

Strategic Buff

It used to be that you could close airfields by laying a certain number of bombs on the runway as well, but that may no longer be true. The strategic rules are under revision.

Terror Buff

1. Points race
2. Deathstars

Deathstars are feared by fighters and are a long running debate between buffers and fighter pilots. A deathstar is a fully gunned B-17 with sufficient hardness and gunner lethality to be able to go trolling for fighters. The usual result (after much laughing) is the fighter pilots complaining and the buff hardness and gunner lethality getting turned down. Of course, this then makes it easy for a fighter to blow a buff out of the sky without worrying about being damaged itself. Now the buff pilots and gunners get a chance to complain and the hardness and lethality get tweaked again.

If you're interested in blood and carnage here are two example's of deathstars in action, caught on film.

• Gunned B-25
• B-17s and B-25s during the Air Warrior Convention

Harassment

Electronic Warfare

Terrain, Route and Fuel

You will find yourself taking the easy way out by flying a nearly straight line to your target, climbing for as long as it feels right with about the same amount of fuel you always take. Hey, it works, but routines can be counterproductive. For instance, you might normally take 40-50% fuel in your fighter, but a B-17 can fly hours with that much fuel. That means a lower climb rate and you are going to need all the altitude you can get. In addition, once the enemy knows your pattern, they can easily prepare to intercept you. You must vary your attacks to keep them guessing.

Look at the PAC terrain map and consider an attack on C72 (assuming N72 was owned by C-land) from A62. Would you go low level or high level? Would you go straight in for speed and surprise or would you loop around behind the mountain for stealth and surprise? Does the orientation of the runway at C72 affect your decision? It should. A low level stealth approach into the face of an N1K1 just taking off would ruin your day.

Ordnance

When I fly online, I now reselect the buff every time I go up (if I'm flying buffs) or use the /bomb command to force loading or unloading as required. If I'm not doing something which requires high rate of climb or maneuverability, I generally try to take eggs with me whenever I go up and jettison them if I need to. This allows me to perform ground attack or air attack on a spur of the moment basis. Of course, if you forget you have those eggs slung underneath, it's like loading up with extra fuel.

Enemy Resistance

Weather

Test

When you are ready to take your test, click here. You will be given the test, the test will be graded and you will be informed of the questions you missed and the areas you need to review. You may review and retest if you like or continue on with the next phase of your training, Solo Flight.

• Frequently Asked Questions
• UK Air Warrior Pilots Guide
• Aussie AW Training Academy