Flying & Combat

Reading the HUD

The HUD is the information drawn over the view. In the cockpit view, some of it moves onto the instrument panel.

Heading tape (top centre)

Your compass heading in degrees, marked with N, E, S and W. North is 000. Use it to hold a course, for example the course home that the bomber leader calls over the radio.

Airspeed and altitude (bottom)

AIRSPEED is in km/h and ALTITUDE is in metres above sea level. Over the Weald and the North Downs, the ground can be a couple of hundred metres above the sea. The throttle bar is at the bottom-left.

Weapons count (bottom centre)

Rounds of ammunition left, and bombs or depth charges. AMMO OUT means your guns are empty. On practice missions it reads UNLIMITED. In the He 111 and Do 17, the bomb stick size is shown next to the bomb count.

FUEL (U-boat hunt)

In missions where fuel matters, a gauge shows how much is left and how many minutes that is at your current throttle. It flashes when you're low.

Objectives (upper-left)

Your tasks for this mission. Each one is ticked off as you complete it, or marked as failed. Press O to pick one. It's marked [>], and the blue bearing marker points to it.

Kills (upper-right)

Aircraft you've shot down this sortie. Below it, the kill feed reports hits, kills, ships sunk, engine and pilot hits from your own gun position, and aircraft breaking off for home.

Radio (under the heading tape)

Calls from your wingman, the controller and your crew. "CONTROL: 9+ bandits plotted" means radar has picked up a new raid of about that size. "Break! Bandit on your six!" means an enemy is close behind you: turn hard now.

Aircraft target box and lead pipper

Corner brackets around the enemy aircraft closest to your nose, with a small bar showing its remaining health. The amber pipper shows where to aim so your bullets meet it. See Gunnery.

Ship box and ground target diamond

Your selected ship or ground target, with its name, range in metres and a health bar. T changes the selected target.

IMPACT circle (orange)

Shown while you carry bombs or depth charges: where one dropped right now would land. With depth charges it turns amber (CLOSE) or green (ON TARGET) over a U-boat. See Hunting U-boats.

Blue bearing marker

Points to the objective you've picked with O: a zone to reach, the convoy or bombers you're guarding, or the nearest target you know of. Until you pick one, it leads you through the mission's search legs and then home.

Zones

Mission zones are drawn as rings on the ground or the sea with a faint glowing wall rising above them, so you can see them from a long way off.

STALL – LOW AIRSPEED

A flashing warning that you're too slow to keep flying. Lower the nose and add throttle.

Flying the aircraft

The flight model is arcade-style. You don't have to take off, land or manage the engine, and only the U-boat hunt makes you watch your fuel. A few rules matter:

• Speed is life. Every aircraft has a stall speed, from about 115 km/h for the Hurricane to 150 km/h for the Bf 110. As you slow toward it, the controls go soft. Below it, the aircraft sinks no matter where the nose points. Climbing and hard turning both use up speed.
• Altitude is stored speed. Diving trades height for speed, and climbing trades it back. The raids come in at 3,000–5,000 m, and the pilot who is higher chooses when the fight starts. Climb early.
• Roll, then pull. To turn hard, roll into a steep bank with A/D, then pull the nose around with W. Use rudder (Q/E) for fine aiming, not for turning.
• Ground avoidance. Below about 340 m every aircraft, including yours, gets a gentle nose-up assist and limited bank. Below about 90 m it's forced into a hard pull-up. It will save you from a late pull-out, but don't count on it. The hills of Kent and the cliffs are solid.
• Cloud hides you. Inside a cloud nobody can see you beyond about 150 m: not fighters, not gunners, not searchlights or light flak. You can't see out either.
• You can't repair. Damage stays with you for the whole sortie. When your aircraft is badly hurt, fight carefully or head for home.

Gunnery

Two markers matter when you're shooting at aircraft:

• The fixed sight: the ring or cross in the centre of the screen, or the reflector gunsight in the cockpit. It always marks straight ahead of your nose.
• The amber lead pipper. It appears when an enemy aircraft is ahead of you and in range. It's a real firing solution, calculated from the target's speed and direction and the speed of your bullets.

Put the pipper on your fixed sight, then fire. Against a turning enemy the two markers separate, and the gap between them is how far you need to aim ahead of it. Straight behind a target they sit on top of each other.

Fifteen seconds of ammunition

The Spitfire and Hurricane carry eight Browning .303s with about 300 rounds each: barely fifteen seconds of fire with the trigger held down. Real pilots fired bursts of one or two seconds, and so should you. The Bf 109 has the opposite problem. Its two cowling machine guns have plenty of ammunition, but its two 20 mm cannon, which do most of the damage, carry only 60 rounds each and run dry after about seven seconds. Save them for the shots you're sure of.

