MiGMan’s Combat Diary

AboutI went to Europe in July 2001 in quest of the perfect cup of coffee. But did I ever find that holy grail?

Published:2001

AboutWhat is the most dangerous form of wildlife in Denmark?

Published:2001

AboutI ran out of gas! How embarassing. Did I have to eject? Watch and see.

Published:2021Last edit:Apr 2, 2021

AboutHad an in-flight emergency when the airspeed/mach indicators went u/s! Landed successfully. On reviewing the cockpit cam I saw that the airspeed HAD come back online during final approach, but I was so fixated on the picture, relating it to past landings in order to guess the speed, that I hadn't even noticed!

Published:2021Last edit:Apr 4, 2021

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Published:2020Last edit:Nov 6, 2023

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Published:2019Last edit:Nov 7, 2023

Published:2001

AboutI hesitate to criticise a product which has probabably been a labour of love for the developers, and am are especially loath to discourage work on the classic '50's jets, but once a product starts competing for your sim-allowance then it has to measure up. Unfortunately in Microsoft Combat Flight Sim 2 the Vulcan seems a fish out of water.

Published:2003Last edit:Mar 13, 2024

AboutIt took me a few years to get my hands on MSFS 2020 Famous Flyer 3, but the wait was worth it!

Published:2025Last edit:Jan 27, 2025

AboutA classic sim in it's time which integrated many of the elements of addictive gameplay.

Published:1998Last edit:Jun 18, 2021

AboutThis was the sim that I, like countless others, cut my teeth in the world of simulated air combat.

Published:2000Last edit:Dec 2, 2024

AboutPrepar3D v.5 running &ORBX Cityscape Canberra for FSX and Prepar3D& - Oct 5th, 2020 | 250101: Moved the article to it’s own exhibit.

Published:2020Last edit:Jan 1, 2025

AboutDam Busters opened the bomb bay door to a new experience in Microsoft Combat Flight Sim 2, that of the bomber pilot. You need a different mindset than when flying the fighters. In the bomber accurate station keeping is everything on the final run.

Published:2002

Published:1998Last edit:Jun 9, 2021

About"EF 2000 first saw the light of day (a gloomy Scandinavian day at that! ) in 1995. It's roots lay in F-29 Retaliator and TFX but it went much, much further, breaking new ground in combat flight fidelity. From engine start, sorry, I mean TWO engine starts, you knew this was a new kind of flight sim experience. Taxiing quickened the pulse as the Eurofighter bobbed and bounced on its suspension. Sunlight glinted through the canopy, wheel brakes on, engine spooled up and the beast was straining at the leash.

"Brakes off and the tyres rumble, 120 knots and the dragon leaps into the air."
Ode to EF 2000 - MiGMan, 1999."

Published:1998Last edit:Feb 25, 2024

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 23, 2022

AboutThe AA radar allows real intercepts to be made, commonplace in combat sims but a first for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004.

Published:2004Last edit:Mar 14, 2024

Published:2004Last edit:Mar 14, 2024

Published:2001Last edit:Jun 10, 2021

Published:2001Last edit:Sep 6, 2024

Published:2010

AboutThe crowning achievement in Microprose's legacy of creating fully immersive flight simulation environments.

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 23, 2022

AboutA lot of fun to fly in MSFS 2004. The fantastic cockpit made me feel like Microprose's legacy F-117 had been brought into the 21st century.

Published:2006Last edit:Aug 18, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 22, 2022

Published:1998

Published:1998

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 20, 2022

Published:1998

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 22, 2022

Published:1998

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 22, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 23, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 23, 2022

About1999 | Beta version | Retail version

Published:1999

Published:1998Last edit:Jan 1, 1998

Published:1998Last edit:Aug 28, 2022

Published:2002Last edit:Aug 28, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 23, 2022

AboutOne of the crowning achievements in the Golden Decade of flight sims which presaged the fluidity and detail we would take for granted in the years ahead.

Published:2001Last edit:Sep 24, 2023

Published:1998

Published:1998

Published:2000Last edit:Jul 14, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Mar 11, 2022

Published:2000Last edit:Mar 11, 2022

Published:2025

Published:2000Last edit:Sep 1, 2022

Published:2003Last edit:Sep 8, 2022

Published:2024Last edit:Apr 8, 2024

AboutIn this case a picture or two is worth a thousand words. This is some of the best fun I've had in 42 years of computer flight simming!

Published:2020Last edit:Sep 9, 2022

Published:2020

Published:2020

AboutAfter a few missions in the Hurricane they put me in a Spitfire. Perhaps not the wisest of moves...

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

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Published:2020

Published:2020

AboutTherefore it must be a good landing. yes?

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

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Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:2020

AboutFun in the Hurricane.
--/o\-- Finally managed a reasonable take-off
--/o\-- To formate or not to formate, that is the question!
--/o\-- Tally Ho!
--/o\-- The cliffs of Dover
--/o\-- St. Margaret's Cathedral
--/o\-- Landing... they can buff that out!

