Combat Air Patrol

This was a late addition to the long line of flight sims for the Amiga, and it was also one of the best. The whole sim was based on the 1991 Gulf War ( Desert Storm ) and you could take to the skies in either the mighty Grumman F-14A Tomcat or the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18C Hornet.

Not only did you fly the missions, but you also had to control the ground war and help co-ordinate ground attacks which you could then ( if you wished ) fly close air support for.

Missions

You were stationed on the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the cost of Saudi Arabia, and the shooting match started on the 17th January 1991 and carried on until you either won, lost or got killed / taken POW.

The cat' shots and carrier landings were without a doubt the best simulated on the Amiga. The cockpits for both aircraft were superb and a very good likeness to the real aircraft. The F-14 only had gun, Sidewinders, Sparrows or Phoenix, also the TARPS recce pod. The Phoenix were superb, with a good 70+ mile range in a head-on engagement, you could fire six of these simultaneously on six targets without too many worries.

The Hornet had a huge choice of mud moving munitions to choose from. You name it, it was there - HARM, Fuel-Air-explosives, Mavericks, Mk80 series (both slicks and retards), various clusterbombs, LGB's, zuni rockets, Harpoon, AGM84E SLAM, and Walleye, plus AIM9, AIM7, a datalink pod, FLIR pod and laser spot tracker. The SLAM-ers and Walleye could be controlled by the datalink pod and steered to the targets of your choice. The SLAM-ers also had the option of being pre-programmed to attack the targets selected in the mission planning.

The missions were flown every other day to simulate aircrew rotation ( unless things got ugly andyou would be up every day ). You had to contend with various Iraqi aircraft, such as Fulcrums, Frogfoots, Mirage F1's, Floggers and Fitters doing both AA and AG sorties against you. You could get scrambled on an intercept ( Mirages coming in for an Exocet attack at low level - so low that the radar on the F14 couldn't lock-on ), anti shipping ( Iraqi gunboats attacking shipping or oil rigs ), even chasing Iraqi aircraft trying to escape to Iran.

The AI of the enemy jets was very good - they would co-ordinate attacks, create feints and sucker you away from the real target and try to drag you down low and slow and even hang around SAM and AAA protected areas to see if you would give chase.

Close air support missions were tough and you had to be really careful not to end up with a friendly fire incident - always a possibility as the ground forces were always on the move.

The missions were done in real time, so if you took off late afternoon ( about 15:00hrs and you stayed up for a couple of hours, it would get dark). There was no Night Vision in either aircraft and night missions were a real challenge and really dark - plus don't forget the carrier landing ... " -

You had radio sets too that you select several different channels, including a general guard frequency, carrier / tower, air-refuel tanker, and SAR.

The most exciting aspect of this sim was you could fly the campaign on your own or with your best friend linked up on another Amiga ( enter my mate Tom ! ).

Not only that, you could have one fly as an F14, the other as a Hornet. You could both fly as Hornets, both have different weapons loadouts and both do separate missions in the same flight. You could do real close formation flying, and flying as a leader / wingman in some of the dogfights was just mind-blowing, while the Wild Weasel flights were beyond description - I don't think we've ever shouted, screamed, cursed and flown as hard in any other Amiga multi-player.

You had various levels of damage that could be received by your aircraft - from engine flame-outs to full engine fires, plus radar failures, fuel leaks, weapons malfunctions ( hang-fires, dud warheads and sometimes control malfunctions so the missiles would go bezerk in flight ) also landing gear failure ( one wheel may not come down - nose or main gear ) and also arrestor hook failures.

Missions

You could if you wanted, divert to a friendly airbase in Saudia and try and land there. In the dogfights, you had to watch when you fired a heater because if you wingman was in view the missile could turn and track him instead.

But, if one of you got hit and had to bail out, you could help out by switching to the SAR channel and fly around the area your wingman ejected over and assist the rescue teams - the longer you could stay on station, the better the chance of him being rescued. You also had a fantastic map view of the Gulf area - the zoom functions on it were so good, we actually ended up learning how to use it as a make-shift AWACS and JSTARS platform to help co-ordinate BVR engagements without using our own radars.

Scenario

The outcome of the war could vary.

Most times we would end up with the liberation of Kuwait and a cease-fire. We did have a couple of campaigns where the Iraqis took the initiative and actually took the invasion into Saudia Arabia - for that we ended up flying more than one mission per day every day with lots of close air support.

The last campaign we ever flew on "CAP" actually took a new turn and allowed us to take the war into Iraq with the intention of eliminating Mr.Hussien. We took control of a good 50% of the Iraqi mainland, but old Saddam escaped to Syria in the midst of a well executed decoy tactic performed by several transports each one heavily escorted - by the time we figured where he was, there were too few missiles to go around and not enough fuel to catch up for a bit of 20mm action.