Situational Awareness
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You’re at 25,000 feet, enroute to your target. Your loadout is two AGM88’s, AIM120’s, and AIM9’s.
How to maintain situational awareness?
In the above scenario I have the FCR set to RWS, with range set to 20 miles, azimuth sweep 60 degrees, and a full 4 bar scan. I cross reference contacts with the RWR, and periodically request picture from AWACS.
What is the preferred method for maintaining situational awareness? What techniques do you use? And how does it differ between air-to-air and air-to-ground roles?
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I can’t give you a good answer as it’s something I need to improve, especially given that I haven’t flown MP in a LONG time.
I’ve started marking nearby CAPs as PPTs so that I know where friendlies should be. If I get in bother I can always drag them out towards the CAP as a plan B. You could try ULS mode when flying towards the target. Remember though, that bar 4 is very slow. It’s good for just monitoring the airspace, but if you know you have a target 40nm out at FL200, then you can decrease the azimuth and bar scan so the RADAR is sweeping over less airspace.
IMO planning plays a huge part in forming a good SA. Mark all known ground threats as PPTs near the flight plan. Anything else that appears en route, MARK them using FCR, TGP; perhaps not OFLY
You can jot down their co-ords from the DED (Markpoints start at STPT 26) and add PPTs using those coords with the mission planner and WDP.Harry (Formerly Amraam at Frugals etc.)
(I'm not currently active with ViperDrivers, but these guys are the best BMS school out there!)
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knowing where you are
knowing what’s happening on the radio wavesbasically picturing mentally the position of friendly assets and enemy forces - using the radio reports, awacs instructions and onboard sensors
- RWR in search mode (especially in SEAD) will give you a better heads up than RWR not in search mode
- if loaded, use the HTS pod page for SAM awareness as well
- if you have wingman, use IDM in your package
- FCR: your range is too low, at 20 Nm if you have a contact you’re probably screwed because by the time you react the guy is within your MAR and he fired first
i’d suggest working at least with 40 Nm
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+1 to 20nm being a bit too close. 40nm or 80nm if you want to look “further out.”
Also listen to AWACS and other “popup” calls, know where they are in relation to bullseye, know where you are in relation to bullseye, and you’ll know whether the new “threat” should concern you or not. While you can ask “picture” or “nearest threat” from AWACS, there are times that enemy aircraft might slip through. When you have a contact on radar, lock it and ask AWACS to “declare.”
When you’re closer to the target, you stop thinking about the air threats and you start thinking about how you’re goint to get your job done… assuming you’re on an A-G mission. Your A-A SA will drop, no way around that at all. You can only focus on one thing at a time.
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As above, I spend my life requesting picture, delcaring targets (and locking them up to get their call sign if friendly), plotting mentally where the bullseye calls are, and using the radar to see what activity there is around the next steerpoint. IDM is very very useful and it is only recently that I have started to exploit it fully…
I also debrief a lot using ACMI (in fact turning it on is on my FENCE check). I am still amazed at what was going on around me at the time that I had not idea about (and I do a good line in doing turns to put me right over enemy ground unit!), however in time thinking back on my mental picture during the sortie versus what was happening, it has got much much better.
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Just one more bit:
too much information kills information:
In MP we often found out that the constant and incessant flow of information from awacs was actually decreasing our SA because it was preventing us to communicate properly
this was a consequence of 12 guys each asking pictures and declare and vector to nearest threat
when you fly MP or with larger group, discipline must be maintained as to who talks to awacs.
if all ask the same stuff on their personal level to the awacs, then the awacs will talk too much with irrelevant and duplicate information and the SA will go down the drain.So one of the very thing to help maintain SA is to maintain comm discipline
Red Dog
Reality if for ppl who can't handle simulation -
agree with others here
FCR at 20NM your just asking for trouble 40NM is a min for me if your flying with others set scan heights for each ie if your two ship get your wingie to scan low while your scanning high.
comm discipline is rly important you don’t want to get SA saturated its just as bad as not having any SA
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You’re at 25,000 feet, enroute to your target. Your loadout is two AGM88’s, AIM120’s, and AIM9’s.
How to maintain situational awareness?
