Saved by CrazyIvan: Tales from Online.....

[Jumoschwanz]

To balance out a server I found myself flying an early I-16 in a frozen Russia, everything was white as far as you could see. The early I-16 with no cannons of course.

I live in a part of the world where it is white and zero degrees F in the winter, so I am amazed that they flew open-cockpit aircraft around in this weather, looks like hell to me. War is hell.

I don't known how often I-16s were flown at 4500 meters altitude, but that is where I climbed to because that is how hi I had to be to get above the clouds on this particular map. Since the entire plane set was old open cockpit biplanes and monoplanes, I wanted to have all the altitude I could to maybe gain an energy advantage, also when you are above a cloud layer anyone getting close to you shows up like a wart on a super-models nose.

This was a hard-settings server, no outside views, closed cockpit and very limited friendly icons, so just as a real combat pilot had to, I needed to keep looking around to avoid being surprised.

So I got up there, leaned out the mixture and got into the second supercharger stage and began to look around for little black dots against the clouds and ground, and I saw them. Mostly I saw formations of friendly enemy fighters patrolling, but I set my prop pitch and throttle to 80% to squeeze better fuel economy from the machine and headed deep into Axis skies.

The I-16 does not have the best rear view, and so once I was cruising over the front line I decided to start doing the occasional CrazyIvan maneuver. This was not a traditional crazyivan but my own version, where I simply made a moderately tight 360 degree turn on occasion whenever I started to feel paranoid.

It paid off, half way through one of my crazyivans I caught two dots that had been following my low-six. I felt glad that I had decided to fly on top of the clouds because I had a little altitude on them, they were a few hundred meters lower than I was.

I straightened out into a shallow dive towards them while opening up my radiator and switching to 85% prop pitch. The bogies saw me and were in a shallow turning climb towards me. I decided to make a shot at the second aircraft, I could see they were Italian G50 fighters now. If I took a shot at the lead fighter as I crossed paths with them at ninety degrees then the second fighter would have had the same shot at me as I was taking on his leader! I hit that second fighter and zoomed smoothly up and back while looking back at my opponents. They had broken formation, one had gone vertical after me while the other had stayed level and was in a wide turn back towards me.

I came back down towards the fighter that had gone vertical which was now stalling out a little below me. I raked it from nose to tail with the machine guns and broke immediately towards the other fighter that was turning back towards me, I got to it before it completed it's turn and scored hit on it as I crossed it's path at an angle.

Back up I zoomed again looking back to see what the next move of my opponents would be, but they were nowhere to be seen......

I kept looking around but both planes had become lost in the clouds a little below. I circled and kept looking and suddenly got the Enemy Aircraft Destroyed on the HUD, looking down I saw black smoke rising from the forest 4000 meters below. I figured I must have killed the pilot of the G50 that had stalled below me, and the other one must have been hit hard enough that it decided to head for home under cloud cover.

If I had not done the crazyivan when I had, before the two enemy fighters had gotten too close to my altitude or aircraft, then I might have been the one shot down over the front line or running for cover in the clouds. I set my aircraft once again for economy cruising and made it the long way back to my base and landed. It was a long mission with some action and that was enough for me for a while, time for supper......


S!

[K_Freddie]

Nice... although I wouldn't have seen the warts on the super models nose

Did they have a pilot oxygen system on these early planes... at 4.5K.. you'd probably be suffering from a good bout of hypoxia

[hunter1]

There isn't Fiat G50 in Russia , Macchi 200 ? Flown 4500 mtrs whit open cockpit and 0 degrees on the ground ?

[rollnloop]

Finns flew G-50s.

Nice AAR

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by hunter1

There isn't Fiat G50 in Russia , Macchi 200 ? Flown 4500 mtrs whit open cockpit and 0 degrees on the ground ?

Russians would have flown against Italian MC.200s during the run up to the Battle of Stalingrad (also a few MC.202s were used) but I'm assuming that Jumos story is set against the Finnish Air Force which used 33 G.50s during the Winter War and Continuation war.

Apparently the Finnish pilots weren't a fan of the open cockpit.