Bought the Glowingheat/Virtavia/Aplhasim SR71 on sale last week. Interesting bird to fly, but the landings are killing me (literally) - on final, I just can't see the runway from either VC or 2D view as the angle of attack is so high, which results in impact with trees, 1000 fpm touchdowns, and so on. Anyone have a view setting recommendation that could help?

Shift-Enter until I can see is what I use to look over the panel.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Yeah, about 10 of those keystrokes and it's still difficult, plus I have to then zoom the field of view in, which means I lose view of some gauges. The plane has a big center post in the cockpit which blocks the runway too, so you almost have to come in at a slight angle then correct at the last second and hope she touches down straight; hope is not a good touchdown strategy. Unfortunately the 2D cockpit won't adjust its translucense like the default Lear Huge ground effect also, so she floats down the runway. Sort of fun though to cross the US in about an hour and 15 minutes.

I'm not familiar with that planes, but I do fly the Concorde X, which is also a delta wing. It has pretty radical angle of attack on short final as well. One thing you could do is to try to keep the speed fairly high until you have to slow down for the landing. At higher speeds you would need less of an angle of attack to be able to maintain your desired altitude

Don't the instruments give you any idea of how far you are from the runway?

 

I guess it's just practice, practice, practice... Start at 5 miles out with a slow rate of descent and see where you end up, then you know to either increase it or decrease it... Lol

 

Good job it's a sim otherwise it would be a mega expensive way to figure out how to land it...

Also, you might want to pick a REALLY long runway to land on too, doesn't that military base near JFK have a mega long runway?

 

Could always install mirrors on the nose to see what's going on, or flip to external view if cheating (would love to see a real pilot try this "just popping outside to check our approach")

I can tell you that some of these extreme aircraft are very difficult to handle for take off and landing. SR-71 being one of them. I have spoken to two pilots who flew her and she was a handful. They rarely saw away from the instrument panel in any stage of flight. It's not a VFR aircraft and was usually operated at night.