When I wrote my preview of the DCS: F-15E, I did it without the benefit of completed training materials and so I kind of stumbled around in the dark until I figured things out. The F-15E is both quite similar to the F/A-18 and F-16 as well as being its own thing and learning how it does things requires a bit of retraining. Fortunately, the jet (now released) comes with some solid training materials and tutorials. Here’s a bit of an overview of what I’ve been doing so far.

Back to basics

A couple of years ago I would have probably wanted to jump in, guns a blazing, and start blowing things up with the F-15E right away. Truthfully, I did a bit of that with it in the preview, but now that its fully out I wanted to take a bit more of a methodical approach and learn some of the basics first.

Fortunately, the F-15E comes with some excellent interactive tutorials that RAZBAM has included with the jet. Those tutorials include cold and dark start-up, taxi and takeoff, programming displays and master modes, and navigation. There’s also introductions to air to air and air to ground operations which I have coming up on my training syllabus.

One of the good things about these tutorials is that they are short. Some modules and older modules have tended to do lengthy tutorials that cover entire concepts, however, these are clunky and tend to make it harder to go back and review a concept without needing to jump through the whole thing. These shorter ones mean you can get going in just a few minutes and some of the longer ones only lasted 8-10 minutes.

Going back to basics, I started with the cold and dark start-up which proved to be relatively straightforward. So did the radio tutorial… and the taxi and takeoff tutorials. These are as much about familiarity as they are about teaching but when you’ve been flying flight sims for as long as I have…it starts to all kind of make sense.

The radio tutorial was useful with some basic learning of the controls that were, in some cases, not particularly intuitive at first. Toggling radio modes between the pre programmed channels and manual entry didn’t exactly make sense to me at first but then it started to click. Tutorials are doing their work!

And a little speed run

To top off my recent time with the F-15E, I’ve also flown the low level speed run which has you following waypoints and zooming around with a hard ceiling forcing both getting to know the F-15E’s low level capabilities as well as its nav systems while managing to avoid ingesting a tree into the engine… or worse!

This kind of low level altitude flying is superb in the jet as the scenery flows past at an incredible speed.

There’s no official timer for the speed run but it was a fun instant action mission. A good one if you just want to let the landscape flow past.

Soon I’ll be back onto the part where pixels explode and I start to really make the F-15E do what it was meant to do. Looking forward to that!