The F14b JSBsim by Richard Harrison

[Gijs]

This magnificent F14b with FDM JSBSim of Richard Harrison, this plane is available at the following link:
http://www.zaretto.com/f-14b

I recommend everyone to try it, is very nice and flying in a more realistic way the old F14b.

I do not know the type of license, I hope it can be present in the hangar of official FGFS.

[Johan G]

I do not know the type of license, I hope it can be present in the hangar of official FGFS.

Given that the one he based it on is published under GNU GPLv2, his modified aircraft is also licensed under that license. Unfortunately it is only stated explicitly in data/COPYING, not in the actual aircraft folder, so he may or may not be aware of it. Given that he have made sure that his changes are documented I would guess he is aware of it.

In any case it would be a good idea to ask him for permission to add it to one of the official repositories (fgdata or FGAddon?), both out of courtesy and to avoid any misunderstandings.


I probably want to test ride it myself...

[legoboyvdlp]

Going to try it... hope I see menu so I can fly it

[someguy]

Wonderful job, Richard! This F-14 is lovely to fly. I like how the stick gets heavier at speed. It was a snap to land seat-of-the-pants on a shortish field, using only flaps and airbrake, no auto-anything.

[Vladimir Akimov]

Will try this. Looks very nice

[Richard]

Thanks for all the feedback and the great screenshot.

Given that the one he based it on is published under GNU GPLv2, his modified aircraft is also licensed under that license

I'd be happy to have it included in the base package and confirm that the licence is indeed GPL; (I didn't explicitly include a COPYING because it didn't seem necessary as it is based on a GPL work)

... F-14 is lovely to fly. I like how the stick gets heavier at speed. It was a snap to land seat-of-the-pants on a shortish field, using only flaps and airbrake, no auto-anything.

Thanks again; that's how I'm hoping it'll be received. One of my main motivation for doing this is I wanted something that felt right both within the normal flight envelope and also departures from the normal envelope (stalls, spins etc.)

There are a few areas I've got left to tune, one of them is high speed (>M1.0) drag which I haven't yet done because it could be that I revise the engines model to be a little more realistic (I've already tuned the engines to the limit of what can be done with the current JSBSim propulsion system).

I'm currently working on adding a working ARA-63 Carrier Landing System (i.e. ILS for the Navy) as carrier landings are hard.

[legoboyvdlp]

That's good. With one tiny mod to a file (changing Tomcat Controls to n=51) I successfully started my F-14 career!!

[Richard]

That's good. With one tiny mod to a file (changing Tomcat Controls to n=51) I successfully started my F-14 career!!

Do you know why this was necessary; I'm assuming that there is a clash with something else; but I can't see what that would be.

Do you think I need to change it in the release version?

[onox]

Really nice to fly. Couldn't land it on a carrier though because the hook wouldn't catch the arrestor cables or would bounce off of the surface

Does the model make use of any constants (CL?) that JSBsim provides to animate the bending of the wings? Although the effect would probably be very very small. Not like an airliner anyway.

[legoboyvdlp]

Richard, it was because I have Bombable and Merlion installed.

[someguy]

Really nice to fly. Couldn't land it on a carrier though because the hook wouldn't catch the arrestor cables or would bounce off of the surface

That sounds like your approach was too high and/or too fast.

I made a couple of carrier traps without any problems, one using autothrottle and one without. If you follow the FLOLS ball and keep the AoA indicator centered on the yellow circle, it plops right down and catches the wire.

Note: to make the FLOLS work, the ship must be heading into the wind. You can't change the course of an AI carrier, but you do have control over the wind via the weather dialog. I added a new weather preset for Nimitz ops, wind 200 @ 3 knots.

[Thorsten]

You can't change the course of an AI carrier

I thought you can command it to turn to recovery course in the menu (or just change the AI scenario definition...)

Couldn't land it on a carrier though because the hook wouldn't catch the arrestor cables or would bounce off of the surface

Which carrier? It seems there's something odd going on with the Vinson. I've tried three approaches today and didn't catch either (and I have done this a gazillion times with the YaSim version of the F-14b) , but I can't launch from the Vinson - whereas launching from Nimitz worked fine,

[someguy]

Ah, I'd forgotten about the recovery course option. For years, my AI Nimitz has been sitting still, zero knots, so I can share it with others who have made the same edit to their scenario file. I haven't visited Vinson for a year or more.

[Richard]

Which carrier? It seems there's something odd going on with the Vinson. I've tried three approaches today and didn't catch either (and I have done this a gazillion times with the YaSim version of the F-14b) , but I can't launch from the Vinson - whereas launching from Nimitz worked fine,

I've been testing this tonight and whilst it is hard to land on a carrier the key thing is you need to come in with full flaps, high AoA (orange donut on the AoA indexer) - I haven't yet got the right figures; but I'm finding that around 124 knots with about 7degrees pitch up is quite good; there a lot of work on the throttle but only minor tweaks on the stick. Clearly I'm not a naval aviator and there are F-14 sized dents all over my the stern of the Nimitz that proves this....

When I use my script to position at the right position, altitude and heading, I can catch the wires most of the time which makes me believe that if I were good enough to get the aircraft lined up and what they call "in the groove" I'd probably manage a lot better.

I will recheck the hook length and position just in case there is something I've measured incorrectly.

I should be releasing an update with the ARA-63 Carrier landing system (and flight director bars) in the next day or so (it's on github already). It is a little easier with this new system active as at least you can see how badly you're doing before impacting the wrong part of the carrier.

[onox]

Which carrier? It seems there's something odd going on with the Vinson. I've tried three approaches today and didn't catch either (and I have done this a gazillion times with the YaSim version of the F-14b) , but I can't launch from the Vinson - whereas launching from Nimitz worked fine,

That small French carrier.