Plenty more where that came from. I've been flying formations with THOR for years now (although these shots aren't with him).

I have two major areas weakness with regards to formation flight.
1. I have a hard time differentiating from route and close spacing. Often I get much closer than I should.
2. I have virtually no practice with tactical forms.

Frederf,

1. Me neither. The lack of depth perception and (in my setup, at least) perspective vision makes it uniquely challenging to maintain a consistent distance without frequent glances to Lead. Maybe that comes with experience? I'm hoping to learn.

2. Me neither. But then, I don't have much experience with real formation flying basics anyways. And by real formation flying, I mean station keeping with a sight picture, cross unders, extend trail chase, etc. - not just flying next to some other airplane.

For 1. you need visual references on the aircraft itself, maybe Magnum can provide them. And it's not 'frequent glances at lead' in these formations ... it's 'cross-checking instruments'. You stare at lead.

Tac forms are flown a mile apart, and the whole idea there is that you can now cross-check the wingman and concentrate either on visual look-out or instruments, whichever happens to be your particular task within the formation.

^^^ Interesting stuff, as always GG.

Last night in Kojori we had a 3-ship formation and it would have been best had we decided on the way in who would TGP scan and broadcast SPI/SADL, along with other tasks. In fact we could have assigned a TGP scan to three pilots as we were flying into the tri-airport area around Tbilisi. And we were too close - well I sure was - to have been able to TGP and stay in formation. But we had a blast

WC

Having fun is the main goal