The Lead Turn
Here is an article on the Lead Turn maneuver, written by "Sensei" Rapier for the Fighter Ace Combat Manual. Reprinted by permission of the author (Rapier) and Microsoft Corporation, publishers.
The Lead Turn or, "Getting There Firstest with the Mostest."
By –)-Rapier–, Fighter Ace Content Manager–
The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon that enables it to strike and destroy its victim. Therefore the good fighter will be terrible in his onset, and prompt in his decision. Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of the trigger."
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
We’ve all been there. You’re tooling along through the beautiful virtual blue sky and you spot an enemy plane at the same time they spot you. You turn toward each other, heading for the classic merge. Now what? Typically both adversaries head straight for each other in a head-on, recklessly exchanging fire and risking collision. The safest place from which to make an attack is the rear, as fighters have no guns there. The question is how do you get to the six position when the enemy continually turns into you?
The answer immediately seized upon by most newbies is to try turning harder. If your chosen mount has greater turn ability than your opponent’s, this strategy will succeed. The results are less than satisfactory if you have chosen a plane like the Focke-Wulf, which doesn’t out-turn very often. However, even if you have turn parity with your opponent, the results can be different from what you anticipate. Long-term tail-chasing results in two low, slow airplanes that are "meat on the table" for any mutual enemy that may happen to fly by.
So what’s the solution? One possible idea is the lead turn, which is a merge technique. It is unlikely to win the fight by itself, but it can give you a tremendous advantage in the initial engagement, which can then be exploited and expanded upon as the fight continues. This is something to keep in mind as you continue to play and grow in Fighter Ace. Unlike standalone flight sims, where discovering a single technique can make you invulnerable, Fighter Ace is an ongoing real-time fight against a living, breathing, thinking opponent, who is unlikely to give up the ghost because you pull out your favorite move. An air-to-air fight can be compared to a long equation in which each move you make has a positive or negative value of varying intensity. The pilots who win are those who make fewer mistakes and whose totals come out higher than their adversaries’.
The lead turn takes the newbie’s "turn harder" strategy and moves it forward in time. Instead of waiting and firing blindly head on — hoping for hits — and then turning after the merge, you throw away this dangerous shot opportunity in the hopes of a better one just a bit later on. As you approach head on, you wait until the opponent is nearly in firing range, start a hard break turn, and then pull slightly out of plane to confuse their aim. If your opponent doesn’t recognize what has happened and flies straight for a ways, you will be able to turn onto their six. Naturally, if you have aimed to meet your opponent head on, your lead turn will take you off from your opponent’s flight path and you will have to turn to get back to a true six position.
A better variation of the lead turn is to turn slightly off of your opponent’s flight path as you are closing head on and then turn back onto their tail. For instance, as you close, you turn slightly to the left to displace your flight path to their right. Then just before being in range, you turn hard right to come around to their tail. Displacing yourself has a couple of benefits. First, it makes you harder to track as a head-on target. Second, you set yourself up to arrive more directly behind your opponent when you make the hard turn.
I was circling above the fight, waiting for a chance to break in, when I noticed four aircraft approaching from the south at about 8,000 feet. I turned toward them and identified them as 109’s. I attacked from their nine o’clock, they broke into me, and we went round and round in a port-climbing orbit. At about 13,000 feet I started getting deflection, so two broke starboard out of the turn and started for the deck. I picked up my flaps, turned and chased. For a second it looked as if I wasn’t closing, so I took two short bursts at about 800 yards just for meanness, when I noticed I was closing rapidly. I chopped everything, let down my flaps (twenty degrees) and closed to about fifty yards on the number two man. Just then he turned starboard as I fired, observing many strikes on the bottom, top and side of the fuselage and wing root. When I closed throttle, I screwed my trim so that I started sliding out to the left. As I slid by, I saw his starboard wing crumble about two feet from the wing root."
Major Howard D. "Deacon" Hively
12.5 victories, USAAF
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