Published:2020

Published:2020

Published:1998Last edit:Sep 12, 2022

AboutWhat a missed opportunity. The PC sim crowd expects more, especially from a sim with the Janes name attached.

Published:2020Last edit:Sep 12, 2022

Published:2021Last edit:May 31, 2021

AboutMan, this felt like flying! It couldn't get any better than this!

Published:1998Last edit:Jan 2, 2025

Published:1998

Published:2003Last edit:Sep 17, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Sep 19, 2022

Published:2000Last edit:Sep 19, 2022

Published:2001Last edit:Sep 19, 2022

AboutThis article was published in PC Aviator magazine.

Published:2004Last edit:Sep 19, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Sep 21, 2022

Published:2004Last edit:Jul 22, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

Published:1998Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

Published:1998Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

Published:1999Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

AboutAs published in PC PowerPlay magazine.

Published:1999Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

Published:1999Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

AboutCome one punk, Mech my day!

Published:1999Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

Published:2003

AboutA VFR pilot's dream.

Published:2003Last edit:Mar 17, 2024

AboutA 5 star aircraft for MSFS 2020.

Published:2023Last edit:Nov 21, 2023

AboutA few notes about the campaign from 1998.

Published:2019Last edit:Mar 19, 2024

AboutI had great fun with the fast paced missions some 20 years after initial contact. Here is a gallery of some highlights.

Published:2019Last edit:Mar 19, 2024

Last edit:Mar 13, 2021

AboutIt's hard to keep up with the MiG... very easy to get behind the aircraft.

Published:2019

AboutI was busy as a one-armed paper hanger on final approach! Quite tricky to get the recommended 10 degrees AOA... more practice is the answer I feel.

Published:2019

AboutThis was tough... they shot at me (with live ordnance) ... I thought it was supposed to be a training sortie... ; -(
Check out the next video where I (hopefully) PASS this mission.

Published:2019

AboutI think I only just scraped through this mission because the MiG-21's couldn't find me!

Published:2019

AboutI passed the bombing, not elegantly but nonetheless, then a rudder failure meant trouble on landing... I mean WHO or WHOM parked a tank there?

Published:2019

AboutI did escort the fighters successfully. My wingman did most of the work as I directed him via voice command. And then I took out the enemy AWACS (scratch one MiG-29...).
This is the first video I've made with voice control, using Voice Attack. I make so much more use of the wingman when I can simply talk to him rather than hunt around in the dark for keys!

Published:2019

Published:2019

AboutA simple NAVEX turns into a Badger hunt!

Published:2019

AboutFlight testing my ridgy-didge state-of-the-art hotas voice-controlled Fulcrum!
1. Pan view working and mapped to the HOTAS. Not TrackIR but pretty good for a 20 year old sim that doesn't support mouse look.
2. Voice control for control surfaces (flaps, gear, chute), wingman.
3. Draw distance? Can anyone help? I doubled the draw distance in the MIG29.INI file, but every time you enter the sim it overwrites it back to 26.
4. Low speed, high alpha
5. and... I didn't take the situation at the threshold seriously enough...

Published:2019

Published:2019

AboutIn this action packed and punchy edit I refly the mission which is becoming somewhat of a nemesis! But it's still a lot of fun.

Published:2019

AboutNight flying! - - - Dangerous - - - Exciting! - - - Even more so when you're being shot at...
Actually the graphics in MiG-29 Fulcrum look stunning at night, and of course draw distance becomes irrelevant.
Enjoy this one!

Published:2019

AboutSome Tu-160's turned up and put on quite the show with their four afterburning engines! ... Then we shot them down.

Published:2019

AboutSecond attempt at this bombing mission. The bombing is very forgiving in this sim... but then we ran into the most 'Top Gun' helo pilot of all time!
Then I shot him down. Eventually I shot him down.
I found the explanation for the 'Top Gun' helo pilot in the documentation for the mission editor. Flight models and aircraft models are independent... and the manual warns not to assign an F-16 flight model to a chopper... which is exactly what some wag at Novalogic did here!

Published:2019

Published:2002Last edit:Mar 12, 2021

AboutOne of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.

Published:1999

AboutOne of MiGMan's wobbly test flights! This video is more for the enthusiast, consisting as it does of 3 minutes dogfight footage of the F-86 Sabre in this classic sim.

Published:1999

Published:2002Last edit:Mar 19, 2024

Published:1998Last edit:May 17, 2021

Published:2000Last edit:Mar 10, 2024

Published:2002

Published:2002Last edit:Mar 13, 2024

AboutDemonstrating just two of the many thousands of free 3rd party add-ons available for the Microsoft flight sims.

Published:2004

AboutBreaking every rule in the book I fly under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, through a football stadium, and frighten the diners 60 floors up in Centrepoint Tower's revolving restaurant! Oh, and it's at night in a Vought Corsair, which Microsoft thoughtfully provided for us in every copy of Flight Sim 2004.
And then I land at Sydney International Airport... probably in the wrong direction...

