So I had a brief discussion about the 'Miracle on the Hudson' again on a different topic which got me thinking. My whole stance on that issue is that any sane pilot would choose a water landing over a city landing. With that being said, I decided to test that in the sim...now the MS series does essentially 0 damage and has a frankly very odd collision system that instantly pauses the sim when an imminent collision is "detected"...obviously that will not do for my test..
The question then is which sim? Il-2 has awesome damage and collision modeling (although at times it is very comical
). BUT Il-2 does not have an Airbus...but considering I am JUST comparing water landing vs city landing I picked up the C-47 in the UP3 mod and gave it a go.
I selected the 'void' skin that Il-2 has for every plane as the plane white allows for easy identifying of any damage in the model.
Water landing:
Oh no! I flew into a flock of invisible 20mm birds!!
(or I just killed the engines)
aaand touch down....yes the plane is a bit submerged, but trying to dead stick to a smooth water landing and try to get a screen shot from Il-2 made me a bit late on the draw...still, the plane was intact albeit engines 'inoperable' (duh)
Now for the alternative...first one pass with engines on to pick the best place to attempt a landing in a large plane..again, I was comparing city landing to water landing.
My best options boiled down to a park with lots of trees and several inconvienently scattered buildings or the longest and widest straight road in town...I went for the road as trees + buildings are always bad...so I elected just buildings
Sorry that this jumps to the firey end but again, trying to dead-stick a C-47 down a city road takes a bit of concentration go figure!
So Basically what happened here is what one would expect from a LARGE airplane touching down on a city road... I was dead center, same speed as the water landing, same pitch angle and decent rate...but that does not matter if your wings hit some buildings
The damaged building in the foreground on the left hit the left wing about 1/2 way out to the tip. The wing snapped off, I caught fire and started to cart-wheel but then the right wing hit the right building...then Il-2 just said "nope, you're dead! BOOM". It all happened with in a 2 second span of left wing hitting and the BOOM.
Conclusion:
1) do not explain to me the differences between an Airbus and the C-47
2) do not explain to me the differences between Il-2 and real life
3) on points 1 & 2 I am very well aware of them
4) the laws of physics that apply to the Airbus apply to the C-47
5) you do not need super accurate simulation to show that a decent and SAFE water landing dead-stick is entirely possible while hitting some buildings is bad news.
So here it is, a simple example of why I view the 'miracle on the hudson' the way I do. Do not discuss pilot experience, that is beyond this example.
On a side note, can someone PLEASE tell me of some good ways to take Il-2 screen shots and post them here without the clumsy 'print-screen', paste to Paint, then shrink way down to meet the 155kb max requirement?!
I would have preferred posting a video but I have no idea how to post Il-2 tracks here.
Pages: 1
