Formation Flying

This is a GREAT help for you formation enthusiast out there. This also might be in Computer Pilot Magazine too, so here's a first look. Must Have Microsoft Word!

Download Part #1 Click HERE
Download Part #2 Click HERE
Download Part #3 Click HERE

Basic tips for formation flight

STEP ONE - Flight lead takes center position in the flight and calls commands to the wing men in a basic format of simple calls. The wing men and the flight lead need to have a common understanding what the calls are. This is your way to personalize a general communication between team members.

STEP TWO - Understanding your aircraft and its flying characteristics. Every aircraft has a different way it flies, kind of like its own personality. No matter what plane it is whether it’s a aerobatic aircraft all the way to performance jets. Have a good feel for your power management and learn how to use stick inputs to use control surfaces smoothly. This smooth movement is critical to maintain precise formation.

- Power management is constantly being adjusted ex. Flight lead makes a power setting of 50% and you seem to be creeping forward on lead, drop the power slightly to back away or slow down the enclosure rate. Your amount of adjustment should be comparable to your rate of speed difference in ether forward or backward movement. So you should always be moving the power to maintain constant distance from your lead.

- Yoke management is relatively the same idea. If you are flying for ex. Right wing pilot in a turn to the left the right wing will be on the high side of the formation. So in the turn when lead calls adding pull the wing man adds the same pull rate. If the adjustment is to much pull your plane will seem to travel high in the formation. So the adjustment required to reposition the plane back to its precise position is ease up on the yoke just slightly to drop back down.

STEP THREE - Understanding your demonstration as a team. In formation as a pilot in my experience if the wing men don’t know what flight lead is doing the formation can fall apart easily. The wing men given the level of experience need to do briefings to understand the flight path the demonstration will take. Any team existing including the USAF Thunderbirds have a briefing before flights. This helps the team understand what the flight will be, usually this includes weather updates, air field information, what maneuvers will be flown given specific air show types.

Step Four - Listen to your flight lead! If you cant here the calls or changes in the flight you will fall out of position every time. Communication should be reserved for the flight lead or solos. If there is to much talking things can get very confusing and out of control.

Formation flying is a constant concentration because of how fast an aircraft can move through the sky. The adjustments needed to perform a demonstration takes many hours of practice before you see results. These basic guide lines are here to help as a basic tip to those who have never done this before. Experience is key so start with very basic stuff before trying to get into the novice or professional areas of this kind of flying. You need to walk before you can run because formation flying takes time to learn and perfect.

Hey everyone. Vindy here to give you a few tips I have picked up over the years for some better frame rates. Now as for me, I fly with very low settings when doing formation. I don't really need to look at a nice ground texture anyway, for about 90% or more of the flight my eyes are glued to the #1 plane, so high graphics dont really concern me. I just turn them back up when I watch FRC's. I would recommend all formation pilots to get into this type of system. Anyway, here are a few of the basics that might help.

First I will talk about a few things with your graphics cards, then we will move on to FSX settings.

Antialiasing is a huge frame killer, however, even I find it looks to bad with no antialiasing what so ever. If you dont know what Antialiasing is then here is a shot explanation. It is basically a way of making rough lines looks smooth. the more antialiasing you apply, the smoother your graphics will look with less rough edges. Most graphics cards let you set this in two ways. 1 - you can set it yourself manually, most cards let you pick between x2 and x16. For flight simulator, I would not go higher than x8, and even this may be to high a setting for some people. the second option is to set it as Application controlled. This just means that the card will set itself to what FSX wants to use. This might not give the best result in graphics for most people. But I find it seems to be the most frame friendly setting.

Now lets check our FSX settings.
- Go to settings on your FSX main start up page on the left side. Once there, go down and press the Customize button.

- The first page you see should be "Graphics" on the top tab. Lets take a look around.

- First thing first, Check your Target frame rate on the left side. This should be set anywhere between 20 and 30, I would not recommend going any higher or lower than that. Mine is currently set at 26.

- Next is our screen resolution. If not set right, this will cause a drop in frames. Make sure you set it up for the screen size you are using. TIP - If you do not know how to check this, then right click on your desktop and go to "Properties" then go to "Settings" and check what you have your Screen resolution at. FSX should be running the same resolution as that.

- Next is Filtering. This is your in game antialiasing setup. I fly with the Anti aliasing button checked. it is just WAY to bad looking when turned off in my view. BUT try setting the Filtering to Bilinear. This is said to get the best fps.

- Next is Global texture resolution. I would NOT recommend flying in a 4 ship formation with this setting on Very High. I personally keep this on High. But you can lower it even more if your frames are bad.

- Make sure all boxes under that are UNCHECKED. this includes lens flare, Light bloom and Advanced animations. These all hurt fps.

- NEXT tab " AIRCRAFT " we will be looking at these settings now.
MAIN thing on this page is the " High-resolution 3-D virtual cockpit" box on the left side.
This NEEDS to be set off, UNchecked. this will Kill frames for some aircraft in formation. Also on the right side of this page you will see 3 more boxes. The main one you want to UNCHECK is "Aircraft cast shadows on itself" this hurts frames a lot for some reason. the other two I leave on. but you can turn them off if your still getting bad frames.

- NEXT tab " SCENERY "
EVERYTHING should be turned DOWN all the way! I dont care if you say your ground textures look like crap or not. This is what must be done for smooth frames with 6 planes or more. make sure both Boxes labeled " Land detail textures" and "Ground scenery shadows" are unchecked, OFF.

- NEXT tab " WEATHER "
Again, all slider bars must be down as far as they can go. On the right side, make sure you have "Simple clouds" checked. do not use Detailed clouds in formation unless your comp is a monster.

- NEXT tab " TRAFFIC "
ALL slider bars DOWN! You see where I'm going with this yet? If you see a slider bar, move it down. All things in this tab kill frames BIG time. any kind of air traffic or ground vehicles KILL frames. As for the Aircraft labels, these do not affect frames. So set them to your personal liking.


Well I know this is a lot to read for now, so look it over, and If you have any questions feel free to ask me.

Godspeed
Vindy