Published:2004

AboutI saw this beauty at Wellington aiport in June 2021.

Published:2021Last edit:Jun 21, 2021

AboutOne of my wobbly test flights!
In the default Bell 205B helicopter, taking a sedate flight over the strip in Vegas. Landmark areas of scenery such as this received particular attention by the developers and they pushed the software and hardware of the day to the limits to achieve this amount of detail. Compare this to the same flight in FS2002

Published:2000

Last edit:Mar 21, 2024

AboutPart of the most popular combat sim franchises in the 1990s, NATO Fighters had the biggest line-up of flyable aircraft ever seen in a combat sim to that time.

Published:1998

Published:2006

Published:2025Last edit:Jan 28, 2025

Published:2001Last edit:Mar 22, 2024

AboutWhat a magnificent flight model, so fluid! Lots of things to learn on this aircraft - as evidenced by me flying the first 10 minutes with the airbrake extended!

Published:2019

AboutI ran a quick photo-recce over Sydney harbour twice. Once with the stock Prepar3D scenery and then again with ORBX Australia v.2 scenery.

Published:2020Last edit:Sep 20, 2020

About250101- Moved to the correct exhibit.

Published:2020Last edit:Jan 1, 2025

AboutProflight was the first flight sim I had seen since the Apple ][ in 1982. I had bought an Atari ST to arrange and print music for my string quartet and included in the package was a demo of this amazingly fluid sim, running at 600 x 400 pixels (in monochrome). There began my true flight sim addiction.

Published:1990

AboutA quick free flight to look at the features of the MiG-29.

Published:2021Last edit:Jun 5, 2023

AboutRed Baron 3-D is an engrossing recreation of the air wars over France in WW1. The style of presentation can't fail to educate as it entertains. With British, American, French and German services to fly in and a full complement of planes it represents hours of flying fun.

Published:1998

AboutSent back 40 years in a time machine to 1952, I was assigned to lead a flight of MiGs for the north.

Published:1998

Published:2002Last edit:Mar 25, 2024

Published:2002

Published:2002Last edit:Mar 25, 2024

Published:2002

AboutHow much better can it get?

Published:2002

Published:2021Last edit:Jun 17, 2021

AboutI'd spent some hours mapping my HOTAS and Voice Attack computer, and saw no arrestor hook command on the official list. Must be automated, I thought, wrongly. After the second bolter I whipped out my future-phone (it was 1979) and searched the inter-web with Alta-Vista. Aha!
H = hook.
Kind of important to know that.

Published:2021Last edit:Jun 17, 2021

AboutSu-27 Flanker was designed by a team of Russian programmers to run on 386 and low end 486 machines. The project was taken on by SSI and revised to SVGA graphics resolution. The Russian designers didn't have access to the faster PC's, and as a result their code was very efficient and it ran very smoothly despite being state of the art! The" sim recreateds the Crimean peninsula in great detail and pits you, in the Su-27 Flanker, against the latest Russian and NATO aircraft, armour, ships and SAMs. All control surfaces move during flight and the attention to detail is extraordinary!"

Published:1998

Published:1992Last edit:Jul 22, 2022

Published:2024

Published:2021Last edit:Feb 20, 2021

Published:2021Last edit:Feb 20, 2021

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 23, 2022

Published:1998Last edit:Feb 25, 2024

Last edit:Jul 28, 2022

AboutSome of my favourite gun camera snaps and theatre footage taken by my trusty wingman.

Published:2002

AboutMy hardware wasn't really up to the job in 2002. The aim of the sim is authenticity and high fidelity - the hardware requirements are correspondingly demanding. I'll take a deeper look at the sim after my next hardware upgrade (soon).

Published:2002

Published:1998

AboutOverall a good sim for newbies, more experienced players will probably find it lacking in challenges and want more control over landings and takeoff's.

Published:1998

AboutHighhlights from my flights.

Published:2024

AboutWell it's all to do with global war, struggles over energy sources etc. But don't let the details bother you too much, the task at hand is to stay alive and shoot down the other guys.

Published:1998

AboutThis MiG is about to meet Marx!

Published:2007

Published:1999Last edit:Jul 22, 2022

Published:2002

Published:2002

Published:1998Last edit:Jul 30, 2022

AboutJoin MiGMan in the cockpit for a chat about flight sims and related stuff!

Published:2021Last edit:Mar 11, 2021

Published:2021Last edit:Mar 11, 2021

Published:2021Last edit:Mar 10, 2021

Published:2020Last edit:Oct 4, 2020

AboutOn an unusually grey Sydney afternoon in October 2006 MiGMan was a guest of Microsoft at the launch of their new flagship product - Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
The creme-de-la-creme of Australia's gaming journalists gathered at Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney, and embarked on a champagne flight over Sydney Harbour in a C-47, the military transport version of the Douglas DC-3.

Published:2006

AboutAs the title says: 'My first flghts' in many varied and wonderful aircraft. Each flight a new adventure!

Published:2023