Part One of Jim Campbell's 'Flight Test' Of ETC's GFET II

There I was… no kidding, pulling 4 Gs as I craned my head around the cockpit of my F-18 looking for the MiG that had a hunting license for yours truly. As the Gs mounted, I twisted and turned to catch sight of the tell-tale jet-glow of a MiG on the make. The physical strain was palpable while I frantically tried to coordinate my visual needs between the radar and the outside world. It's one thing to pull G… it's another to do it while tightly strapped, twisting and turning in your seat trying to catch sight of the guy who's trying to kill you just as bad as you're trying to kill him.

Ouch…

I was up against an MiG 21 being flown by an experienced military fighter jock, while sitting solo in the cockpit of an elder version of the F-18 (not one of the Supers, I'm sad to say) and doing my best not to make it too easy for him to send me to Valhalla. Less than a minute into the fight profile, the never-ending G was an ever-present reminder that this was just about as real as it gets… and it was beginning to hurt.

Cranking aloft at 450 knots, I finally detected the fearsome glow of the MiG's tail and slammed the stick hard right all the way over to pull through, half a second later, into a Split S to gain some speed and close the distance to the MiG -- which was now heading off to my right and allowing me the chance to take him from his 7 o'clock. Catching up and pulling harder through the turn before rolling level, my speed advantage (well over 700 knots) allowed me to close the gap as the HUD painted him as a pretty good target. Meanwhile; my heart started crowding my Adam's Apple. At this point, I'd never have the right kind of position for a gun kill, but a missile kill was looking like a less remote possibility as I kept hauling ass to the left, HARD, to keep up with him as he cranked out JUST AS HARD to evade me. He wasn't going to go easy, but I was bound and determined that he was going to be the one to go… not me.

There's no way that a MiG 21 is going to out-turn an F-18 once I was in any kind of position to take a shot, but my adversary was going to make me pay for my very temporary advantage by diving hard for the deck and doing what a MiG 21 does so very, very well…run like hell. When a MiG 21 hits the go-juice, speed happens… and I had only a few seconds left to set up my position, maximize my kill angle and torch one off. This was turning into a helluva knife fight, twisting, turning, diving and all at HIGH G that never seemed to let off for a second…and I gotta tell you my 47 year old bones were feeling the strain. Mind you, the total amount of G wasn't that bad…but the fact that it was not lessening up even for a micro-second second was a killer. I was huffing and puffing. I gutted my way through the strain and tried to tail that SOB as close as I could… to watch him start to pull away.

OK. Now or never.

My intercept angle improved just slightly, but enough so that the kill looked like it had a chance of happening …so I popped one off and watched the plume depart the rails while hoping to blow that son of a (not-nice word deleted) all the way to Satan's summer home. It tracked in like a freight train, so it was going to be my fifth kill in this airplane… against a hell of a good pilot… one who had already killed me twice that day (and was obviously still making it way too easy for me… but I'm not complaining).

But that's the way the whole thing happened. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Huh? Real G? Air-to-air combat against another pilot (and real G)? F-18s (and real G)?  MiG-21 (and real G)? What the heck is going on here? It couldn't be a simulator tale… because simulators can't pull real Gs… or -- can they?

Well folks… the above tale is true. The whole blasted thing.  I know. I have the sore (expletive deleted) to prove it.

Against another pilot, with REAL G, and startlingly painful realism, yours truly got the coveted chance to fly real live air-to-air combat missions in a very faithfully rendered F-18 cockpit, supported by some of the best graphics simulation in the business, all by my lonesome, and in an extraordinary multi-million aerospace wonder whose capabilities and realism are exceeded only by the airplanes they simulate.

Yes… the above tale was told about a number of high-tech simulator flights… in a tactical Flight Sim that can pull real-live G… because the whole kit and kaboodle is attached to an enormous centrifuge, capable of a 15 G/Sec onset rate and a rumored max G capability of 25 Gs… (something that I have no desire to test). The ETC USA GFET II Authentic Tactical Flight Simulator (Model ATFS-400) is the device in question, certainly a candidate to become one of the seven wonders of the aeronautical world and one of the most intriguing flight training systems I have ever flown. Tens of millions of dollars per unit, this is not a casual training device, but for those whose life is at risk every time they strap on a bird to conduct ACM exercises, the GFET makes sense in so many ways… safety, economy and intensity.

Yes, no matter what we do, real-world ACM is dangerous… expensive… and tough to conduct under realistic conditions.

GFET II changes all that. Since it rarely gets more than a few feet off the ground, the safety factor is obvious. At only a few hundred dollars an hour in DOC, it certainly burns less expensive "fuel" than an F-18 (even at flight idle). And more important than anything else… one can set up dozens of ACM engagements a day without having to worry about the ready stats of the bird, the weather in the engagement area, the need to tanker up every few dozen minutes (in ACM scenarios) or dozens of other factors… thereby maximizing the experience, profile, and amount of real combat training (and even specific aspects of an engagement) over the course of what was once an impossibly short time-frame.

Yup… this thing is an incredible piece of technology… and as I write this, the first one is getting ready to head out for duty overseas for a Southeast Asian customer and the chance to prove ETC's contention that there is now something just as valuable as real ACM training available for tomorrow's combat pilots. Tactical flight training... and simulation... is never going to be the same.

To be continued…

FMI: www.etcusa.com, www.etcaircrewtraining.com/ats_gfet.htm