MiGMan’s Combat Diary

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

What is the most dangerous form of wildlife in Denmark?

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

Had 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!

I 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.

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

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

Dam 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.

"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."

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

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

A 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.

1999 | Beta version | Retail version

One 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.

In 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!

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

Therefore it must be a good landing. yes?

Fun 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!

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

This article was published in PC Aviator magazine.

As published in PC PowerPlay magazine.

Come one punk, Mech my day!

A VFR pilot's dream.

A 5 star aircraft for MSFS 2020.

A few notes about the campaign from 1998.

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

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

I 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.

This 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.

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

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

I 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!

A simple NAVEX turns into a Badger hunt!

Flight 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...

In 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.

Night 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!

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

Second 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!

One 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.

One 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.

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

Breaking 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...

I saw this beauty at Wellington aiport in June 2021.

One 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

Part 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.

What 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!

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

Proflight 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.

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

Red 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.

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

How much better can it get?

I'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.

Su-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!"

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

My hardware wasn't really up to the job in 2002.

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

Well 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.

This MiG is about to meet Marx!

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

On 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.

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