What IL2 means to me ~ or ~ How I spent my summer vacation flying in two world wars

[Flyingwrench]

 

 

What IL2 means to me ~ or ~ how I spent my summer vacation flying in two world wars

 

All in all, IL2 VR fulfills all my boyhood dreams in ways I never dreamt. My last life ended in a 1938 military training accident that left me with an unfulfilled, burning desire to fly in combat. I spent the first half of my present life pursuing a goal that could never be fulfilled in this life, or so I once thought. I was sixteen before I finally came to grips with the fact I would never be a WWII fighter pilot, as that plane of existence had departed the field before I was born, but still the desire burned within. Although I had died, the desire lived on, so I immersed myself in aviation, first as a mechanic, then as a professional pilot. While I did manage to fly various WWII aircraft, flying those antiques just wasn’t the same, except maybe those brief moments in that Stearman over Mississippi. For those moments, I was back where I left off, back where I always felt I belonged. But the moment passed and I moved on to ag-flying.

 

Ironically, the Grumman ag-cat was kissing cousin to the Boeing F4B I had always wanted to fly. Ag flying is all stick and rudder and that’s all I ever wanted from flight. No radios, no instruments, just stick and rudder. The government ended that career move with a single stroke of the pen. Next came cargo flying around the Caribbean in C-45s and C-47s. After that, it was soaring operations management with tow-plane flying and glider demo rides along with skydiving and flying jump planes. Then it was corporate jets. It did not take long flying jets to discover there was nothing for me in the soulless nature of the procedural and instrument ladened, Jet A-soaked, turbine environment. Today, one is just a rocket man burning out his fuse up there alone five day a week. Not long after that, I burned out on the dog-eat-dog world of civil aviation where I never enjoyed the camaraderie of the tight knit, pre-war, military pilot fraternity that had existed only to dissipate by degree after the war.

 

I had finally grown sick of the regulations. Wry sayings of those days described my issues with aviation, to wit, “One cannot leave the ground without breaking at least three FARs” ~ and ~ “The weight of the paperwork must equal the weight of the aircraft before it can leave the ground” and none of this had ever taken me where I had always wanted to go. My last stint was flying search and rescue missions in Alaska where it was rare to find survivors. I thought, what am I doing? How long will it be before they are looking for me out here? At last, I would not even drive past an airport if I could avoid it.

 

Years passed that turned into decades.

 

Leaving aviation I went into computers, going right back to procedures, but the new technology fascinated me as flying once had. One day I went into a store to find a computer display running Aces of the Pacific. I was mildly intrigued but not enough to pursue the game. Later I set up a few role-playing games for client’s children in my spare time just to see what they were all about, but again, I was not really interested, as I have never been a game player of any sort. I began looking at virtual reality in the early 1990s and saw the possibility of it taking me where I wanted to go. However, my technical background made it obvious it had a long way to go before that would happen. Besides, I wasn’t really interested in flying anyway. Retirement arrived and I bought a sailboat with the intent of circumnavigating the planet. Alas, an ugly divorce made that another impossible dream. I eventually moved off the boat and back onto the shore to look for my fiddlers green.

 

I finished writing a book of historical quasi-fiction about the life of Jesus (I assure you it’s nothing like what you think of the man. In fact it is so far removed from the traditional narration you might not recognize the story). After that, routine set in; mind numbing routine that had long been the utter antithesis of my life’s philosophy of seeking adventurous, new horizons. I grew old, fat and bored, filling my days with comments and stories like this one. At one point I began looking at aviation again, poking around the potential purchase of a light aircraft, but it did not take long to remember why I left aviation in the first place.

 

Eventually I ran across IL2 and Rise of Flight so I purchased a state-of-the art gaming machine instead, along with various sims, including MS Flight sim. I went the whole route with IR tracking and a seventy-inch monitor that provided a life-size cockpit view. At first, it was a blast from the past. I even joined a WWI jagdstaffel, but the egos were more than I could handle at my age. After a year or so, I gave it up once again. Watching a screen, even a life-sized one, just did not cut it after being there for more than 2700 hrs. Something about flying around my living room put me off the experience.    

