It’s been a couple of months since the previous episodes of the DCS F/A-18C Hornet were released and we’ve been waiting for episode 3 to release. It took a while today Matt Wagner’s tutorial on how to start up the DCS’ F/A-18C Hornet is out and ready to watch.

Preflight, startup, taxi and takeoff

This 20-minute video is a in-depth tutorial on the F/A-18C Hornet. It goes into fairly extreme detail on how to do the pre-flight, setup, start and ultimately takeoff run for the F/A-18.

After watching this video, you’ll have a full understanding of the setup process for flying the F/A-18. It’s a great tutorial although it goes into the kinds of details that you don’t normally need to deal with as a DCS pilot – fuses will always be there, systems don’t need to be tested because they always work, but it is all still there in exquisite detail. This is what DCS does really well.

Progress evident

Holding up the release of this video was the programming of all of the systems behind the start-up. The Hornet itself is surprisingly automated in its start-up procedures so it does appear that the Hornet will be relatively easy to setup and take-off with. To get there, Eagle Dynamics needed to program all of that automation in.

The Hornet seems quite a bit more alive in this video than in previous videos. The sounds, the beeps, etc. are all authentic sounds released to Eagle Dynamics by Boeing. So this is a very authentic Hornet experience.

It’ll be a while still before F/A-18C Hornet is released to early access by Eagle Dynamics but it is getting there. Progress is really starting to show with this  latest video.

For comparison sake check out the previous videos: