Flying without flying

Flying is the epitome of a “composite experience”, and I’ve been missing it during quarantine. You’ve got to make risk and navigation decisions while three voices shout at you through your headset and you constantly scan for traffic, and then execute those decisions by carefully controlling several interdependent axes simultaneously. It’s loud, bumpy, bright, and cramped as well. It takes every part of your mind and body to cut through the distractions to make good decisions, especially where I learned, at an airport at the center of an inset of another inset.

But in quarantine, it’s not a great idea to be locked into a tiny, sealed-off cockpit with anyone, let alone a CFI who (most often) is touching the age that puts them into the “higher risk” category. Furthermore, in a time when unemployment is at an all-time high and the economy is – shall we say – unpredictable, it’s a good idea to find ways to save money. It’s just not wise to fly during quarantine.

As a result, I haven’t flown since the day before Google sent us home (March 8th with a kind coworker), over nine months ago. So what have I been doing since then? So how do I get my fix during quarantine? How can I ever get close to experiencing this?

Flying without flying.

Luckily one of the most beautiful, accurate, intense, and social flight simulators out there is easy to install: DCS World. It harkens back to my childhood playing Combat Flight Simulator 2 and Combat Flight Simulator 3. It also takes me back to a memorably frustrating experience with DCS’s predecessor Lock On: Modern Air Combat. Oddly, the content from that game is in DCS but considered a “beginner’s module” I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole; Ah, how time flies and we grow.

This is a game that IGN called, in 2011, “a tremendously – and at times obscenely – demanding game” of which “precious little […] is designed for the [beginner]”. You’ll find no disagreement from me, either, considering in my Steam review I called it “not for the faint of heart”.

Fundamentally, DCS is a simulation of various military aircraft and their weapons systems, defensive countermeasures, and procedures that’s as faithful as they can be without being irresponsible. You can fly a near-study-level simulation of an F-14 Tomcat or an F-18 Hornet (pictured below) off the deck of a nuclear-class aircraft carrier, for example.

What’s not to love? It’s the closest thing to flying without doing the real thing.

I am intentionally snubbing the new MSFS, by the way. Civilian flight simulators are useless for VFR training since landing is the tricky part of a VFR certificate and you can’t simulate that (there’s no way to simulate “fly how feels right”), and useless out-of-the-box for IFR training since they don’t include up-to-date approaches, fixes, or G1000 implementations. Moreover, the workload in a sim is much lower than real life because there’s no three radios to listen to, no traffic that’s possible to watch out for, no ATC that accidentally assigns you the same callsign as another plane, no other pilots cutting through your pattern, and so on. It can’t touch the intensity, fear, and randomness of a real flight.

What you need, to scratch that itch of a composite experience, is something that requires every single one of your limbs plus your entire mind, all the time. DCS is the closest to that.

On the weekly mission night with ~25 folks flying dissimilar aircraft with separate goals, you can practice listening to two chattering radios simultaneously. Learning 3 air-to-air weapons and 7 air-to-ground ones is good practice for knowing 4 types of takeoff and 6 types of landing. Getting to and from the boat to the mission area via TACAN, lat-long waypoints, dead reckoning, and an HSI is effectively identical to flying a real route. Much like a real “quick flight”, a mission night is 2 - 3 hours of focus that leaves a person exhausted but satisfied. And when you’re flying close formation with a flight lead, you can practice the +/-100 foot Private Pilot standard.

More than anything, though, DCS matches the time-invested-per-flight hour that real flying does. When I took my first mountain flight over the Sierra Nevadas from Palo Alto to Bishop and Mammoth, I joked I spent 30 hours studying for 5 hours of flying. Between currency and proficiency flights, a couple hours with an instructor every month, and my monstrous stack of textbooks for my private (PHAK, AFH, Stick and Rudder, FAR, AIM, POH, and various ACs), I like to say flying is a hobby in which you can participate without doing all that much flying. DCS is similar; it takes several hours per week to maintain currency on the systems and procedures (and, sadly, DCS bugs) to be ready for mission night.

The only big difference is that in real flying, there’s zero room for error, whereas in the game you can often get in over your head. So stepping out of the real plane, I feel exhausted but elated most often, and sick to my stomach from some near-death experience only a fraction of the time. In DCS, by contrast, I step out frustrated from inability or inexperience almost half the time. So although DCS comes close to matching the intensity, it doesn’t leave you feeling as good as really flying. (But come on, that cost difference.)

And, as a side benefit, it costs comparatively little to get into DCS: “just” ~$3000, or about the cost of 3 months of flying to maintain currency, or just 12% - 20% of the cost of an initial Private certificate.

Overall DCS is the closest thing to flying without really flying. It’s safer and cheaper, but still approaches intensity of being in a real airplane. Thankfully, it’s almost as pretty, too.

Now I’m subscribed to /r/hoggit and /r/wingmanfinder and I’m a member of a Discord channel. Every Saturday I hop into a practice mission to make sure I still remember which one is TMS and how to hit something with a laser-guided bomb. Then … Onto mission night!