In the above scenario I have the FCR set to RWS, with range set to 20 miles, azimuth sweep 60 degrees, and a full 4 bar scan. I cross reference contacts with the RWR, and periodically request picture from AWACS.
What is the preferred method for maintaining situational awareness? What techniques do you use? And how does it differ between air-to-air and air-to-ground roles?
Get a human wingman, fly together. Use the link for SA. Longer range sweeps, less bars (2 each, one guy is high, the other low). Air to ground is really an air to air mission where you will stop when in the target area to padlock on the ground. At which point, you want to hope you have someone with you to keep up long range SA on whats incoming. RL, that might be your AWACS monitoring groups while you proceed on your strike.
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You’re at 25,000 feet, enroute to your target. Your loadout is two AGM88’s, AIM120’s, and AIM9’s.
How to maintain situational awareness?
In the above scenario I have the FCR set to RWS, with range set to 20 miles, azimuth sweep 60 degrees, and a full 4 bar scan. I cross reference contacts with the RWR, and periodically request picture from AWACS.
What is the preferred method for maintaining situational awareness? What techniques do you use? And how does it differ between air-to-air and air-to-ground roles?
What do you have on your other MFD? I think it’s more granular than just AA vs AG as well. Your attention will be focused different for SEAD than it is for Strike, same applies to Sweep vs CAP/DCA. Hopefully, since you’re carrying 88s, you’re showing the HAD on your other MFD? If so, you can think of it like teaching a teenager to drive a car…constantly moving your vision around the inside and outside. Sensor to sensor, or MFD to MFD.
Your attention will be different even from one SEAD to the next, depending if you have pre-planned targets or you’re just up for hunter killer/target of opportunity. Pre-planned DEAD with a fixed target location means you can more or less focus solely on the AA picture, so long as you do proper mission planning and know where the ground threats are (Marked via PPT), adjust your ingress/egress to minimize exposure to SAMs, and set your pre-attack stpt to be just further than your estimated range at 25k ft for the 88s. Once you cross that stpt, your attention focuses on the AG engagement only as long as need be to engage and egress. Whereas for a S/D or target of opportunity flight, you will need to focus more on the HAD to find and engage targets in the target area, which means you are relying on RWR or AWACS to hopefully keep you informed of the air picture.
The FCR range has been beat to death, so I’ll make another note that for ranges less than 80, TWS has almost the same fidelity in the game as RWS, and provides you with a little more info on targets such as their direction of flight. It also makes it easier to engage multiple bandits with 120s if you’re already in TWS.
I wholeheartedly agree with Planehazza: In general, proper mission planning is one of the best SA tools you can have. Know the map, bullseye location, target location, and threats. Don’t just accept the auto-generated flight path for a mission, plan your sortie and adjust the flight path to your needs. Make sure to take the time to recon and mark AAA and SAM locations. Use the stpt lines to setup a “FLOT” on the HSD so you have an idea when your’re relatively safe and when you aren’t, it also makes it much easier in the heat of going defensive to know which way to turn and run if you need to when there is a big line drawn across the HSD. Don’t discount marking friendly SAM units with PPTs as well. If you’re being chased it’s rather convenient to know where a Patriot battery or friendly airbase is and start moving in that direction.
Take the time to study the map beforehand. There was recently a pretty lengthy discussion on Bullseye calculations and quickly picturing the battlespace when you hear AWACS make bullseye calls in this forum. If you take off and don’t know the Bullseye location of your target area, you are wrong. If you are ingressing to an AG target and hear AWACS call out bandits at a bullseye, you should not have to do any math in your head to at least have a general idea if they are close to your target area, which will immediately change your focus. But for that to be true, you need to know where your target is in relation to BE beforehand. SA is just as much about confidence as it is about using and understanding the systems around you. Knowing you have a good plan in place before takeoff makes it easier to focus on the real time stuff.
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With the loadout you described, I would assume(?) that you are going out to do SEAD, yeah?
