Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat

Chuck Yeager welcomes you into the sim with a croaky 8-bit sample: "It's a great day for flying".

This was really high-tech at the time, computers with speech!

But to more weighty matters... this was the sim that I, like countless others, cut my teeth in the world of simulated air combat.

I spent hour upon hour replaying the same missions over and over, striving for incremental improvement.

The missions generally started you in the air and presented very clear and simple goals.

The sim is a historical fulcrum between the living history embodied in Chuck Yeager and the younger generation trying to understand the experience of air combat in three wars and codify that.

It formed a bridge whereby the general public could get some 'hands-on' insight into these historical events.

And Brent Iverson managed to present this complex environment in a way that was accessible and enjoyable.

The design principles he laid out here played out over the next decade in the Janes combat sims, and are, hopefully. studied by simulation designers today.

The MiG-21 was produced in greater numbers than any other jet fighter. Chuck Yeager saw them in action during the Vietnam War and the sim gives you the opportunity to get a feel for the aircraft.