 

Patience is the key

 

Then one day a couple of years ago, I was surfing around various cresting technological waves, when I paid a visit to virtual reality (I had once been a surfer in real life). It was then I discovered the technology had advanced to the point it was worth looking into. However, there were still problems with things like narrow range of vision, the “view through a toilet paper roll” issue, “screen door effect” and low resolution to contend with, but it was close - really close. Less than a year later Pimax appeared on the scene and looking at the specs and reviews, I knew the time had finally arrived to plunge into the wild blue yonder of visual reality that isn’t. So I purchased another top-of-the line, highest end gaming machine possible, spending less than I did on most of my flight ratings and a Pimax 8KX HMD. After spending some eight months working out various technical issues, with most of that time waiting for a replacement graphics card, I hooked up the components and suddenly there I was, where I had always wanted to be, the place where my heart’s desires had smoldered since before the day I was born into the life that brought me here.

 

A real pilot dies but once, while the VR pilot dies a thousand deaths.

 

One of the most interesting things about VR is the number of different factors one is exposed to, versus the more limited experience of real life encounters. For instance, I never damaged an airplane in real life. The worst damage I ever did was slightly curling some prop tips and wrapping a piece of power line around the wing that tore off part of a spray boom. Nether incident put the aircraft out of service for over a day. While I have had in-flight engine failures at hair-raisingly low altitudes, I pulled off more than one forced landing without incident.

 

By contrast, with VR I finally joined the ranks of those who have landed gear up. I have survived a skidding stop from full flight during a forced landing in an Me-262. I have limped back to the field so shot up it was all I could do to keep the aircraft level. I have lost control of an aircraft, necessitating bailing out. While I experienced such events in real life, it was in the more prosaic form of skydiving. Exiting an aircraft under full control is quite different than making an emergency exit from a disabled aircraft spinning out of control. I have watched the wings fold on my Albatros and Sopwith Camel, riding the wreckage down to an inevitable terminal ending of the flight. Perhaps most interesting of all is the fiery deaths I have experienced. Even though it is VR, the experience of watching flames roar forth from under the instrument panel is unnerving.

 

A VR death in IL2 is fascinating in that it replicates accounts given by people who have had near-death experiences. First, everything goes red with blood or often totally black. Then suddenly one finds themselves detached and outside the aircraft, calmly watching themselves go down in flames or other times looking at the corpse slumped over in the cockpit. Then the aircraft disappears and the view begins moving skyward, towards heaven one might say, before the menu of death comes on with its skull and crossbones informing one they have been killed in action, their mission often failing. For me, the more this happens, the more I become unnerved by the experience. Perhaps because I have felt death’s cold breath on my neck more than once. This leads to a natural inclination to avoid those encounters where one is almost certain to “buy the farm”, as they used to say.

 

Okay, you’re flying alone in your Yak 1 when suddenly you see swarms of Bf-109s spawning before you. One who is acutely aware of the historic replications of these encounters realizes they are heading towards a suicidal encounter when tangling solo with the bad boys of JG52. So the inclination is to dive, divert and duck for cover, heading as fast and far away as quickly as possible, knowing that one will be lucky to get off a single burst before the world goes black once again. It’s just like real life where after a time the only real concern for most combatants is getting out of the situation alive. Of course, when there is no option available, brave heroics occur. You’re in the thick of it now so why not give your best shot at a fight to the finish?

 

The other side of VR is where one has the upper hand as they dive on an enemy bomber formation that are essentially fat, sitting ducks before a heavily armed, cannon equipped fighter. Diving through the formation and blasting aircraft from the sky, one watches for parachutes, hoping the crews get out alive. Sometimes they do, sometime they don’t. Gradually a sick feeling begins to overwhelm the sim pilot as the impact of the mass slaughter in which one is participating comes home in the virtual world. That enemy pilot in his virtual airplane is really no different than a real pilot in a real aircraft, both are just distant points in one’s field of view. 

