The DCS F-14 is doing a free weekend, and it’s one of the handful of jets I don’t own at this point. First impressions:
The handling is very strange, and super dynamic. It’s a really fun plane to fly because it’s so radically different depending on the flight regime. At high angles of attack, the ailerons (spoilers?) don’t reliably work and you’ll need to use your rudders instead. To get the most out of this plane, you will need either rudder pedals or to get good with a twist stick. Rudder control is very important. Practically every moment you’re flying, you’re actively doing something or compensating for some motion. Quirky planes like this are the kind that I think DCS does best.
At transonic speeds, the plane becomes a bit squirrelly and unstable feeling. It’s extremely smooth when comfortably supersonic or subsonic.
The wing sweep angle dramatically changes the flight characteristics in a way that caught me by surprise. Wings swept, it flies sort of like the MiG-21, where the faster it goes the happier it is. Elevator response is a bit heavy, but at high speeds you can comfortably pull high Gs and get good turn rates.
However, with the wings spread, it’s a completely different plane. It generates so much lift that it’s actually difficult to land, in the sense that it doesn’t want to come down. You have to basically slam it into the ground or else it’ll happily float down the runway. The turn rates you can get with the wings spread are much higher than you would think for a plane this big, but it becomes difficult to control, particularly at high AOA, and is very draggy.
The Tomcat is much faster than I was expecting. To the point where it’s shockingly easy to go supersonic by accident. I was always under the impression that the F-14 had weak engines, but I was either completely mistaken (maybe only the TF30s on the F-14A?), or that the aerodynamics for the plane are superb when the wings are swept. It’s almost trivial to pick up speed, and especially at high altitudes can remain supersonic with ease.
I got so excited with its high speed performance that I ran out of fuel and my first landing was a dead stick landing.
What’s especially impressive is that this performance is with a combat loadout of 2x Sidewinders and 4x Sparrows. Most planes’ performance dramatically drops when loaded with draggy stores, but aside from the small Sidewinders, all munitions are carried conformally in that loadout.
This is probably the single hardest plane in DCS to refuel. Previous to this, I thought it was the Harrier because the probe is behind you and out of sight. The F-14 on the other hand is very unstable at the precision formation flying you need to do at refueling speeds. In particular, it is extremely sensitive to throttle settings, which will cause you climb and descend at alarming rates with the kind of adjustments I’m used to making with the F-16.
Disclaimer: I didn’t try anything related to the RIO because I don’t have the time to. I absolutely love the idea of a radar so complicated you need a second person to operate it, along with the coop potential behind that, but that’s something for another day. That and I don’t have somebody I could consistently fly with in DCS for such a thing.
I probably won’t buy it, mostly because I don’t have the time to play/learn DCS anymore, but on first impressions it’s a tremendous module. It fits right into the niche that DCS does best: planes with very interesting flight models, and systems that predate the heavy computerization (and simplification) that you see in more modern and later 4th generation aircraft.
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