Tinker AFB - Boeing E-6B Mercury package by MAIW

[P3_Super_Bee]

Thanks for your comments. I will have a "think" about it for future plans.

cheers
Barry

I'm with Bora on that... very few places fly 24/7, some bases the field isn't even open 24 hours. Even the busy bases its a rarity. Most aren't even open 24 hours. You have all the idiots who buy houses around an airport AFTER the airport is opened complaining cause it's tooo noisy, then the military trying to be the good neighbor, shuts down. Otherwise the anti-military crowd starts crying. Most bases are full stop landings only after 10pm. Nor are high power maintenance turns allowed after 10pm at most places either.

A plane doing TNG's at 0 dark thirty is not eye candy, it's lame since its doesn't happen in real life. JMHO.

Our bounce flight ops usally start with 0700 take-offs. and the last one will land around 7pm on a normal day. Every once in awhile, like if we get backed up on hours because of down aircraft the last one in will be around 10pm.

Just my 2cents...

[CelticWarrior]

A plane doing TNG's at 0 dark thirty is not eye candy, it's lame since its doesn't happen in real life. JMHO.

I tend to agree with the majority of your comments, but I'll take you up on that one alone.

I teach at the primary rotary training facility in the UK, it's tiny compared to US facilities, but we pack a lot in nonetheless. When we night fly in the summer we do TNGs until 0200hrs local. Night flying takes place approximately 2 weeks out of four and will be 4 a/c in the circuit here and at the RLG and others doing nav Mon-Thu.

As far as other times go, even on the busiest days the airfield can be spookily quiet while the a/c are out in the local training areas. Years ago you could almost set your clocks by the RAF fast jet training. The morning wave would depart at 0900 and return 2 hours later. Lunch. Afternoon wave at 1400hrs and return 2 hrs later. Dinner. Night flying wave returns 2 hrs after TO. Supper.

IME at almost every military facility in Europe you could expect the place to be a 'ghost town' from 1630 hrs every day and from 1200hrs on a Friday and all weekend.

[btaylo24]

Ok

I am going to drop the 1hr TNG and try to incorporate all your comments.
Means a couple of packages are going to be held up to the new year now, but oh well...

Thanks guys it was great feedback from you all, and thanks Bora for pointing it all out in the first place

Cheers
Barry

[Bora]

You're welcome Barry...

[Stewart Pearson]

Just as a wee postscript to this.

I know very little about USAF/USN methods, however I would suspect that they'd be similar to RAF.

Therefore it would be realistic to expect that prior to a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, that units would be involved in an intensive work-up period, including night ops.

Don't think we should "ban" night flying just because some units/bases don't do it.

Cheers

Stew

[P3_Super_Bee]

Here's what a friend wrote about bouncing in E-3's.

I just got back yesterday afternoon, thank God it's over, I was a little sick of the two drinks a night max. About the E3, there are quiet hours, but I'm not sure when, but I think it's from like 9 AM to 11 AM and it has something to do with school, but anyway I've done touch and go's past 2000 so I'm not sure how it works, generally our E3's are in the pattern all day, and remember All jets need to be on the ground no later than 1700 on friday and you won't see them on the weekend unless they are coming back from a TDY or deployment.

The "Just got back" is from a 6 month or so deployment to the Middle East.

[P3_Super_Bee]

Don't think we should "ban" night flying just because some units/bases don't do it.

Cheers

Stew

Not at all... The Bounce flights is where I'm talking...

-our bounce flight schedule stays pretty much the same. Still don't bounce 24/7 even before a deployment. There is no need. Same amount of Pilots doing the same number of checks in the block for currency checks at the end of a deployment as just prior to the next.

Our TAC flights do pick up somewhat... But that is one if OPS are idiots, and can't get the nessisary flights earlier enough. Though we work with boats a lot from the battle group, and can be tough scheduling TAC trainers with them. My last deployment we were flying TAC Trainers up to the day we left, trying to complete mostly because of scheduling with the boats. Have also been where the Planes sat of the flght line collecting dust for two weeks prior to departure as well.

So by no means, stop night flying all together. And I don't think that's what he's doing just scrubbing and/or scaling back the night bounce flights

I teach at the primary rotary training facility in the UK,

Sorry about that... Talked about this in the Beta forum a little.... I did mention there that Training commands might be different. from the normal fleet. Alos though. Even with VP-30 the P-3 FRS they don't fly a lot of bounce flights into the wee hours of the night. TAC Trainers yes, bounces no. Not to say it NEVER happens either.

Can't remember if I posted here or the beta forum, sorry for being in this in both places and can't keep track of what I said where. We occasionally fly late bounce flights do to scheduling with aircraft, but even then not past midnight. Its more the 1 am to 5 am TAKE OFFS that I'm refereing to not being accurate.

[GZR_Sactargets]

There was an old joke that when you added a star to your "slick" wings it meant you could fly at night. That was really a matter of experience and years of service. Nonetheless, night ops are very much a part of profeciency and training. For the bomber or Transport types, you need to fly at night for celestial navigation, night overwater was even more demanding. I also recall a night training mission where the instructor had me close my eyes and then gently and imperceptably rolled the airplane inverted. Then he told me to open my eyes and recover. Over the Alabama country side, the ground lights are as dispersed as stars. I said ,
"recover from what?" the the attitude indicator told me I was inverted.
Teaches you to trust your instruments. So at least at that time, pilot training included night flights and checkrides. In B-52s, we flew at night a good portion of the time. Needed that for the celestial missions. I don't have first hand information but I would bet that the airlines also fly training extensively at night because they will need that on their routes.
Even in the sim, lots of missions and flights are built with at least part of the flight at night. AI traffic for the commercial stuff is at night as well as day.

