These are some of the pictures of my time flying as 'g-wolf' with 617 Squadron RAF in the Warbirds online megaplayer combat flight sim.
These pages are a bit rough at the moment, but I'm working on that.
The whole aim of forming a squadron was to have fun. We did this best when flying as big groups, normally in the company of two other RAF squadrons, 249 and 633. Formation flying with these guys was great fun. With the missions being quite long, it takes a while to get those big heavy bombers up to a sensible height, we spent a lot of time just chatting on the radio and trying to get into good formation. We normally didn't do too well at flying in formation, but we got quite good at chatting innanely for hours.
This is an example of the sort of formtions we used to put
together. In this case flying high over the ocean in B17Gs
(warbirds never had Lancasters) on the lookout for enemy fighters.
We didn't just do high level sorties thogh. Often taking a large
number of light bombers to surprise the enemy by flying low under
the radar. Wherever possible we tried to fly over the sea, mainly
because that way there were less hills for the CO, and usual
formation leader, kfsone to fly into.
Some nights our pilots found flying in formation quite tricky. Large
amounts of alcohol were often involved on those nights. So just to
make things a little easier we practiced ground based formations.
These proved quite successful although even here some pilots found
problems, it appears that very few aircraft were fitted with a
reverse gear.
Sometimes we'd get far to drunk to be able to bomb straight. This
left us little choice but to grab a load of Ju-52 transport planes
and fill them up with paratroppers and beer. We'd then head over
to the nearest enemy airbase for a party, kicking the paratroopers
out over the base, then jumping into the gunner positions and
attempting to take out the AAA defemding the base before the
paratroopers got shot by them.
To our complete amazement his sometimes resulted in the
paratroopers capturing the enemey airbase and we'd land and raid
the beer supplies left be the fleeing enemy. Although more often
than not it would just end up with a load of minced paratroopers
and planes missing the odd wing or two.
The Ju-52 had a couple of major problems in the perforamnce area.
It was slow and climbed very poorly. The climb problem we got
around by just not doing any, but we never could make it go faster,
no matter how hard we pedaled.
We didn't just limit ourselves to American bombers and German
transport planes, but flew just about anything with wings (at
least on takeoff, often the enemy would help us out by lightening
our aircraft by removing unnecessary parts like, wings, tailplanes,
rudders and the odd engine or three).
Some random pictures of us flying other things.
Even when things had gone badly wrong and our aircarft were
missing an unhealthy number of parts, due to the aforementioned
lightening by the enemy, we would always try and get home.