Convergence

The RAF fighters' eight guns sit out in the wings, angled inward so their streams meet about 230 m ahead. Closer than that, the bullets pass on either side of the target. Much further out, they've crossed and spread apart again. Close to 200–250 m before you fire and the whole weight of fire goes into one spot. The 109's cowling guns fire along the nose and don't have this problem.

Attacking bombers

Every German bomber shoots back. The Do 17 and He 111 carry hand-held MG 15s in the nose, the dorsal position, the ventral gondola and both beam windows, and each gun covers its own arc. The gunners open up at about 550 m and fire in bursts. The more damaged the bomber, the worse they shoot.

• Don't sit dead astern. Directly behind and level with a Dornier, you're in the arcs of both the dorsal and the ventral gunner, flying straight at them. It's the worst place to be.
• Attack from the front quarter or high on the beam, make one fast pass, and keep going. A head-on pass gives the gunners very little time to shoot at you.
• Break up the formation. A formation's gunners fire together, and level bombers release their bombs together on the leader's signal. Shoot the leader and the next aircraft takes over, but a scattered formation drops scattered bombs. A bomber that isn't in its slot drops its bombs somewhere else.
• Stragglers run. A bomber that has strayed from its formation, or is the last one left, won't hold its course when a fighter closes. It jettisons its bombs if it's still outbound, noses down and dives for the nearest cloud. If there's no cloud, it heads for low level, where it jinks toward home and you can't attack from below. Catch it before it gets there, or follow it down. Nobody breaks off a bombing run once it has started.
• Catch the Stuka on its pull-out. A Ju 87 in its dive is fast and hard to hit. A Ju 87 pulling out at a few hundred metres, slow and level, is the easiest kill in the sky. Its single rear gunner is its only protection.

Manning a gun

In the He 111, Do 17, Bf 110, Ju 87 and Sunderland you can press 1–5 to leave the controls and man a gun position. 0 takes you back to the controls. While you're at a gun, the autopilot holds the course and height you left it on, and the rest of the crew keep fighting from the other positions. Gunnery Practice is the place to learn this.

• Aim with the stick, the flight keys or the mouse, and fire with the trigger or Space. C moves you to the next gun.
• Each gun only swings through its own arc. The dorsal gun covers the sky above and behind, the ventral gondola below and behind, the beam guns out of the side windows, and the nose gun ahead. The limits are fixed to the aircraft, not the horizon, so in a bank "all the way down" sits somewhere else on the screen. The ring turns red and shows LIMIT against a stop.
• The ring sight is on the line of the barrel. When an attacker is in your arc, a target box and a lead pipper show where to put the ring. Your bullets carry your bomber's own speed, so put the ring on the pipper, not on the fighter.
• Red arrows at the edge of the screen point to attackers you can't see from where you sit. Each shows the number of the gun that can bear on it (gold if it's yours, "-" if none can) and its range. The closer the attacker, the bigger and brighter the arrow. Switch to the gun the attack is coming into before it arrives.
• The easy shot is a fighter coming straight up behind you. It barely moves across your sight and only grows bigger. Meet it with the dorsal gun (or the gondola if it's low), open fire at about 400 m aiming at its nose, and keep firing until it breaks away. Crossing and beam attacks need a lot of lead, and head-on passes close so fast that you get a second of fire at most.
• Where you hit matters when you man a gun yourself. One MG 15 is light armament against a Hurricane, but rounds in the engine or the cockpit can do real harm. ENGINE HIT means the fighter is smoking and badly hurt, and PILOT HIT means it's going down. Walk your burst onto the nose as it closes.

Bombing

Press B to drop a bomb. Bombs have no altitude or speed limits, but they have to fall a long way. The orange IMPACT circle shows where a bomb released now would land. Fly so the circle sits on the target, then drop.

Dive-bombing (Ju 87)

The Stuka carries one heavy bomb. Start high, roll into a near-vertical dive with the target ahead, and put the IMPACT circle on it. In a steep dive, the bomb falls almost along your line of sight, so it's very accurate. Release, then pull out early: the Stuka is slow to come out of a dive, and that's when fighters and flak catch it.

Level bombing (He 111, Do 17)

• Use the bombsight. Press C until you see the BOMBSIGHT view, looking down through the nose. The crosshair is where a bomb released now would land. Your line of flight runs up the sight, so the target comes down toward the cross as you close. Steer to bring the target straight down the vertical line.
• Press B once as the target meets the cross. The release gear drops the whole stick by itself, one bomb every 0.6 seconds, so a steady run along a row of buildings lays the stick along it. N sets the stick size.
• Hold it level until the stick has gone. A bank throws the bombs wide.
• Bombs from 4,000 m take around 30 seconds to fall. Be patient.

