Blackhawk

[empenage]

I got a chance to fly the Blackhawk Sim in PBI last week. I say "fly" like I know what I'm talking about.

Really I crashed it trying to land it 4 times. Takeoff was ok, landing was bad.

Anyway, the FAA guy I was with took off and picked up a "water bladder" and then flew over to another field and placed it down in the middle of a road. It felt so real. Every time I flew the thing I made myself sick. This guy flew the sim like it was part of his body. When he got close to the deck the leaves blew in the trees. The visual was that good.

I had vertigo for 2 hours after.

 

[Traderd]

I got a chance to fly the Blackhawk Sim in PBI last week. I say "fly" like I know what I'm talking about.

Really I crashed it trying to land it 4 times. Takeoff was ok, landing was bad.

Anyway, the FAA guy I was with took off and picked up a "water bladder" and then flew over to another field and placed it down in the middle of a road. It felt so real. Every time I flew the thing I made myself sick. This guy flew the sim like it was part of his body. When he got close to the deck the leaves blew in the trees. The visual was that good.

I had vertigo for 2 hours after.

I have about twelve years experience in the thing and have known a lot of guys who had a hard time with motion sickness while flying the sim. Sometimes the screens seemed to "jump" around a bit and it could hard for some to handle. Nothing new I'm sure.

They are great though. You can get shot down (or if lucky just shot at), do all of the crazy crap you'd never try in the real thing (dual PCL chops at vne, rolls, inverted flight etc). If you're ever in again, land on water and watch the graphics go nuts when you go below the programmed waterline. Another neat thing is the multi-ship missions while connected to boxes at other locations and the record feature that will let you fly the manuver, then land off to the side and watch what you just flew from an outside perspective.

Kinda miss it all; but I know that retirement is good - retirement is good!

 

[Traderd]

Speaking of sims, many years I ago I flew my required simulator time in the Cobra sim at Ft. Lewis. It was quite different from modern sims in many ways, but mostly in the fact there was no software for graphics, but instead there was a "board" which was configured to depict in small scale all the details of some part of Germany. It had plastic trees, plastic houses and little people along with mountains and hills. The simulator was an actual Cobra cockpit with screens connected to a camera that moved around the "board" in cordination with your flight control inputs. So as you flew over a town you would see the little plastic people and buildings etc. If you flew the camera to the edge of the board, then the screens would white out and you'd be IMC. One real weakness was the TSU did not work visually in this sim, so that once you identified a target, you gould mask behind a hill and still the target throught the TSU as a red dot. Easy kills I tell ya!

As a joke, someone had cut out a centerfold picture and glued it to the side of one of the mountains. When you flew around the hill, there was what appeared to be a 200' tall, totally naked woman. Talk about big'uns!!!!

 

[empenage]

They gave me missles to shoot. I hit a C-130 by accident! Sombody had to be chasing me because a missle would go by every now and then but my erratic flying kept them at bay.

I kept wanting to get altitude and go fast. The sim instructor, under his breath in the back, kept saying "dam fixed wing guys"!

I'm very lucky to have had the expierence. It sure was allot of fun!

 

[flyhighroller]

How do you crash a blackhawk?? It flies itself!!

J/k...it my favorite aircraft of the five (wow!!) that I've flown. I've only got 65 hours in it, but I love it!!

 

[hawg2hawk]

I got a chance to fly the Blackhawk Sim in PBI last week. I say "fly" like I know what I'm talking about.

Really I crashed it trying to land it 4 times. Takeoff was ok, landing was bad.

Anyway, the FAA guy I was with took off and picked up a "water bladder" and then flew over to another field and placed it down in the middle of a road. It felt so real. Every time I flew the thing I made myself sick. This guy flew the sim like it was part of his body. When he got close to the deck the leaves blew in the trees. The visual was that good.

I had vertigo for 2 hours after.

If you think that made you sick, try it with NVGs on!

 

[flyhighroller]

worse than NVGs, for me anyway, was with HUD!!