Wingman Skills 201: The High Threat Environment
Even the best wingman tactics in the world won’t help if you can’t reliably finish a kill, or don’t see your wingman’s trouble coming before it gets there. Being a good wingman, and an effective member of combat elements, requires skills that are hard won…and unfortunately those who are really successful in busy arenas sometimes aren’t the greatest at breaking down what they do that works. After watching and thinking about what some of those great sticks do, it seems to me that there are some general concepts we can apply to improve our success in the multi-con arenas.
Successful combat flying requires competence in three major areas: Threat Assessment (or Situational Awareness), Combat Maneuvering, and Target Destruction (which in AH means Gunnery). Being great at one will not help you break the back of an attack, and it won’t get you home – it takes a balance between all three to get ‘er done. We’ve all heard about these skills, but there’s a long distance between knowing about them and understanding how to get them into practice. So, let’s take a closer, but thoroughly practical, look at the skills of SA, ACM, and gunnery.
Learning a Little About LearningMany developing sim pilots know their SA is weak spot, but it can be especially hard to improve early on. There’s a good reason for that difficulty, and it’s based in the way the brain learns new skills…which means flight and gun skill development is directly tied in to having Situational Awareness. Here’s what I mean.
It seems that the mind can manage 7-10 objects or ideas at a time; unfortunately, when we’re developing flight skills those attention slots may be taken up by basic things like closure rate, target evasives, and judging deflection. Many times, the brain’s “thinking slots” are used up before we get to “what’s going on behind me” – with predictable consequences! Most importantly, we are actively thinking about what’s happening and calculating what needs to happen next.
Functional brain analysis has shown that experts (in any field) do not think about what they are doing. Instead, they’re relying on memory of past events and processes. Think of it this way – the newb thinks “OK, I have to roll about 45, then pull up just high enough, then roll back, then drop down again.” Lots of processing, not as much memory, and lots of individual moves to think about, so SA suffers. On the other hand, the intermediate player has consolidated those actions into one move, so he can think “Time for a high yo-yo!” The expert has had so much practice in the move and all its possibilities that if he thinks anything, it’s <Cue Darth Vader voice> “I have you now…”
It’s also important to realize that once you’ve practiced to a certain point you won’t learn anything by continuing to do the same thing over and over. If you want to get better, you have to continue to learn new things, practice them till they’re natural, then go back and learn some more. (If you’re interested in the topic, here are some places for further reading: Link to original "Expert Mind" article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945 and Thread on AH BBS:
http://forums.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=195688.)
Threat Assessment 101
It’s hard to pay attention to what’s going on around you when it takes all your concentration just to keep your plane in the air, or to keep your guns on target. So, effective SA is going to require enough skill development that your mind can move on to other things. As basic flight maneuvers and the tactics of combat flight maneuvering become more natural, you’ll be able to improve your awareness of what’s going on around you.
But there’s much more to situational awareness than checking your 6 constantly, which is why I prefer to think about Threat Assessment. In fact, it’s important to think of SA as having three distinct components.
Stage One Threat Assessment is knowing who’s attacking you, and who could be about to attack you. It means watching your 6, and paying attention to contacts that have the angle and energy to grab attack position soon.
Stage Two Threat Assessment means noticing enemies in the general area who are not yet a threat, but who could turn into one soon. It means keeping track of the 109 circling above the fight waiting for a pick, and the 262 climbing out of range and then returning for a pass through the furball. It also means noticing the enemy that’s climbing AWAY from the fight, because that guy will be coming back soon with a potentially dangerous energy advantage.
Stage Three Threat Assessment requires understanding the general danger posed by the situation on the map, and in the arena over all. How close are you to the enemy base, and how long is the flight time before friendlies can return to the fight? How high are the new arrivals, and will they be able to jump you without much warning? Even if you’ve capped the base, is there a DAR bar building from the next one over, that might mean a mission in to break cap? The more dangerous your situation overall, the quicker you need to finish the fight you’re in and extend to rebuild a safety margin of energy or distance.
