TobyV wrote:Are they all AI or is one of them you? The formation looks quite realistic, some of the aircraft appear to move slightly relative to each other and they don't have the jerkiness that I remember some AI aircraft having in FS? The only thing that looked a bit odd was the formation landing where some aircraft appear to land to the right of the runway.
Toby, the answers to your questions are a bit complex and I have answered in another place so here is a cut and paste that will probably answer you:-
The real flight covered in the video occurred on 3rd June 1960...The twelve Hunter FGA9s flew out from UK to Kenya on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd June. We flew in three four ship formations with each four in wide battle formation and I led one of the fours. My PDF file about 208 Squadron in Kenya covers the period including this flight and can be downloaded here:-
http://www.petermcleland.com/dl/208_Squ ... ya_PDF.zip
The PDF file is enclosed in a ZIP and after unzipping can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free download).
Anyway, as we approached the 50th Anniversary of the flight out to Kenya I decided to make a video of each of the six legs that we flew to get there...Politics forced us to fly the following route:-
Stradishall to Luqa in Malta to Nicosia in Cyprus, Nightstop. Then to Tehran in Iran via a point due North of Cyprus to avoid overflying Syria. Then to Sharja in the United Arab Emirates, Nightstop. Then to Khormaksar in Aden and finally to Nairobi airport in Kenya (Eastleigh was to short for our Hunters).
So, the first step was to make an airfield at Stradishall because for some years now it has been a Prison...When the airfield was ready and functioning I took Dave Garwood's Hunter and adjusted the liveries to show our twelve aircraft exactly with the correct registrations and the pilot's names on the left side of each cockpit. Mine was "Echo" XE 609 with my name, Flt. Lt. P. R. E. McLeland...I already had the livery for mine from Dave Garwood and I just had to change the colour of the letter "E" for Echo to yellow on the fin and the nosewheel door and make the rest of the nosewheel door blue. Having got Echo sorted I just adjusted the "Letter" and the Pilot's name to make the other 11 Hunters...Now I had a whole squadron at a working RAF Stradishall and was ready to get testing for the big move to Kenya...And I really wanted to make the flights on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd June 2010, half a Century after the real original flights.
Some things you need to know about Traffic in FS...It only exists for a radius of about 60 nms from YOUR position...Beyond that it simply vanishes and if you are watching it then you are dumped back on the ground where you are. So you can imagine how very interested I was in an app that allowed you to clip yourself onto any AI Traffic aeroplane and thus go with it all the way to its destination because although you were clipped on to it, you were always at the centre of that 60 nms radius circle.
I wanted my 208 Squadron formation to allow me to follow it every mile of the long six leg journey from Stradishall to Nairobi. This formation was all AI Traffic and I was not flying any of them as a pilot...I just clipped onto one of them and took suitable clips of video with Fraps that I could clip together as one video for each of the six legs. I was able to pan myself around using the hat switch and zoom in and out as required.
My next task now that I had a working Stradishall with a complete 208 Squadron was to train them to fly in the various formations required. This required a lot of work with AFCAD to make completely invisible airfields with a runway and taxiway and tower frequency for each aircraft...These invisible airfields needed to be positioned strategically relative to their REAL Departure or Destination airfield and furthermore there needed to be four invisible runways on each of the REAL airfield's runways. ALL these invisible runways needed to have a fictitious airfield name that could be programmed into an AI Traffic Flightplan...The object was that each of the twelve Hunters fly their own individual Flightplan and because they would all call ATC for Take-Off Clearance at the same time, on their own frequency, they would all move together and remain in their formation positions for the rest of the flight to their destination. At their flightplanned destination they would all land on an invisible set of runways SHORT of the REAL destination but alligned with the same runway heading and on the approach path to the real runway with about a mile or two to go. This invisible set of runways would arrange the aircraft in their new formations ready to take-off again for the short run in and break over the REAL destination (in the case of that final leg video that you watched it was three echelons of four aircraft). One other thing that I had to arrange was that the invisible runways on top of the REAL visible runway would link up with the visible REAL airfield's taxiways and parking and normal ATC frequencies...I also had to put special parking for the 12 Hunters in each of the destination's AFCAD files.
