In case you haven’t seen it, the History Channel has a new Friday-night series called “Dogfight.” Sponsored–and assumedly done–by Microsoft, it uses the best of Flight Simulator animation technology to reproduce some fo the great aircraft battles of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, etc. (Since they also use excellent on-camera interviews with surviving combatants, I doubt we’ll see any earlier than that.) You literally experience the dogfights from every possible point of view, from in-cockpit to a Sidewinder’s pov. They diagram the maneuvering as well, which begins to make apparent the complexity of energy management. (I’ve had some air-combat maneuvering training, and ACM still frequently baffles me…)
Very little stock footage, most of it is animation. A week ago, there was an hour-long show on the great Korean War MiG-Alley sweeps and several of the most important match-ups. Last night (11/10) they did the Robin Olds-led match-ups with MiG-21s–missiles versus cannon–and I think next week they’re doing some Flying Tigers stuff.
Fabulous series. Don’t miss it–much better than that highly touted Nova on air combat earlier this week, which I thought was nothing more than a compendium of the usual I-Flew-for-the-Fuhrer stock footage, which we’ve all seen a million times. “Dogfight” is truly new stuff.
That’s an interesting and valid point, though I wonder how much it has to do with the difficulty of finding the surviving Korean and Vietnamese aces, or at least dogfighters. Those have been the only two wars covered so far (as far as I know), and I’ll bet we see a German and perhaps Japanese ace on camera before long.
Great series. I just watched the F-86 episode on the DVR, great stuff! Thanks for the above link. Looks like so far everything is from an American Perspective. It would be nice to see them make the series a bit more international and go into the good old German, Japanese, Italian, Australian and others.
world war 2 was covered in the original 2 hour show.
I really like the combat simulations with the computer technology. it looks really great.
But as far as non-american aces, I have to say i am rather more impressed with korean/vietnamese aces who excelled while facing the most advanced and formidable fighting machine inb the world, than american aces, who had the most advanced infrastructure in the world to back their kills up. (not that the Americans were unskilled, quite the opposite)
But I really dont want to start a flame war here.
I for one would like to see them cover WWI, even if they dont have the live pilot interviews. The dogfights there are the stuff of legend.
I’ll tape it next week after hearing these good reviews.
A while ago (maybe a year at least now?) the History Channel had a 2-hour special with digital recreations of some notable dogfights. I thought that particular special was pretty bad: the CGI was so-so and the art direction was terrible in terms of the way they laid out the scenes with the camera angles, etc. Even worse the explanations of what was going on were so simplistic it didn’t seem like the writers really understand what was happening. It was typical of the trend I’ve seen in cable “educational” television where about ten minutes of informative content is stretched into an hour, the rest of the space being filled by eye-candy, uninformative babbling and the three-minute recap following each two-minute commercial.
If this new series bucks that trend I’ll be very pleased.
Tankmaster, thanks to the link provided by Ted Healey, you can see that though there was a small amount of WWII material in the first program, it was hardly “covered.”
Here’s the list of episode titles, from Ted’s link:
Hope they do a series on both Saburo Sakai and Enrich Hartman. Any fan of WWII Air combat should know these two names.
I read Saburo’s book Samurai and really enjoy it. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the PAcific war. Not only does it reveal what it’s like on the other side, it also paints a stark human contrast on the enemy. Saburo of course lost his left eye over Guadacanal and is the only few Japanese aces that survived the war (he’s dead now I think).
Enrich Hartman of course needs no introduction. As the world’s “Aces of all Aces” with something like 378 kills and over 800 combat sorties, he’s whole career is one of legend! If fact, when the Russians took out something like a 25 million rubies reward for anyone who can kill or capture “bubi” no one took up on the offer! Russian pilots scattered when ever they saw his ME-109 with that distinctive tulip marking (He of course later gave his aircraft to a newer pilot and he switched to an aircraft without the distinctive marking). This series needs an introduction to Enrich or else it won’t be a dogfight series without the ace of all aces.
Of course there are the ol’ standbys like Adolf Galland, Gabreski, Rober Johnson, Boelcki(SP?), etc. But yea, some obscure pilots like Russians (WWII and Korean), Chinese (Korean), VC etc would be nice.
Anything on early start of dogfights needs Bolecki (SP?). This is the man that invented the rules of dogfighting! Some, like get close as possible before open fire may not be as important today in the age of missiles but others, like keep a clear situation all around you for at least several miles and no matter if it’s successful or not, make one pass at an enemy then disenage immediatly before attacking again and do not make an attack until you are sure of yourself still apply more than ever. One pilot during an airshow told me that anyone who forget any one of Bolecki dictum is gonna go home in a flamming coffin! It goes to show how much common sense and logic last and still works today as it was over the skys of Europe during WWI!
I think the Dogfight series is cool also. It’s neat to see a recreation of how the battles took place.
If ya’ll like this stuff, you should seriously consider buying the Forgotten Battles flight sim series for your computer. You can fly a sim that has better graphics and more accurate flight models than what the show uses. The detail in the sim is incredible, right down to every gauge in the cockpit working just like they are supposed to. Throw in a nice set of joystick, throttle and pedals and get a TrackIR, which tracks the movement of your head so you can look around the cockpit just by moving your head a little, and it’s really cool.
There are tons of historical missions to download from different sites. I’m in an online squadron, the virtual 352nd Fighter Group, with about 20 guys across the US. We get together twice a week online with the assistance of TeamSpeak, a voice communication program. Many of the missions we fly together are escort missions based on historical missions the actual 352ndFG flew. During the spring, we created a mission to simulate, and honor, the Doolittle Raid. We held several practice sessions prior to the actual mission day to learn how to squeak ever last bit of mileage out of our B-25s. (luckily we have several actual pilots and a flight instructor in a group) The mission was set up so that if you didn’t set your prop pitch, manafold pressure, etc., just right, you wouldn’t have enough fuel to drop your bombs on the target and make it to the airfield on the “China” mainland. It was a lot of fun.
Anyway, it’s obvious many of you love aircraft and aircraft history. Try jumping in the cockpit and experience it a little also. [:)]
Yes its a pretty awesome series. My only complaint is how some of the aircraft “fly”. They put so much work into the aircraft, background, and camera angles, but the posture of some of the aircraft doesn’t look right. For example, the Phantom fly’s with kind of a tail down attitude in level flight, the ones in the show are flying flat. and some of the shots of the Mustangs and Lightnings don’t look right either. I think it is due to how a real aircraft reacts on it’s center of gravity and aerodynamics. If they could fix that, it would be impossible to tell these clips from real footage. Just my 2cents [:-^]
And I also think that the range and relative speed between
aircraft looks strange. That is to say that they are often too
close together, and moving too slow. IMO.