INTRODUCTION.
European Air War was
released by Microprose in late 1998, and has established itself as one
of the most enduring flight sims ever to hit the shelves. It's recent
re-release has brought many new EAW players onto the scene, and one of
the things that seems to trouble most new pilots, is how to avoid and recover
from the spins and stalls which are modelled so well in the game.
Many new Pilots quickly find the Sim
H.Q. EAW Message Boards ,
and post questions regarding the best way to get out of spins, after finding
themselves plummeting hopelessly earthwards from 10,000 feet. After
seeing a number of these requests for help, I decided to have a go at making
a "spin recovery tutorial" that could be downloaded, negating the need
to explain everything over the message board. I don't know if it
will get used much, but I hope that this bit of documentation comes in
useful to you, and has some educational value as well.
I have been flying EAW since January 1999, and would hate to know just
how many hours have been consumed sitting in front of my computer chasing
bandits all over the sky. I have flown just about every kind
of aircraft that EAW and ECA have to offer, as well as a few of my own
flight models that I made up. I have spun everything many times over,
and feel that I have reasonable authority to write a tutorial on this subject.
Don't get me wrong - I don't pretend to be an expert pilot, but I think
that stall recovery isn't an area where I need a lot more work.
One of my favourite "early" sims, was Flight Unlimited, which was basically
about flying aerobatic aircraft, and executing precision aerobatic maneuvers.
Many of these routines involve stalling one wing to enter a spin or a "snap
roll", and then recovering from the snap to end the move. Doing such
moves helped build up a good stall recovery routine, and the things that
I learned from Flight Unlimited all apply to EAW as well - just in some
slightly different ways. The recovery routines outlined in this document
should work equally well in any flight sim that covers aircraft of this
type, but don't expect it to apply to top end jet simulations such as Falcon
4.0!!
The lessons spelt out in this tutorial are based on many things, but borrow
a bit from sections of the Instruction Manuals for EAW and Flight Unlimited.
This document only represents my ideas and experiences on the subject,
and is not meant to be taken as gospel. I expect the some of my statements
may appear misguided to some people, but this is how I see things to the
best of my knowledge. Please feel free to contact me with any comments,
ideas or criticism so that any future update will be even better.
Anyway read on and I hope that you learn something!!
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here to go to AERODYNAMICS OF A STALL
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