Control InputsWe will assume you are flying in single user mode (offline).
Knowing how to move the controls on your plane is not enough. You must be able to determine the state of your airplane, sometimes without looking out the window. To do this, you must know your instruments. This not only includes knowing what they say, but also knowing what normal is, what conditions are abnormal and remedies for that, as well as where they are located so you can quickly glance to take a reading.
To fly well, you must get into the habit of scanning your instruments while flying. You will need to be able to quickly look at the most important instruments and determine if corrective action should be taken while you continue a scan outside your plane.
What's important, will probably depend on what your situation is. In a turning battle, airspeed, altitude, fuel, ammo and Gs are important. On a low level bombing run, altitude, vertical velocity and heading are going to be important. For dive bombing, altitude and airspeed become important. For scenarios, heading and airspeed might be important for proper rendezvous. In a spin, compass heading, altitude and oil pressure become important. For landing, airspeed, altitude, and gear locks are of primary concern. As you can see, what's important changes, but you still need to be aware of what your plane is telling you.
You have a limited amount of fuel available to you. You can either fill your
tanks to the brim and probably not have to worry about it (with a large
loss of maneuverability) or you can plan for a specific flight length
and have to watch your fuel so you don't run out.
On occasion, you will be hit in the fuel tanks causing a leak. Depending on how fast it is leaking and how much fuel you have left, you will need to decide whether or not it is time to RTB. Going down in indian country will cost you your life. In neutral territory, it's iffy at best.
The fuel gauge shown indicates approximately 35% fuel in the tanks. This gauge is actually a pretty poor design. There are other cockpit art replacements that give you a graduated gauge allowing you to read the amount more precisely. You will need to learn the fuel burn rates for the aircraft you fly to determine how much flying time this will give you.
Next to the fuel gauge is the gear handle and 3 indicator lights. The
indicator lights show the status of the gear with the green light
indicating down and locked, red indicating gear up and locked and yellow
indicating an unsafe condition.
When you raise or lower the gear, the yellow unsafe light will flash on while the gear extends or retracts. The direction of movement is indicated by the gear handle. Occasionally, your gear may be damaged. If this happens, the yellow indicator light will come on and you will not be able to raise or lower the gear. You must either bail out or belly land the plane.
An important point to note is airspeeds you can fly at with the gear extended. The speed range for most of the fighters is is around 175-300 kts. There is a slight pitch down when the gear is extended and exceeding this speed when they are down and locked will damage the gear causing additional drag and the need for a gear up landing. In addition, the gear may not fully extend on some planes if your speed exceeds 150 kts or so.
The maximum for buffs is somewhere in the 100-150kt range depending on the plane. Of particular note, if you exceed this speed in the B-17 with your gear extended, the plane will pitch nose down sharply (compounding your problem). Actions to take are similar to exceeding the maximum flap extended speed.
The throttle indicates the power output of your engine. Most people
tend to fly around with it at 100%. If you are flying in a scenario,
you may end up throttling back for loiter [ glossary ] time. You may also
need to throttle back for spin recovery, compression, and of course, landings.
In addition to the throttle position, there's the WEP [ glossary ] indicator. You have a limited amount of emergency power available during a single flight. There is no indicator for how much is left so use it wisely and only when necessary. You will need to know how much is available on your aircraft and remember how much has been used during the flight.
The airspeed indicator is one of your primary instruments. Your aircraft
performance is greatly affected by the speed at which you are traveling.
If you go too fast, you can compress (and yes, some pilots are smart
enough to use this against you). If you go too slow, you may stall or
suffer poor roll or turn rate. Controlling your airspeed is a vital
skill to learn.
Note that there are two airspeeds which Air Warrior can display (See Options). There is true airspeed and indicated airspeed. Indicated airspeed will be the most valuable to use as it tells you how the plane feels.
The G meter becomes important when you start to fight or fly aerobatics.
Past 5.5 Gs you start to suffer blackout effects. The way it works is
you generally have a 3 second supply of blood in your head. Past 5.5
Gs, this reserve starts to drain away. Once you go beyond 6 Gs, you
use up whatever reserve you have and then you black out.
Once you are blacked out, you lose control (can't move the stick, throttle, fire guns, etc.). Your control inputs are also automatically halved to help recover, but if you don't reduce stick pressure while blacked out, you will black out again when you recover and control returns.
[ move this to section on riding blackouts under aerobatics? JK ] It appears that black out starts as the screen starts to fade to black. When you recover, you get control back before the screen fades back to normal. There is a slight gray that you can ride if you are particularly good, but I find the G meter to be a more accurate way of riding the edge.