 

Day after day, mission after mission, on and on it goes as battle fatigue begins setting in. The further one goes in the campaigns, the longer they fly, the more realistically sickening the combat experience becomes. For me this realization has been profound. To think this bloody horror was all I ever wanted from life. I think how much of my life was directed towards fulfilling this very dream. How petty, how narrow my desires were of wanting nothing more than to fly airplanes with the intent of shooting down others flying similar aircraft. The sinuous lines of the fighter hid from me the true purpose of these machines. I had never before looked at combat aircraft as the killing machines they truly are, but IL2 presents the reality of the matter with crystal clarity. Best of all, it manages to accomplish this profound illusion of understanding without actually costing the lives of others.

 

A short word about AI pilots. They are good at their task, really good. One of the most unnerving occurrences is when one pounces on say a flight of three FE2s to engage them. Before long, comes the realization the enemy AI pilots have taken your attack personally and now they turn on you. Suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted as the enemy doggedly pursues you across the landscape. They won’t quit and you fully realize the desperate situation you are in when you fly them directly into the flight path of your squadron mates and they pay no attention to your predicament. Then you realize its you alone against an enemy that will not stop until you stop them or you are dead. More than once, I have had to shoot down a pursuing aircraft so I could land. I began doing this after one tenacious pilot respawned right at the airfield to shoot me out of the sky.

 

Once my aircraft was so badly damaged I could no longer maneuver to engage the enemy. I had taken my own toll on the EA and its performance was suffering from battle damage as well. Yet that did not deter the AI pilot from following me around France at a lower altitude for a considerable time until finally the damage I had inflicted took its toll and the aircraft crashed, allowing me to come in for a safe but wobbly landing. The lesson here is let sleeping AI dogs lie.    

 

Who would have thought it possible to repeatedly live the desires of a past life in one’s present life?

I came into this life with the goal of flying and fighting in the aircraft of two world wars. Initially it mattered not that I would have been killing others in the process. I am now sickened by the thought that this was the prime, burning desire that resulted in my return to this existence. I reflect on the thoughts of Japanese fighter ace Saburō Sakai about his combat experience. “Mr. Sakai became a lay Buddhist acolyte as an act of atonement. He told Mr. Sheftall that he had not killed any creature, ''not even a mosquito,'' since last stepping from the cockpit of his Zero on a hot August day in 1945.” 

The thought of the pettiness and insignificance of these desires now leaves a certain emptiness in my soul. It’s like a once beautiful woman now turned old and ugly. At the same time, I am profoundly grateful IL2 provided the opportunity to experience these desires firsthand, as this was undoubtedly a primary karmic issue I had to work through in this life. I won’t be coming back. Now I can finally move beyond the repeating life cycles of this existence and that is what is most important to the soul. I will be forever grateful to the creators and developers of the IL2 series for the opportunity to resolve my final issues in this life.

Thank you.

 

 

Best regards,

From the Flyingwrench 

 

Edited July 1, 2022 by Flyingwrench
formatting errors

[readyred1]

Respect for these words, I take off my hat.

 

[jollyjack]

We humans must be beasts. Call our selves lucky that all alternative killing actions can be done in VR and IL2 only, and save our souls that way?

[firdimigdi]

"We could wave at the people and buzz in low and make the roofs flap in the prop wash, and pull up and do lazy eights over the town hall, or stay up at 20,000 and line up the cross hairs on the local steel mill or opera house and watch the bombs drop away.  And while the little kids waved at us their houses would topple and the lights would go out and the bomb dust would strangle the living air."

 

- Bert Stiles, Serenade to the Big Bird

 

Beautifully written @Flyingwrench, I must admit this post was not what I expected it to be when I started reading it - some quite profound insight in such a short text, thank you for sharing.

