Happy New Year Stormbirds readers! Kicking off the new year with some exciting new content and a first look at Combat Pilot: Carrier Qualification pre-alpha. Let’s have a look at what’s available!

What’s in it so far

Combat Pilot: Carrier Qualification is an evolution of the demo that I first was hands on with at Flight Sim Expo 2024. Things have evolved since June, unsurprisingly, and so what I’m looking at now feels similar but has been updated in nearly every way.

This first look is a pre-alpha version of the software. A pre-alpha is, by name, the among the earliest of development stages, so before I go any further and remark on anything else, I want everyone to be clear that what we see right now is not anywhere close to the finished product.

What this does give us is a useful preview of what the vision going forward will be. As more systems and features are iterated on and added to the mix, Combat Pilot will slowly take shape into what its designers intend for it to be and what we all hope it will be. This is the crawl, before the walk, before the run, that will hopefully carry Combat Pilot into the future as a next generation combat flight sim.

That out of the way, in this preview we’ve got a flyable F4F-4 Wildcat, flyable A6M2-21 Zero, the USS Enterprise and IJN Akagi and a preview area that consists of a few small clusters of islands, a simple airport, and a few ground objects. Enough to get us started!

Starting it up

When looking at the big picture of what a combat flight sim is in terms of overall checklists of features, Combat Pilot right now doesn’t have a lot in it. But when you look at what’s necessary to make something like this tick, there’s actually quite a bit that is already happening.

The main menu lets you choose an airplane, the time of day, and lets you get into the settings and configure the sim as needed. Again, I wouldn’t consider any of the UI or features here to be anything resembling finished. What is here is just enough to get started though there are some fun options like the ability to set the wallpaper background. There’s also some Pacific theatre inspired art during the loading screens which helps show us what the devs want to do with this sim.

Key bindings are broken down into Axis and Button assignments and I was able to assign nearly every button and axis I wanted to without much trouble with one or two exceptions. Everything bound just fine though I was having trouble recognizing the full travel of my throttle axis initially. I eventually solved that problem with a ‘normalize’ check box in the controls system. Frankly, any weirdness here I would have chalked up to it being a pre-alpha but everything was generally working properly which is great.

After that, you’re put on the runway of the island airport with your aircraft of choice and then need to start it up. The toggleable UI will let you know about what appears to be every control and system that the sim currently is simulating. Magnetos, fuel mixture, throttle, prop pitch, flaps, gear, wing fold… the works.

I want to reiterate too that there is clearly some core simulation stuff already happening. You have to get the throttle and fuel mixture into the correct settings or the engine will not start up… it’ll spin, choke, and stop. A little warning message will let you know what you got wrong. Not enough or too much throttle, incorrect fuel mixture, etc. Get it right and the engine roars to life!

Flying the Wildcat and Zero

I would have absolutely forgiven the Combat Pilot developers if the two aircraft in the sim at this early stage were carbon copies of each other…. but they are not!

Both aircraft already have distinctive handling profiles, both have asymmetric yaw in varying amounts (you can feel the short fuselage of the Wildcat in its yaw stability), both can stall, both can be recovered from stalls, cross control can be used for sideslips, controls will use effectiveness at low and high speeds and so on and so forth. There is pre-stall buffeting though it does feel a bit canned right now. But it’s a start!

It’s pointless to test actual performance values at this stage but suffice to say both feel like warbirds and fly with the kind of raw power and lively character that you expect from them. They are stable to fly but they exhibit what I feel is an appropriate level of nose wobble for the kinds of aircraft that we’re talking about.

I’m surprised genuinely at how good the flight model already is. It was one thing to do so at FSExpo at one of the booths that the Combat Pilot team setup and quite another to do it at home with my own setup. I stopped thinking about the flight model as a concept all that much and just started to enjoy flying the aircraft which is absolutely what I think should be happening with any flight sim.

Once flying around I immediately noticed one of the bigger and more obvious things that has changed is that the aircraft carriers now move. Previously static, these floating behemoths are starting to liven things up. That small change makes setting up a landing far more realistic than some of our early attempts at landing on the carriers at FSExpo. Those attempts at landing were something that tended to end with a lot of crashing and laughter as the hooks were not yet implemented either. But now we have carriers that float right along and tail hooks that work.

The sounds are already starting to get into place too. Engine start sounds are good, there are various mechanical noises for flaps and gear, the engine backfires when the throttle is reduced quickly, there are creaks and groans of the airframe when you yank the airplane into a tight turn, some wind noises are in place, and they even have a little whistle sound off the propellers. It’s already good and if it improves further from here, I’ll be very happy indeed!

There are all kinds of things not here yet too. No combat, no weapon systems of any kind, the aircraft can crash into aircraft carriers and then begin to spin around hilariously, the tail hook works but there’s no visible wire to hook it to just yet. These aren’t criticisms, this is what a pre-alpha software looks like.

There is a lot that still needs to happen before this pre-alpha becomes an alpha that then becomes a beta and on towards a released product. The developers know the mountain they need to climb but they’ve already gotten past the foothills and they’ve done it relatively quickly and ably in my estimation!

Six minutes of gameplay

As much as writing and screenshots come first, I’m going to lean a little more into video this year on Stormbirds to help illuminate certain features and so here we go with some clips from some of my gameplay with Combat Pilot so far.

The promise of Combat Pilot

As Combat Pilot continues to evolve in a way that is considerably more transparent than any combat flight sim that I can think of in recent memory, this early pre-alpha version is more than just a bit of software. It’s also a hopeful promise of more to come.

The overt and obvious premise is that while Combat Pilot’s core features continue to be developed, this early version of the sim gives us a pair of iconic aircraft, two famous Battle of Midway era aircraft carriers to land on and the ability to start our own practice of landing aircraft on aircraft carriers. As one of the hardest things to do in aviation, practising carrier landings is a great first step towards a more complete combat flight sim experience and this seems like a great way to get us started.

This sim still has a long way to go and building a ground-up newly developed combat flight sim isn’t something that has been done in decades. What I see before me now, on my home PC for the first time, is still impressive enough to fill me with plenty of hope. I look forward to seeing this project continue to work towards its ultimate goal of a Pacific WWII combat flight sim with all of the fun, challenge and realism that it can muster.

Learn more about Combat Pilot over on their official website!