Greetings from your Operations and Training Supervisor (OTS)

Hey guys. I see we now got a mix of old and new members, so I guess I should introduce myself. My callsign is the stereotype of the country I live in Yeah, I'm American. I'm 22. I found FG back in December of '08 while scouring the Internet for some sort of free air combat sim. With a complete lack of any combat features (yes, before bombable, and even working guns!), it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but I still fell in love with it for the flight aspect, and (on some planes) its unbelievable attention to detail. I mean FDM-wise. I don't care much about graphics. I'm not saying FG should be stripped down to the most basic graphics necessary for flight simulation; just that advancing developments in realistic FDMs should be the first priority.

I'm currently on a sort of hiatus from university, but I have spent a couple years as a computer science major, and have become confident in my abilities in object-oriented programming in Java, and have used those skills to learn how to make some things in FG's Nasal scripting language, although I haven't done anything combat-oriented yet. My abilities reach their limit when I find I need to broadcast or obtain properties over MP, so I still have a lot more to learn.

I've always had an interest in flight, and air combat. I've actually done a lot of research on air combat maneuvering (ACM), as well the basics: basic fighter maneuvering (BFM). I've committed most, if not everything, I learned to memory. I analyzed several different maneuvers, determined their purpose(s), and really picked them apart down to their most basic elements. I'm not sure exactly what a general OTS does, or how one could be knowledgeable and capable in all areas of airborne military ops, but as a Fighter Operations and Training Supervisor, I would certainly know to manage the fighter instructors, and make sure their skills and knowledge meet the standards I will set. However, I'm going to guess that we currently do not have any fighter pilot instructors (I was away for a while, and got back kinda recently), in which case, I will first have to fix that by acting as one myself, until we have pilots, who possess the necessary knowledge and skills to have the potential to be an instructor, and then instruct them on instruction. Of course, training is only half of it. However, actual fighter ops won't be possible until I know we have the minimum required amount of capable fighter pilots and AWACS commanders (I can also teach that) for even a simple mock engagement exercise. Anyway, due to some changes in FG, I will need to make a few changes to the old fighter pilot syllabus I had created about a year or two ago, before I can really get started. That, and I'll have to get some real life issues taken care of first, so that I can have more free time to do this.