Control InputsWhen you select fly [ picture? ], one of the first things you should do is check the proper operation of your equipment. Move the stick to its extremes and watch the reported movement. It should move smoothly to the extremes of the instrument without spiking. Do the same with your rudder pedals if you have them. If there is spiking, you may need to replace the pots [ glossary ] in your stick or pedals. If the stick doesn't move to the extremes, it may need to be recalibrated. If the movement is asymmetric, you may need to purchase or adjust your high speed game card [ is this the proper symptom? JK ]
Stall Warning
Vertical Speed IndicatorDuring climbs, it may be used to get the best climb rate, though a better way to judge maximum climb rate is by indicated airspeed. This is due to the climb rate decreasing as altitude increases (See The Four Forces for altitude effects).
AltimiterNot everyone pays enough attention to this. A while back the following NOTAM [ glossary ] was issued by an Air Warrior pilot after a rather short flight.
NOTAMTry it sometime to see why. :-)FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS, B5, BLAND, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. A RIGHT HAND PATTERN SHALL NOT BE USED FOR DEPARTURE FLIGHTS FROM B5 DUE TO OBSTRUCTION.
To determine your altitude, you must sum the values of the 3 hands. The longest hand indicates 10's of feet, middle is 100's, and short hand is thousands of feet.
The altimiter is used mainly to give you an idea of how much maneuvering room you have so you don't smack the ground. It's almost the only visual cue you have so check it often. This is particularly true in low level flights or turning battles over water. Remember that there is no terrain texturing which appears below a certain altitude and the terrain is flat and uses large polygons so there is very little depth perception available.
Another use of the altimiter is in keeping your aircraft within its maximum performance parameters. Remember that each plane operates differently. Part of those characteristics includes the altitude range at which it operates best.
Lastly, the altimiter can also be used as an energy gauge. The higher you are, the steeper and/or longer you can dive to pick up speed and escape from a potentially dangerous situation.
Available Ammunition
FlapsFor planes with multi-position flaps, you get most of your additional lift from the first flap position (1 notch down) with a small increase in drag. Further positions increase lift slightly, but mainly increase drag.
Planes with maneuvering flaps can gain a significant amount of lift, and therefore turn rate, by deploying them at high speed. Other flap positions may not be used until below a certain airspeed (generally around 150 kts).
Once you get below this speed and deploy flaps, do not exceed the maximum flaps extended speed (around 225 - 375 kts depending on the plane) or you risk having the nose tuck under with no ability to pull up. To fix this, you must either reduce airspeed via throttle, dive brake or both, or you must throttle up and try an outside loop [ glossary ]. Another possibility is rolling inverted and there's a good chance the negative Gs will damage your engine(s).
Radio
There are two special channels. Channel 1 is the open channel which
goes to all countries. It's also the default channel, so if you
don't change it, be careful of what you say. It's also a very noisy
channel with lots of taunting, name calling, etc. If you are just learning
Air Warrior, you probably won't want to hang out here. You should, instead,
tune your radio to channel 2 using the command
<esc>t2.
Channel 2 is the other special channel. This is the country channel and all radios are able to receive this at any time no matter what the radio is tuned to. Anything broadcast on channel 2 will be received by all your countrymen.
<esc>tNNN
command. This sets the adjust channel. The fixed
channel is always the country channel except on multiplayer vehicles
(see Intercom). The
rest of the channels, 3-999, may be used for communicating with your wingmen or
squad mates but is only sent and received within the same country. For
instance, if you are a B-lander tuned to channel 3, you could
communicate with other B-landers who are also tuned to 3, but you would
not be able to talk with any C-landers who are also tuned to 3.
Be careful about tuning your radio right after takeoff. Your airplane will be initialized by the host system shortly after you appear on the field. If you tune before the initialization, the initialization will reset the radio back to channel 1 and you could end up saying some things to the enemy that you really didn't want to. Watch for your ammo gauge to register non-empty before tuning and you should be ok.
' followed by
whatever you want to say. To send on the tuned channel, you type
/ followed by whatever you want to say.
All messages sent on the radio are prefixed by the player id of that number. To help identify to others who you are, you may want to create a macro using the AW macro facility or a programmable keyboard macro facility (if you have one), the key sequences which identify you online. [ Needs to be expanded on. May need to be moved to online stuff too. ]
' key for broadcasting
on the country channel is multi-player vehicles. In buffs and land vehicles,
this is used as the intercom which allows you to communicate with the other
players in your vehicle. This means you can receive the country channel
traffic, intercom traffic and whatever you are tuned to and you can send
on the intercom or whatever channel you are tuned to.