There are a lot of ways to accomplish SEAD, so you should know what type you are planning to implement. This all goes to mission planning…
You should know where to expect your SAM targets, and when they are likely to go active, (when some blue air is going to fly through a particular mez) so it’s not a surprise when they pop up… Where those mezzes are, incase YOU fly through them (again, mission planning)
Have your right MFD on HTS or at least HAS. I’ve found myself manually flipping through the pages looking for different active emitters… Seems like there should be a better way to do that?For A-A, unfortunately you probably need to just ask AWACS all the time for closest group, or closest threat.
Unfortunately, by the time AWACS tells you about a threat, it’s already wayyyyy too close for comfort (for my comfort anyway) It’s already a popup threat by the time the AI AWACS warns you about it, and ideally you should have targeted and shot it a long time before that… (or run away from it, a long time ago). +1 on getting your scan out to 40… You can pick up bigger stuff even further out, but you probably won’t be able to do much with it until it’s at or within 40.+1 on getting an human wingman, who knows how to work together.
+1 again on getting a human AWACS who knows what they are doing.I’ve seen most times, red air probably won’t mess with you, if you don’t mess with them (unless they are specifically fragged on a sweep, dca, or intercept). A flight of red strikers will fly right past you and go on to their target if you don’t kick the bee’s nest. They probably won’t even be pointed out to you if you asked for “nearest threat”. But they might show up if you ask for picture, which gives you “nearest group”.
That’s probably not realistic, but it’s a feature of the game’s AI. So, exploit it, I suppose.
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One thing I thought about because my SA is very bad - activating labels for a few flights in order to get a feeling for distances and behaviour.
I didn’t do it yet, but everytime I got shot because of lost SA, I think again about it. If I look at the FCR and see 7 contacts in front of me, I’m too slow to check them all. Meanwhile a missile is already inbound.
So not only to get a feeling regarding behaviour and distances, but also about speed and dimensions.Another example of this is speed/height/distance units. At the beginning I was always calculating kts to km/h, nm to km, ft to m - but converting units is totally senseless - you have to get a feeling on how the plane behaves and how close you are to the floor on 1000ft, 150’ 200’.
You need to know how the airframe behaves at 140 kcas, 350 kcas, and you have to get a feeling about how many seconds it takes to run 20nm.Not realistic either, but I think I will really do it for a few flights
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One thing I thought about because my SA is very bad - activating labels for a few flights in order to get a feeling for distances and behaviour.
I didn’t do it yet, but everytime I got shot because of lost SA, I think again about it. If I look at the FCR and see 7 contacts in front of me, I’m too slow to check them all. Meanwhile a missile is already inbound.
So not only to get a feeling regarding behaviour and distances, but also about speed and dimensions.Another example of this is speed/height/distance units. At the beginning I was always calculating kts to km/h, nm to km, ft to m - but converting units is totally senseless - you have to get a feeling on how the plane behaves and how close you are to the floor on 1000ft, 150’ 200’.
You need to know how the airframe behaves at 140 kcas, 350 kcas, and you have to get a feeling about how many seconds it takes to run 20nm.Not realistic either, but I think I will really do it for a few flights
In my opinion that is only going to handicap you in the long run, truthfully it will probably degrade your SA even further because you’ll get used to knowing where the bandits are and when you turn labels off again you’re just back to square one. I’d recommend just practicing reading your radar and learning the group labels associated with the radar picture: range, azimuth, echelon, walls, and ladders.
Reference this if it helps:
Another big deal is learning the intercept timeline, so commit (40-60 miles) -> targeting (usually 30 miles) -> meld/sorting (25 miles) -> shooting/decision range (25-15 miles) -> minimum abort range (13-18 miles depending on threat). The timeline of an intercept is 2-3 minutes (assuming a 40 mile start) so you can plan accordingly. Often on a self-escorted strike where we can see the target area is clear and we have contacts at 40-70 miles away from the target, we can quickly assess if we need to skip the target and go for the air threat, or if we have the time to hit the target and then press the air threat. Sometimes you’ll have air threats over your target and you simply flow to them, kill them before resetting the strike if the MC will allow a late or adjusted TOT. This is all part of the strike decision making process on ingress.
