The HOTAS was intuitive and fairly common with most F-teen series jets. I particularly liked the Throttle Designation Controller (TDC) being on the top of the throttle and operated by your thumb – all those years of practice on the Playstation controller paid off and made slewing the Sniper pod second nature!
McDonnell Douglas F/A-18A/C Hornet
Being a McDonnell-Douglas design I found this cockpit easy to convert to after the Harrier. It had an almost identical UFC and the same MFDs on the left and right, but this time with an additional larger MFD in the middle. It felt more cramped than the Harrier, certainly narrower but it was still well laid out.
Of course this jet had two engines for the first time in my career but I didn’t really notice a difference after a flight or two. It only got weird when you had one throttle off or at idle when dealing with an emergency; this was exacerbated if you had the right engine off and were flying on the left throttle as the push-to-talk switch was on the right throttle. It took a bit of dexterity at times to make sure you were pressing the correct switch.
The Hornet was a jet you could fly purely by feel, and indeed sound at times. The sound of the airflow over the LEX at high alpha was known as the ‘waterfall’. When flying BFM, if you were trying to out-rate your opponent you pulled back on the stick until it felt like the jet was driving over a cobblestone road. If you wanted to tighten the radius a little you would pull a little harder until you heard what sounds like ‘standing at the top of a waterfall’ – it’s obvious when you hear it! When you needed to pull someone into your HUD for a guns kill you would bury the stick into your guts until it sounded like you were standing ‘at the bottom of a waterfall’. Talking of stick movements, I have never experienced such violent and aggressive movements of a control stick in an aircraft before, you would literally pull or push it to the stops as fast and as hard as you could. Definitely a jet built to take abuse.
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