So I just got back from vacation in Colorado for the past week, but I did want to grab the Early Access module and take it for a quick spin even though it is 2AM.

Don’t yell at me for switches being set wrong and panels being off because I went with my fun personal game of Cold & Dark where I try to get the thing in the air just by hunting and pecking through the cockpit switches. To be fair though, on my flight back from Colorado I did gloss over the Early Access manual between stealing glances at my seat-mates watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens…so I did sort of know what maybe a dozen switches do. Just enough to be dangerous to those residents living just outside the fence at Kobuleti.

I did go into the control settings and simply deleted all the redundant stuff (it’s always fun to go to full afterburner when you hit your left brake amiright?). The only things I mapped to my HOTAS Warthog (I was sorta hoping it would auto-map stuff like the default settings for the A-10C do) were pitch, roll, yaw, left/right brakes, left/right throttles, trim (L/R/U/D), and speedbrakes. Everything else I just left as keyboard commands.

Found the battery switch, the APU, and just went ahead and started the left engine (now I’m told I should have started the right one). Of course, when I hit 20% and went to move the throttle over the gate, that didn’t actually move the throttle in the cockpit. So I had to pause, consult the key bindings, and found the ALT HOME and SHIFT HOME keys move the throttles out of the cutoff position. I probably exceeded the start limitations on time but not temperature. Oops…

Once both engines were up and running…I tried to find the obvious stuff. Ejection seat arm, O2 on, and some switches were just defaulted to the right spot (anti-skid, generators…stuff like that). Closed the canopy. Then hunted around some more to get the left and right DDIs (?) up and the center one. I never could find the control that turns on the UFC (?)…again, not much manual reading on vacation and I’m gonna dive into Matt’s awesome videos tomorrow.

Anyway, got enough stuff working to get me to taxi. I probably need to map a NWS switch. NWS was illuminated in my HUD, but I feel I wasn’t getting maximum nosewheel turning capability. So I’ll need to figure that out. Fortunately, only two turns and I’m at the runway.

I got a couple “diddle-diddles” for something about flight controls…but I did try to make sure my trim was showing zero. So I don’t know what that was about. I’m sure I had a switch in the wrong spot.

Added power…and off we went. The thing flies like you’d expect an attack/fighter to fly…! She came unstuck at around 145 knots. Not sure what weight I was at or what the proper rotation speed was supposed to be, but 145 felt right-ish.

The sound effects from the external and internal perspectives are just insanely good. I let it accelerate out over the water, then just flew a ragged box pattern. Got up to around 500 knots on the downwind and reefed it around on the base to final leg and it bled off speed nicely down to 300 knots or so.

Popped the speedbrake and was at around 250 which was a number I remember reading somewhere in the manual. Half flaps and a good bit of nose down pitch, gear out, more drag, full flaps.

The cockpit lighting of the AOA indicator is just cool…it really feels like a “lamp” with regards to its illumination. I had a yellow donut at around 150 and once you are there and speed is trending down, you have to get into the throttle quite a bit to get it to stick there. Now I can see why all those Hornet cockpit videos of the carrier landings have those guys moving the throttles a LOT. Same here…I got a shade under 150 and it feels like you get on the back side of the power curve fairly quickly. Then again, I did one circuit in the pattern and was probably way overweight.

Like I said, 150 was giving me the warm and fuzzies and I just held that over the numbers and tried to not flare like a proper Navy pilot should, but I have too much civilian training in my DNA, so of course I pulled a bit on the stick. Plopped it down just fine though and the squat switch must have triggered the NWS on or something…although I still don’t know if that is variable rate based on the paddle switch or pinky switch on the HOTAS (not mapped in my case anyway). Rolled out with some moderate braking and pulling back on the stick because it seems like the right thing to do for aerodynamic braking (but it might not be)…

Super fun stuff though. And the cockpit textures…oh man…they are just insanely good. The sounds, the overall feel is just really nice. I probably won’t post a lot about it though…there are tons of other people in the community that can do it better and faster (and they stream stuff…I don’t stream…I’m too old school for that). My reason for getting it early is simply so I can work on some magazine content…so I might post some stuff here and there, but I’ll mostly be working on that.

I also promise I’ll be a good virtual Navy pilot and read the manual and do things right next time.

G’nite. Been a long day of traveling…zzzzz…