Night raids

• Fires lead you in. Burning targets glow from a long way off, and a moonlit river is a good road to follow.
• Searchlights. When one catches you, its neighbours swing over and cone you (the HUD shows CONED and how many lights are on you), and every heavy gun in reach aims at you. Straight and level, they'll hold you. A hard turn or a push into a dive breaks away within a few seconds. If you're on your bomb run, bomb first, then break.
• Balloons. Barrage balloons float over parts of London at about 1,500 m. Their cables take wings off. Stay high.
• Night fighters can only see you at close range, unless the searchlights are holding you. Stay with the other bombers on the way home: a lone bomber is the easiest kill.

Hunting U-boats

Only the Sunderland carries depth charges. The U-boat Hunt mission page has a full walkthrough, but these are the basics:

• Search with the ASV radar. From about 300 m up, it shows a surfaced U-boat out to about 10 km ahead as an amber ASV marker. Near the water, the range is about half that. The navigator calls each new contact.
• Come in low. A U-boat's lookouts see a big flying boat long before you see the boat, and a crash dive puts her under in less than thirty seconds. Skim the wave tops (below 60 m) or stay in the cloud, and go straight in once you see her.
• Release below 120 m. Higher than that and the depth charges break up on the water. The HUD warns you if you're too high.
• Close is not enough. Depth charges sink and burst eight metres down, and only a close one is lethal. The IMPACT circle turns amber (CLOSE) and then green (ON TARGET). The green window lasts only about half a second, so release just before it turns green.
• DATUM. If she dives while you can see her or have her on radar, a DATUM marker shows where she went under and her course at the time. She keeps moving at about 1.5 m/s, so aim ahead of the marker along that line. The older the datum, the further ahead.

Wingmen & radar

On many missions you fly with a wingman (your No. 2, or Rottenflieger on the German side). A wingman flies in formation on you until an enemy comes close, then breaks off to fight it and rejoins you afterwards. You can't give wingmen orders, but you can use them:

• Drag a pursuer onto your wingman. Every AI pilot, friendly or enemy, attacks whichever opponent is closest to itself. If a 109 is on your tail, fly toward your wingman. Your wingman will attack it, and the 109 may switch to your wingman instead of you.
• Press V to show a marker for your wingman at all times, so you can find them quickly.
• Other friendly squadrons fly on their own. The controller directs them onto the nearest raid. Drag your pursuers across them too.

Radar gives warning. When a new raid appears, the controller calls it on the radio: "CONTROL: 9+ bandits plotted". The number is the size of the raid. Use the warning to turn toward it and start climbing.

How the enemy fights

Knowing the AI's habits makes it much easier to beat:

• Bombers fly to their target no matter what. They don't dogfight. Level bombers stay in formation and bomb on their leader's signal. Stukas peel off one at a time over the target, a couple of seconds apart, into near-vertical dives.
• Escorts guard their bombers, not the sky. Escorting 109s fly top cover about 600 m above and behind their bombers. They dive on anyone who comes within about 2.5 km of the bombers, and break off again if a fight drags them more than 4 km away.
• Free-hunting fighters come for you. A frei Jagd patrol of 109s, or Bf 110s sent out hunting, attacks the nearest enemy fighter it finds.
• Fighters evade when hit. An enemy fighter you hit breaks into a hard evasive turn for a few seconds, then comes back at you.
• Fighters go home when they're hurt. Badly damaged or out of ammunition, they break off for home. You'll see "breaking off" in the kill feed.
• Ground fire shoots at the enemy. Airfield Bofors guns throw 40 mm shells that burst into black flak puffs, and Lewis gun posts fire at anything low. They're firing at the raiders, but a flak burst aimed where a Dornier was a second ago can still hit you. Stay out of your own flak.

Objectives & winning

The Objectives panel lists what you need to do. There are a few different kinds:

General tips

1. Climb first. In almost every RAF mission you start below the enemy. Turn toward the raid and climb while it closes.
2. Short bursts from close range. Close to 250 m and fire for a second or two. If you've fired your guns dry before the second raid arrives, you're done.
3. Hit the bombers, not the escorts. The bombers are what fail your mission. Make one fast pass through them and zoom away before the 109s arrive.
4. Don't turn with a Spitfire in a 109, and don't dive after a 109 in a Spitfire. The RAF fighters turn better. The 109 climbs and dives better. Fight the way your aircraft is good at. See matchups.
5. Check your six. Hold / for a quick look behind you, especially after a firing pass. The "Break!" radio call means act now.
6. Use the cloud. In a bomber, cloud is the best friend you have. In a fighter, a straggler heading for cloud has to be caught before it gets there.
7. Use Recon and F9. Look at the map before you fly, or fly the mission once in invulnerable mode to learn when and where each raid comes from.
8. Watch your replays. F8 after a lost fight shows exactly where the enemy came from.