Compass
Oil GaugeFor some reason, spins can drop your oil pressure to the point they damage your engine. Throttling back can help. Shutting the power off can help as well. Once you've recovered from a spin, give some time for the oil to pool up under positive Gs before restarting or more damage will occur.
Another use for the oil pressure gauge is during ground checks. Glance at the oil gauge before throttling up for takeoff to determine whether or not all of your engines are started. Many fighter jocks occasionally forget to start all the engines when they jump into a buff or P-38.
AutopilotOne limit is minimum altitude. Usually, this is 200' (another host settable item). You can sneak under a radar by staying below the limit. However, you will show up in the sector as a counter on the radar display and the enemy may start to look for you.
Another limit is the lag for counter updates. Don't depend solely on these for locating enemy planes. However, they can be used for determining general movement by watching the counters move from sector to sector.
Radar can be made inoperative by destroying the tower in which it operates. If you fly with your head glued to the radar screen, you may find an enemy flying up your six due to your radar being out.
Never depend on radar near the limits of its range. In Air Warrior, radar is a very binary thing. You may have an airplane 2000 yds away closing for the kill, but not see it on the radar because it is just outside the radar range.
Once you hop in your plane by clicking the Fly button, you
need to quickly complete a series of last minute checks. These checks
include:
The first check is your radar map. You want to check this to make sure there are no bad guys CAPing the field just waiting to vulch the next guy that pops up. The problem is that it takes a moment before the radar map is updated enough to display nearby enemy aircraft. In addition, your radar may be out, or the enemy may be flying under it.
There are two camps here. One camp believes it is better to wait for the radar update and check for the enemy before starting your engine(s) so you can escape quickly if necessary. The other camp believes that it is best to get a running start into the air as fast as possible so you can be at a fighting speed sooner. Personally, I always check first. If there is an enemy plane within approximately 5000 yds, you are probably better off taking off from another field. This is particularly true if the enemy has destroyed the ack at your field.
Check the views for a visual look as well. There are two reasons to do this. The first is to verify that your equipment is working properly (some joysticks can control the view selection from the stick). The second reason is that aircraft under 200 feet don't show up on radar. In fact, there might be an enemy plane parked right behind you just waiting for you to pop up. Now there's a good reason to take a jeep or an FP up first to have a look see with radar and views.
It may seem crazy to check the compass heading, but you want to be sure you are leaving from the field you think you are leaving from. If the compass heading of the runway doesn't match what you think it should, you've probably selected the wrong runway. Landmarks such as mountains are a good visual cue as well.
Make a quick check of your control surfaces before you get moving down the runway. A control problem once you are moving can be disastrous. I find the typical problem to be cables that are kicked loose, or changing between mouse and joystick control and forgetting what is set.
Be sure to start ALL of your engines before you start moving down the runway. You may not be able to reach takeoff speed if you don't and the asymmetric thrust at low speed is very difficult to control with the usual result being a crash.
Setting your radio channel is not as critical as some of the above mentioned items, but it's a good habit to start. That way you are less likely to blab critical information over the open channel (a very dweeby mistake). There should never be a reason for you not to wait for the init packet to be received by your plane (filling the ammo) before tuning. If you are in a hurry to get off the ground because of nearby enemy planes, you should probably be taking off from somewhere else.
Some buffs don't have ammo, so waiting for radar updates is probably sufficient.
Once you are airborne and in no danger of going back down, raise your gear. However, be sure to do this before you get to 150 kts. If you start to go too fast, pull the nose up a bit. If you're getting too slow, lower the nose a bit. Remember, during takeoff and landing, pitch controls airspeed and throttle controls your vertical rate (though the two are intimately related).
Continue your full throttle climbout to 1000 feet then level and throttle back to somewhere around 50%. Congratulations on performing the first step.
Take a few moments on the downwind leg of the pattern to experiment with the view keys and the radar view (being sure to maintain 1000 feet altitude and 90 degrees for your heading). Watch and wait for the airfield go by. Once you are past the field, throttle back some more. Once your airspeed goes below 150 kts, roll left again 45 - 60 degrees of bank and begin your turn. lower full flaps and gear and begin your descent. Get your nose so that it points in front of the end of the runway.
You need to continue practicing your take off, low speed handling, and landings until you are proficient at it.
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, Aerobatics.