Simviation Forums

I seem to have trouble with carrier landings, here's my standard practice:

Spawn at Midway Atoll
place AICarrier at 10 nm away
take off and keep at 200 IAS until ~5 nm out
slow to 160-170 until <1 nm out
slow to 150 or less for landing

I land with the nose about 5 degrees up and always plow it into the deck, with crashes off, I land.
With them on I crash, any help?

what are you flying? some plane's gear is more tolerant than others

Default F/A-18 Hornet

1. Is your tailhook down ?
2. Are you hitting the arrestor cable area ?
3. Are you on the glideslope and therefore keeping the Meatball green ?

Cheers
Karol

I have the same problem with the default F18. Tomcat no problem but the F18 always seems to bury it's nose gear when the cable catches.

Zaphod.

I'm using the "aicarrier program and just love it. I haven't tried the default f-18 as I only use WWII props and NO tailhooks. It's much more fun. 

Tail hook down,

Last or second to last cable (Mabye part of the problem)

Never paid attention to the meatball, I'll need to try that

I maybe wrong here , but I think that the approach has to be within certain limits both of being aligned with the centre line and the glideslope .
the glideslope will be in the vicinity of 3 to 3.5 degrees.
The Meatball is green when within approach parameters.

Unable to test as I do not have AIcarriers , I only use the freeware Nimitz and Carriers 2006 .

Cheers
Karol

Like in real life you should never land with more than 30% of fuel on board.  Also the Gear-Damage-Threshold of the FSX FA-18 is 1600 fpm, which is more stringent than many 3rd party add-on fighters.  You can fix this if you're comfortable with editing Aircraft.cfg files.  Go to Gear section, the 4th numbers from left, change all 3 gear numbers, I raise my to 2400 fpm.  Also the ideal alpha for the FA-18 is 8.1 when landing.

[quote]Like in real life you should never land with more than 30% of fuel on board.

Hello SkyHawk00

Alpha is the Angle-of-Attack, in the real FA-18 the ideal alpha for landing is 8.1 degrees but in FSX it's lower, 5-7 degrees or even lower depends on weight and speed.

Are you approaching too fast or too high?

The following is from a file available here at at simviation under FSX Military

Interesting...
I didn't realise it was even possible to adjust the amount of tension on the arresting wires. Presumably this is simulated within the aircraft.cfg.
I wonder if it is possible to modify the default F18's .cfg to achieve the same result?

Zaphod :-?

..reducing the fuel to 30% certainly makes a big difference and I am now able to land the F18 without ploughing the flight deck with the nose! Helps with the Tomcat also. Nice spot.
Zaphod

I finally got it to work