This was posted by Rampenplan in the UBI forum:
http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/23110283/m/9951084814/p/1
"A friend of my family flew for the Luftwaffe in the war. He has a large amount of anecdotes about his time there, and I thought it would be educational to me to see how he would do in IL2.
It took a while to get him used to the controls, because he is not used to using computers. Also, he can’t fly long before tiring his eyes. Apart from those things, he seems not to be overly interested in flightsimming and I suspect he did it mainly to please me.
He wanted to fly the Me262, ‘because he wanted to know what it was like’. He got turned down when he applied to be transferred to jets, and I guess he’s still curious. What I wanted was to see him fly the 109E and the 190A, which were his machines in the war. Is just sat to the side making notes and helping him with the keyboard. He was very impressed with the graphics in the game, his impressions of computers being calibrated on ‘pong’.
After a number of testflights in a Finnish Brewster, to get him used to the controls, he started with the Emil. He had to get a bit used to the flight model. According to him, the real 109 was ‘stiffer’. It would want to go in a straight line, and you’d have to work to get it to turn; relaxing the controls would very quickly return you to a straight line. The radius of turn and the turn speed were OK according to his recollection, but to do it often would require ‘Riesenmuskeln’. My stick setup is already very stiff, so that must have been impressive. HE didn’t turn much when at speed, mostly curving gently. The climb and acceleration were a bit optimistic according to him. Such climb should be possible, but only if you had the exact right ‘feel for the wing’, not just b puting the nose up. In fighting, he took a lot of time to get into position, and preferred to go for positions in which he had at least two seconds uninterrupted firing time. After that, he’d break off, even if the attack had failed to do damage. He’d shoot quite accurately, even with difficult deflection shots. However, if there was any indication he might be targeted by an enemy, he’d go fully into the defensive. Especially after he learned to mistrust his AI wingmen. Even during attack approaches, he’d be throwing his view all over the glass of the cockpit, and always on the widest available angle. When landing he’d be very careful, make a long approach and touching down straight, flaring and slow. Maybe because he spent a good few months in hospital in '40 after crashing his Emil on landing.
In the 190a4, his first remark was ‘Warum gibt’s kein Panzerglas?’, and the second was about the ReVi being mounted too low. Front visibility was completely wrong, according to him. This was compounded by the flight attitude that should have been more tail-high. When gunning the engine for take-off, he jammed the stick into his crotch, and was very surprised when his tail started slipping sideways regardless. I locked his tailwheel manually thereafter, but he insisted that should also be more effective.
The first time he took off, he immediately landed because he thought his engine was running badly. I explained to him random engine trouble isn’t modeled, but he has trouble seeing the extents of the simulation, expecting everything to be modeled that he can see.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t think the E loss in curves is too much. Even more surprisingly, he thinks straight flight drag is too light (said while overshooting the runway with 600 km/h). Then he made remarks about the engine giving accurate performance when at high speed, but too little thrust at speeds lower than 350-400 km/h. One of his combat moves is a very rough near-stall high-speed turn, dropping a lot of speed, then accelerating - which last part doesn’t happen. That annoyed him a bit.
He did like the maneuverability of the a4. The FW was nice to maneuver, because it was very light in the controls compared to the 109E. He was much more eager to pull violent moves in the FW. It was easy to pull the acing vector away from the heading vector. He did consider the rudder too ‘sharp’ though. That should have been less useful. Still, most maneuvers would be quite gradual. After a violent move, he’d often fire very short bursts from his wing guns. He said that was to stop them jamming.
In the 190, when confronted with roaming fighters, he’d refuse to engage. He’d just look for a different target. Quite different from my ‘kill everyhin’ approach. When attacked, he held his own, once making a very impressive aerobatic move: A Spit came in fast on his high 6, which was answered with a throttle cut and a clockwise barrel roll with a steep pull-up, ending up firing from almost-stall vertically down into the Spits cockpit. When I try, I crash.
He never liked flying against Spits. He said they could still give him nightmares. Once, when pursued by a cautious AI Spit, he suddenly started firing his wingguns into open space. When asked, he said you shouldn’t have a bomb inside your wing when there’s a Spit behind you. He was dumping his ammo.
He remembers viidly how his plane was hit with Hispano’s. He says the little clunk we hear now is nothing compared to the shock, vibration and deafening noise of getting any part of the plane hit by 2cm. Rifle calibre would also make noise, but mainly when hitting something substantive, like armour, engine, or heavier stiffeners. When he fired upon a Lightning, and took off a wing and a boom with a single burst, he was quite surprised. He said it was very rare taking off large structural parts, but a lot of paneling should come off, and fires shoudl be more frequent. When it happened a few times more (wing shedding I mean) he said it was something you’d expect after a long wing fire, when carrying vulnerable ordnance, or when hit with 3cm a lot, but not otherwise. When landing the 190 the first time, he landed much more roughly than with the 109. After making touchdown, he jammed his stick back, causing the bouncing tailwheel nose-over. That baffled him, saying that this was wholly unrealistic.
On approaching bombers: in the war, he relied on being vectored in to determine his approach. On a head-on pass, one would try to damage the formation. Large formations would have trouble reforming after being disrupted. After the pass, a return would be made from the side or behind. When one would have a good target (i.e. no close-by other bombers that could fire) one’d park on his 6 and pick off his engines. He aslo says that real bombers would spray MG fire from the moment they saw you comin in, and in almost random directions. They’d have trouble tracking you and just put up curtains of fire. When approaching a flight of 4 B17s from high 7, he showed that you were pretty well-protected if you kept them all just hidden behind your cowling; either they’d hit your engine (und es ist nur Halbzollfeuer)or your Panzerglas, so you were quite safe. That is when he was PK’d at 700 meters with the first burst.
One thing he really missed was ground contact. Ground control would be constantly giving information on position, vector to be taken and enemy presence. Without it, he felt quite lost.
The AI was something of an irritation. Not only do they do suicidal things, but he tracked a P38, saying ‘with this kind of maneuvering, he’ll be dead tired soon and I can shoot him then’. It took some convincing that the AI never gets tired.
When flying the a8, most of the above applied. He likes the 30mm we have, saying it is more reliable than the real thing. The damage it does is not quite what he remembers. A hit in the fuselage would silence bomber gunners, and on engines it would be less effective than 20mm. It would destroy propellers, and loosen large chunks of skin though. De-skinning a wing would send a bomber into a spiral. With the a8, he would want to know in advance the location of Leichte Flak, and whenever he’d get pursued, he’d dive towards it. Flak accuracy in game is equal to Hitlerjugend operated Flak, if I understand him correctly. Good Flak would fire short, well-calculated bursts, with much higher accuracy than we have. His advice on dealing with AA is to keep speed up and not get in view too long. The trick was to be in and out before the gunners had readied and swivelled. After that, the fire was murderous.
Random observations: Lightnings turn wider in game than he remembers, and B17s go down too easily to cannon fire."