 

However, I must admit I did not require VR to realize what the cannons are for.

 

As a sidenote, I would not mind knowing the title of the book you wrote, if it's still in print.

 

Edited July 3, 2022 by Firdimigdi
formatting, phrasing

[SkychaserGT]

Wow! For once a meaningful comment out of the box. I highly respect your words and your views.

Too bad we won't be seeing you again..

I am myself a commercial heli pilot and love every minute of flying despite the precarious state of affairs one can find himself into. I believe that in few decades, that generation will look upon the planes and helicopters we flew with respect and inevitable sense of how could people in their right sate of mind,fly these aircraft lol. 

Single engine ac and single engine helis need to be treated with a serious amount of scrutiny to avoid situations where respawn is not an option lol. they are not really know for their high degree of reliability ,,

I have accepted long ago that each time I take off may be my last and I'm ok with that. The thrill of flying just overcomes my fears of death. I am not suicidal! i just always loved flying but I am not the happy go lucky type of pilot. I am rather focused in the aircraft as I am flying, knowing damn well that again, respawning is not an option. I never push my luck. I can do very cool stuff in helis and FW but I am fully aware of the risks and always try to minimize them. I have seen too many pilot on airshows trying to do just one more spin or one more maneuver feeling the peer pressure of the crowd they cannot hear or really see and their routine ending in running out of sky.. I do what I planned to do and call it ! If it goes well, great if it I did not go exactly as planned , too bad, but I will live to fly another day ! I have a friend named Jurgys Kayris, A Lithuanian acro demo pilot that worked on developing the SU26M and SU31, Amazing pilot but very aware mentally and physically. He taught Svetlana Kapanina to fly with the same philosophy and are still around today to talk about their amazing life and love with aviation. 

IL2 is a game, but I love that sim. I think that if I would have flown in WW2 and realize the horror that came with it, I probably would have been in the temple right next to Saburo. But IL2 in VR just gives you as you said the experience of flying a collection of birds that are for most out of reach. And when you can fly them, we only fly them mostly at 25% of their capacity at most. I was lucky to experience flying a few warbirds and will always treasure the experience, then again IL2 with a good VR headset is the next best thing after breaking the piggy bank to get one of those WW2 birds, nevermind the insurance and the maintenance ...Comparatively IL2 , the VR headset, the Jet seat pad from Andre's shop, the Kanttorin Kone quadrant throttle, the Winwing or Virpil setups, or other customized peripherals along with a capable rig to make this possible is pretty damn cheap! and very safe lol. I see IL2 like a 3 dimensional chessboard. You win some, you lose some, but I have a few buddies which whom I fly with and we have been tight knitted for over a decade. WW1, WW2 all good. We have some killer moments together and tons of good laughs! If you ever decide to change your mind , You are welcome to join us :). After a long time in WW1 mostly, I tried the Finnish server. I must say that this is an interesting one! Being a real time pilot has its advantages for navigation :)) I still get a kick at even just navigating on long sorties.

I truly enjoyed reading you post. The Weight of the paperwork must equal the weight of the aircraft prior to TO   So very true !!

What is the name of your book ? I would like to get my hands on one !

 

Cheers,  Shay

 

PS: Nice Stearman !

[Raptorattacker]

It's so refreshing t'see someone who hasn't just reverted to 'stock post' and has kind of just passed on a snapshot of a life and just gone where the writing has taken them...
Nice one.

Rap

[Flyingwrench]

The book is entitled "Conspiracy of Man" The life and times of Yeshu (Jesus). The first four chapters of the book can be read here - www.conspiracyofman.com

[Freycinet]

Thanks for the long-read, very inspiring. For the few WWII flying was a magnificent thrill, the Hartmanns and Baders. For the big majority though, it was just the quick realisation of being prey with little hope and a short life expectancy. Little Earthworms gouged on the hook with no possibility of escape. Reading mid-war Lancaster or B-17 crew accounts makes that clear.