To get back home you need to use all three stages of threat assessment, all the time. The general situation should give a general anxiety level that sets the background for all your fighting, so that in high threat environments you know to scan constantly, to avoid flying straight and level, and to fight the urge to chase down a particular target. In high threat environments, try to either finish the kill quickly or to sweep through the fight landing hits on whatever targets present themselves. (In those high threat environments, remember that many times good hits turn into kills later on when another pilot finishes off the target you heavily damaged but let go.) Ghosth compares this to a shark cutting though a school of fish, maneuvering only a little to grab the ones that come near enough to his path.
If Stage Three Threat Assessment turns into general sense of situational anxiety, Stage Two should be like scribbled notes to remind yourself of what to look for. After you make a pass on a Spit, only to see him successfully break clean, don’t forget he’s around. Even if you see a friendly engage him, remember that the Spit is behind you and use that memory when you decide how long to stay with your next target. Murphy’s Law guarantees that when you go vertical into a loop after the next guy, that same Spit will be there to crawl up your 6 if you’re not careful! On the other hand, by keeping track of him you might not only save your bacon, but you might get a chance to surprise him with an attack of your own. Even if that doesn’t work, the more you react to the changing environment the more you’ll leave less aware pilots in the dust. To fixated pilots, you’ll seem to be zipping around unpredictably – which makes you a harder target to track, and the less they anticipate where you’re going the more likely you’ll get an unexpected opportunity to kill THEM.
Of course, what I’m calling Stage One Threat Assessment is plain old immediate SA. In my humble opinion, Morpheus (a furballing master from a while back) put it best: “In a furball, the only time you should look out the front is when you pull the trigger.” It’s not that much of an exaggeration.
Air Combat ManeuveringWe often think of the fight in terms of moves, which is why you’ll find five discussions of ACM for every one you see about SA or Gunnery! Because the information is out there in extensive detail, with more expertise than I could ever give, I’m not going into much depth here.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the gurus do succeed because they know some secret move that is only revealed to the Grand Masters. Instead, most of their success comes from doing a few things very, very well. Often good players know a lot, but rely on two or three maneuvers for their bread and butter kills. Even in the intermediate range, pilots can harvest pelts by using effective threat assessment and being pretty good at a couple maneuvers.
What follows is only my opinion, but I think it’s a pretty accurate one. I believe that you can be a highly successful AH combat pilot with only these few moves: the
high and low yo-yo; the
barrel roll reversal; the
break turn (which incidentally can work both in the horizontal and in the vertical plane); the
Immelman; the
Split S; the
Vertical Scissor; and the
Rolling Scissor. (Flat scissors are very dangerous unless both planes are pretty low on E, and you can prevent the opponent from having a shot as you cross. On the other hand, it’s very common to start with a rolling scissor, and as energy starts to drop to convert to a vertical scissor, and then to fall into the flat scissor. Once you’re in a scissor, you’ll generally need to stay in it until one of you is dead.) Even if you don’t use the pure maneuver, getting to know the elements of them, and being able to execute them well, will allow you to react intelligently in a fight.
Gunnery Having a wingman only helps if both pilots know they can trust each other to get it done. Without good shooting skills, your wingman just can’t depend on you to clear his 6, or to handle one threat while he deals with another! Therefore, gunnery skills are critical to handling the high threat environment successfully.
How good is good enough? Since an entire fight can boil down to a single 1 second opportunity, you HAVE to be able to cash it in -- and that’s what matters, not the hit percent. Hit stats will be skewed by any number of things: like flying planes with centerline guns, instead of ones that have them spread out on the wings; or, throwing useless tracers to spook targets into turning instead of letting them go; or, hunting great big targets like bombers instead of little jumpy ones like fighters; or, shooting up buildings when you’re in fighter mode, where the rounds will all be counted as misses. Obviously, pilots who often waste bullets will have lower hit percent than their skills would otherwise produce.
