Carrier Landings

[SkyHawk00]

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?

[c130lover]

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

[SkyHawk00]

Default F/A-18 Hornet

[COBS]

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

[Zaphod]

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.

[RAFSB]

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. 

[SkyHawk00]

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

[COBS]

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

[nnd816]

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.

[SkyHawk00]

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

[nnd816]

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?

[COBS]

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

[Zaphod]

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 :-?

[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

[SkyHawk00]

I finally got it to work