BLACKOUTS -all appy's to Cfs2 Stock aircraft just replace the one talked about,may very slightly look at basics .. How long they last, how to avoid them "Break, Purple Two, break!" It was too late, a 109 was right on my tail and I heard the thunder of explosions as his cannon shells burst in my plane. Fiery red balls were passing on all sides of me. Crunch, I was hit in the wing. Crunch, one exploded in back of my armour plating and chunks of shrapnel smashed against my instrument panel. It would be only a matter of seconds now. I had lost air speed and even if I turned left or right, or dived, I would still, probably, not be able to escape him. But then I remembered sitting back in Eshott, listening to two RAF Battle of Britain pilots talking. Their words stuck in my memory: "The important thing is to do something. Make no movement gently, but be as violent as possible. Pull back on the stick and apply left rudder at the same time. It might rip the wings out of the plane, but if you're a goner anyway, what's the difference?" All this raced through my mind at the same time, no longer than it takes to blink an eyelash. I nearly pulled the control stick from its socket with my violent yank; at the same time I pushed with all the strength of a desperate man against the left rudder bar. The manoeuvre blacked me out. John T. Godfrey G forces represent Earth's gravity on the human body. We normally feel a force of 1G on our bodies. In a fighter plane dramatic manoeuvres and flight inertia create G forces many times above that. At 5G blood is drained away from the brain to the lower part of the body and at 6G (approx.) you will blackout. In AW the effects of a blackout are accumulative. The first time you blackout it should be at around 6G and last a short period of time. Following a blackout there is a recovery period, if you pull excessive G again within that recovery period you will blackout at a lower G and the effect will last longer. Blackout within this next recovery period and it lasts longer still. The other thing to note is that your controls freeze during a blackout. If you are in a roll when you blackout, no amount of waggling the stick will stop that roll and you will still be rolling when you recover from the blackout. This of course can have disastrous consequences if you are pointing at the ground when you black. So how do you avoid blackouts? Obviously the easiest way to avoid them is not to pull more than 5 or 6 G; this is easier said than done though. Blackouts tend to happen very quickly and you get very little warning. If you are pulling a steady G load there is a greying out of the screen before the blackout takes effect. If you spot this greying out in time you can just maintain the back stick pressure, rather than increasing it and thus stay right on the edge of the blackout. I have a CH Products Force Feedback stick that helps a bit, because as you pull more G, the stick pressure you are pulling against becomes harder. The other answer is to keep one eye on the G meter, but this is not easy in the heat of battle. If you fly your air combat manoeuvre correctly and smoothly there should be no need to yank the stick back into the pit of your stomach. A smooth and even back pressure will enable you to control the G loading much more. Negative G works opposite to a blackout, push the stick forward, into a bunt and blood is forced upwards into your head. This can cause a red-out if the negative G-force is severe. The onset of a redout is usually lots quicker than a blackout but the effects are similar. Back to the Top STALLS AND SPINS – Why, how, recovery Habit brought my head swivelling around to look behind me. I was just in time to see a Focke-Wulf bouncing, nose twinkling from the .30-calibers. My left hand slammed forward on the throttle, my right hand hauled back and left on the stick, my heart went to the top of my head and the Thunderbolt leaped upward. I racked the Jug into a tight left climbing turn, staying just above and in front of the pursuing Focke-Wulf…To get any strikes on me the German first had to turn inside of me and then haul his nose up steeply to place his bullets ahead of me. The Focke-Wulf just didn't have it. At 8,000 feet he stalled out while the Thunderbolt roared smoothly; I kicked over into a roll and locked onto his tail. Robert S. Johnson One of the things players new to Full Realism, (FR) find the hardest is spin recovery. While it is perfectly possible to recover the aircraft from a spin at only a few hundred feet, I have seen new players spinning down from 20,000 feet into the ground. This can easily be avoided with some off line spin recovery practise. When the angle of attack of your wings exceeds the critical angle for flight, your wings cease to generate lift and the aircraft stalls. The fairly simple remedy to a stall is to push the nose down to decrease the angle of attack and then wait for the airflow over the wings to increase until lift is re-established. When you enter a stall if you are manoeuvring, or in a bank, then one wing may stall before the other. The wing that has lost lift drops and the aircraft enters a spin. To recover from a spin you need to react quickly. Immediately raise any flaps and chop the throttle. Push the stick forward to get the nose down so that you regain airspeed and airflow over the wings, which will help to regain lift. At the same time apply opposite rudder to stop the spin. When the spin stops centralise the rudders and on confirmation of airspeed, (from looking at the airspeed dial) increase the throttle and pull gently back on the stick to fly the aircraft out of the spin. If you can't see the direction of the spin from looking out of the cockpit, look at the compass and move the rudders in the direction the compass is spinning. Be aware that if you don't centralise the rudders as soon as the rotation stops you could end up spinning again, the opposite way. Because of the way Air Warrior models spins and because the rudders and ailerons are co-ordinated, you can also stop the rotation of the spin by using opposite aileron, (move the stick in the opposite direction to the spin) if you don't have rudder pedals. To practise off line spin recovery take your aircraft up to about 20,000 feet, pull the nose up until the aircraft stalls and try to turn hard. This will produce a spin of varying proportions, depending on how hard you turn and how far below stall speed you are when you enter the spin.