[P3_Super_Bee]

Is it me or is no one understand what is being said here...

I nor do I believe anyone has said ZERO Training flight occur at NIGHT.

What I am saying there is not a plane or two in the pattern doing BOUNCE flights 24/7/365. We fly at night ALL THE TIME, doing training flights. 95% of our flights at home are TRAINING flights. There's just not that many enemy subs nor terriorist infighting going on in the waters surrounding Hawaii... The only real world stuff we get here is when the Coast Guard goes down and/or they are flying missions, and they don't have a backup aircraft to cover the LRIG(Long Range Intercept/Guard) Ready. and we have to cover for them. Just not ALL OF THEM are BOUNCE flights. BOUNCE flights do not happen at 3am. NORMALLY it is between 0700 and 2000. OCCASIONALLY they will go till 2200 due to aircraft availablity. But even with the lack of aircraft in the P-3 world and passing aircraft around between squadrons, We rarely fly BOUNCE flights pasted 2000. Even more rare the occurance is a BOUNCE flight on the weekend. 90% of the the time we work weekends it is for MAINTENANCE, not FLIGHT OPS. We have worked 4 weekends in 6 months, 3 of them for maintenance, 1 to cover VP-4 leaving on deployment. ZERO for BOUNCE FLIGHTS. The training commands in the Navy are "shore duty" commands. They only work the weekends for maintenance, great time to catch up on maintence issues since the planes are on the GROUND. (which for them is every weekend, though they work 3 shifts, Days / Nights / Weekends. The Weekends crew work 10 to 12 hour shifts depending on workload, Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun. Days / Nights work 10 hour shifts Mon to Thurs. Thursday with all there is training day, Another NO FLY DAY. Here we have our Training Day on Mondays, the other VP command has their Training Day on Friday. Don't fly on training days, they are spent in classroom type environment training on our trades. Aircrew do hangar fliying, systems training, quarterly quals testing etc.

Rarely if at all do they BOUNCE on the weekends. -Would be the same as us, behind in flight hours for the month, then will play catch up on the weekends, just doesn't happen all that often.

[BadPvtDan]

What's a BOUNCE flight?

[P3_Super_Bee]

What's a BOUNCE flight?

Sorry, Navy term for Touch and Go.

There are three "official terms" we use, Bounce is slang.

PILTRA - Pilot Trainer Takin the new guys out. Full on training flight in all aspects of flyin' the plane.
DFW - Jokingly called Designated Fuel Waste, but Officiall Dedicated Field Work. Bouncing to get the checks in the block for currency.
NDFW - Night DFW. Doing the Bouncing in the dark.

Also, For FS and AI for me. Do I care that aircraft bounce at night 24/7 not at all. Rarely do I fly at night anyway Hell half my airline AI are schedules from 2004 2005, I don't sit at an airport watching AI aircraft, to make sure Delta flight umpty squat shows up to gate 8 precisely at 8:36 like the Delta website says either. Getting the close to reality is good for me. Maybe because its with P-3's. This weekend I set up which aircraft tail numbers are with which squadron. Guess what even though the list was 100% accurate when I left work Friday. 3 aircraft transfers happended today. So by the time my package comes out, 30% or more of the aircraft will have been transfered from one command to another. So you will never be able to get a P-3 package even remotely close to real life, unless you never got up from the computer and released updates daily.

This whole disscussion was brought up that someone didn't think it was realistic. Well its not, but still don't mean its not a great package to begin with. You will NEVER get it to 100% accurate, FS limits you on that. For instance take the NRL P-3s they travel around the world all the time. Different sites every trip. There's no way to do that in FS so you will end up with one particular trip, over and over.

Just so everyone knows. There are NO hard feelings or anything towards anyone. Just trying to put out what I know. Have seen the "Anti-Navy" comments with can't get out of bed before what ever time. or not. I know its all in good fun. Because the Air Force is worse than the Navy. Hickam is a ghost town on the weekends. Along with Kadena, and Misawa. We have ZERO support on the weekends because the Air Force is closed(as far as Aircraft Maintenance- One deployment to Kadena we had a standing SOP with the Fuel Cell hangar. As long as it was Saturday or Sunday we could use the hangar anytime we wanted cause they were never going to be there..

[GZR_Sactargets]

C'mon Guys! It is a sim, a hobby, not real life. Build it like you want it. If people don't like it they can just delete it or modify it. Not worth all this strain on the hawser.

[CelticWarrior]

Going way off thread here guys. Perhaps if people want to continue this sort of discussion a new thread in the Real World area would be better

[StingingCanine]

I always enjoy P3_super_bee's posts no matter what thread they are in. I like to read about how we can make our AI even more realistic. First person comments are always a treat.

[btaylo24]

StingingCanine

I am with u on that, nice to read about REAL WORLD aviation...
Interesting to hear about it all...Maybe we should carry on, over in the real world thread?

barry

[beckerm13]

I just installed the Tinker package and now have two Tinker AFCADs files:
MAIW_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP.bgl
and
MAIW_AF2_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP.bgl

Which one should I keep, so as not to have a duplicate?

Marty

[BadPvtDan]

I have the second one installed.

[reconmercs]

MAIW_AF2_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP.bgl

is the one you should keep

[beckerm13]

Thanks!

Marty

[greyrogue715]

I have 2 Tinker AFCADs and I am wondering which is the correct file.

I have: MAIW_AF2_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP.bgl
and
MAIW_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP.bgl

I guess it's the one without the B-52 parking?

Though the answer is probably somewhere, I searched and couldn't find anything relevant.

Thanks,
Andrew