As far as learning to judge time to fly a certain distance, at typical speeds the F-16 will fly a mile every 7-10 seconds, so for 10 miles this equates to approximately a minute give or take. You will fly for 3.5-5 minutes to travel 40 miles. If you’re intercepting something with a 180AA or close to 180AA then your intercept timeline will be half (again assuming a 40 mile start). Or approximately 2 minutes.
Finally another big piece of it all is superior formation handing. Not like in an air show, but the wingman knowing their contracts, roles, and responsibilities while being able to communicate about threats, friendlies, ect operating in/out of the AO, is the keystone to increasing situational awareness in the modern combat environment. Your wingmen being where you can see them, use them, and direct them to complete the mission.
Anyway, didn’t mean to give you a red herring if it’s too much to understand at this point, but this is a very good thread with a lot of good info from many that fly the sim a lot.
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Redshift - would you mind if I added those into the FCR Manual?
Also not sure about the comments. E.g. the first one - that looks more like 20 nm not 15nm, and the second look like 20nm not 10nm! What am I missing?
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Carefull…copyrighted material…
Believe it is from a BEM… -
Thanks for all the information so far. I’ll post a summary of thoughts later.
What are you doing with your radios during the flight?
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Carefull…copyrighted material…
Believe it is from a BEM…Actually documents, manuals, and works by the US government are not eligible to be protected by copyright (as anything the US govt produces is owned by the people) and as such rmax is free to use them in his FCR document.
Redshift - would you mind if I added those into the FCR Manual?
Also not sure about the comments. E.g. the first one - that looks more like 20 nm not 15nm, and the second look like 20nm not 10nm! What am I missing?
They are in fact 15 miles and 10 miles, approximately. The first example the lead group is 3-4 ticks away from the trail group which is 15 or 20 miles. You’re also seeing the contact history so it makes it look further back on the FCR than it is. The ticks are what you use to estimate, you always provide a rounded mileage and not the exact mileage as well which could be another reason there’s a little difference. You just need to provide enough information for everyone to have SA on that group formation.
Full comms for it would be, “2 GROUPS RANGE 15, LEAD GROUP BULLSEYE 240/30 20 THOUSAND HOSTILE, TRAIL GROUP 20 THOUSAND HOSTILE.” and you can also add directional amplifier if it helps SA such as “TRACK SOUTH.”
What’s cool about group labeling is you can quickly call what the picture is in one sentence instead calling each package individually, reducing the chatter on the radio and giving a much more clear SA. It’s a lot easier to pick out a group picture on the radar than to make heads/tails of a bunch of single contacts called out with bullseye.
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Actually documents, manuals, and works by the US government are not eligible to be protected by copyright (as anything the US govt produces is owned by the people) and as such rmax is free to use them in his FCR document.
Unless it was produced by a contractor on request from the government…
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Unless it was produced by a contractor on request from the government…
Without getting too deep into it, there maybe some limited applications in that regard, however the ATTP 3-1 was produced by the USAF and therefore would be governed under 17 USC paragraph 105.59 which means no copyright protection at least in general. In some respects the US govt would have copyright over another country using the work and publishing it, but for our purposes (using them for the simulator) most definitely not.
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Without getting too deep into it, there maybe some limited applications in that regard, however the ATTP 3-1 was produced by the USAF and therefore would be governed under 17 USC paragraph 105.59 which means no copyright protection at least in general. In some respects the US govt would have copyright over another country using the work and publishing it, but for our purposes (using them for the simulator) most definitely not.
True, I wasn’t arguing with you, just pointing out to people who may not know that not everything the Military uses is produced solely in-house by Government agencies, and therefore some training manuals and equipment documentation produced by contractors would fall under copyright law.
The other piece you were referring to is called ITAR control, which prevents export of certain things to foreign nations. This can apply to anything from weapons or equipment manuals, to encryption schemes, or actual equipment and even aircraft. Should also be noted that something does not need to be classified to be ITAR controlled.
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True, I wasn’t arguing with you, just pointing out to people who may not know that not everything the Military uses is produced solely in-house by Government agencies, and therefore some training manuals and equipment documentation produced by contractors would fall under copyright law.
No worries, definitely wasn’t arguing lol!!!
Just was elaborating on the subject, I don’t want folks to be scared to use the material, the copyright word can be a sticky icky poo poo head.