But with those cautions, in my experience you ought to shoot for at least 5% hits when you’re actually shooting at fighters. Anything less than that means you’re either going to fail to kill or take too long to kill that critical enemy. Anything above 10% is very good.
In my experience, playing in the arenas has not helped my gunnery get better, with or without tracers. Even killing drones (the offline kind, not the newb kind) may not improve shooting skill, unless you’re specifically working on specific shots. And that’s one of the key concepts in air to air shooting: you improve gunnery by learning one shot situation at a time. Gunnery is not a global skill; it’s the end result of adding up your skills in all the different speed and angle situations you shoot in.
So that’s what you need to work for in your drone time – learning new shots. One way to do this is to work with out of plane maneuvering while you attack the drones. (Meaning, don’t fly in the same horizontal plane as the drones’ circle, move all around it.) I built a 20 minute practice routine that worked great for me, and raised my hit percent from 4-6% up to 10-11% inside of 3 weeks. Here’s what I did.
1. Auto climb until you’re 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the drone circle.
2. Reverse direction, and try to set up a nearly 90 degree snap shot on one of the drones. (This builds you ability to judge time and distance problems, and eventually to “see” where you need to point the nose to intercept an enemy’s flight path.)
3. Although you may start by throwing out a stream of bullets for the drone to fly through, work towards firing a brief burst that you’ve timed to minimize wasted rounds. (This helps you learn the shot timing far better. Eventually, you can add a tweak of rudder to make all the rounds hit the same place on the plane instead of raking across it as the plane passes – and that tweak will turn assists into explosive kills,)
4. VERY IMPORTANT: make sure you’re focusing on the right things. We naturally want to watch the target, and it’s easy to walk the tracers onto that plane – but that’s the worst thing you can do when working on gunnery. You are trying to build a library of visual shot angles that teach your brain just where the pipper and target should be when you pull the trigger. So force yourself to focus completely on the pipper, and track the target in your peripheral vision. This is a training exercise that will dramatically help your brain pick up those shot relationships!
5. Continue flying into the circle’s center, but begin a barrel roll that will finish with a short range angle shot on a drone. Try NOT to shoot from the same altitude, and especially not from the dead 6 – you probably can hit those shots already, and we’re trying to build entirely new shots into your library.
6. After taking that deflection shot, start a move (barrel roll or high yo-yo, outside the circle when high E and inside when a bit lower) that will bring you back on the target for a second shot. Repeat similar moves, inside and outside the circle, until your target takes killing damage.
7. Once energy falls enough, start doing low yo-yos inside that circle and try to shoot the target from below and inside him. Pretend you’re sneaking up on that sleeping enemy, and you just KNOW that once he sees you in the 6 view he’ll break away and rob you of the easy kill!
8. Work to avoid overshooting – don’t let your wings cross the imaginary 3 oclock to 6 oclock line the target’s wings define. That’s important in combat.
I’ve used several crutches when trying to learn a new shot. At first, I turned tracers on, but that didn’t help as much when shooting from a different altitude… on a 2D screen, I couldn’t tell if those whizzing tracers were off horizontally or vertically. So now I use the offline lead computing gun sight at first. Again, it’s important to force your brain to see only the target aircraft and the pipper, and not to watch the lead computing sight “+” and line it up with your reflector sight. Once you get the idea, you should turn the LCS off and keep practicing the shot until it’s second nature.
Gunnery takes a while to cement in place, so expect to log drone time here and there for a while. And while you may eventually feel you’ve “got it”, don’t be surprised to find you need some refresher time down the road!
Here's a film I made showing one of my practice sessions:
332nd.org/dogs/simaril/GunneryPracticeSession.ahf
Friday nights (FSO) at 11 PM Eastern 
