As I am someone who has never ever flown a real warbird and I have never once been involved in military combat operations of any kind, I could never write about the real experience of being a fighting airman. I could teach nothing about the tactics of true air combat and I can only wonder if I fully understand what the honors, responsibilities, and experiences of a combat flying duty entails.

On the contrary, I have the many years of flight hours logged on my home PC, through various simulators that have been developed over the last decade. What I can write to a short degree is a bit on air combat as it exists in the digital world of flight simulation. The text that follows is a look at a few tactics and concepts that may or may not have been used in actual combat, but have applicability to simulated air combat as I know it.

As far as I can tell, the two most important differences between the true air combat experience and the simulated equivalent are as follows:

1: The real combat pilot is surrounded by life-threatening risks, both from his foes and the inherent dangers of airplane flying. The most important implication of this difference is that while the real pilot has everything to lose from his mistakes, the simulator pilot can only gain from the experience of crashing or being blown to bits. The simulator pilot always has the benefit of the second chance, which allows him to become a better pilot by learning from his mistakes. When a fight simulation is flown with other human players, the experience of air combat is instead a gentlemen’s game of skill that only resembles the true-to life flying experience of a real fighter pilot.

2: The real pilot flies an airplane while the simulator pilot flies computer code. It cannot be forgotten that a flight simulator is not an airplane. Anybody who expects that they can perform barrel rolls in a real aircraft after mere simulator training is certainly heading for disaster. Although the complexity of simulator code has grown significantly since the first PC flight simulators were developed, there must be very significant differences between flight-modeling computer algorithms and the behavior of real world physics and aerodynamics, not to mention the affects of flight forces on the human body in the cockpit.

With these differences in mind, let’s explore the many aspects of simulated air combat…
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