Aero L-39 Albatros Follow Up

By Andrew Herd (27 November 2001)

ot so very long ago, I reviewed the Captain Simulators' L-39 Albatros, an aircraft which impressed me as being the best FS2000 military sim I had ever seen. Now, I am pleased to be able to announce that the developers have released a new paint scheme; an airbase for the Albatros to operate from; a "history of the Soviet Air Force in pictures" CD; and a Combat Flight Simulator 2 version of the L-39.

The new scheme is a Navy Fighter Weapons School "agressor" paint, based on a Skyhawk scheme. The L-39 has, of course, never served in the US Navy, but flight simulation offers tempting opportunities to bend reality all the time - for once I am glad that a developer has given in to their sense of fun and gone ahead and indulged us, because I am sure this "top gun" scheme is going to be really popular. Best of all, it is a free 1 Mb download from the Captain Simulators web site.

Kontop Air Force Base is payware, but a very reasonable $9, given that it is, as far as I am aware, the only Ukrainian military airbase available for Flight Simulator. The money gets you a very presentable model of the air base featured in the documentation supporting the TLK-39, complete with a magnificent hard standing complete with dozens of Migs and Albatrosses... er Albatri? Anyway, TLKs. I spent ages trying to line my plane up as neatly as the statics were and then gave up and took this shot instead. As you can see, the base is dispersed over a wide area and there are numerous aircraft parked on the stands, along with various other statics trucks and bowsers. Vehicles buzz around on the pavement and there are also the sort of dynamic aircraft you don't normally see in western airports, so watch out for heavy transport traffic coming in when you are waiting for departure clearance.

Various approach charts are available for the airbase as part of the Albatros manual, annotated in cyrillic characters, which adds to the authenticity, if not to the readability, but approach charts are approach charts and as long as you don't forget that the measurements are metric you should be able to work them out. It has to be said that if this the quality of approach chart the Ukrainian Air Force is used to, I will never complain about ours ever again.

Perhaps the most interesting item on offer from Captain Simulations is their pictorial history of the Soviet Air Force fighter pilot schools, a bargain at $4. The pictures were taken by Eugene Jigalov over the 1973-1996 period, during which time he served as an instructor pilot and then as a navigation teacher at the Barnaul Attack Fighter Pilot School; and the text was written by Eugene Yurchenko and Alexander Pogensky - both graduates of the Chernigov Fighter Pilot School. The album was built using Macromedia Flash and I can hardly recommend it too highly: the presentation is very good and the photographic quality is simply stunning. Whatever Eugene's talents may have been as an instructor, he definitely can take some exceptional photographs and as I went through the album I was consistently impressed with the images he captured.

Fascinating though the album is from a technical and historical viewpoint, I found it made compulsive viewing and I went back to it several times. To begin with, it was hard to pin down what made it so poignant and it took almost a week of worrying on about it before I hit on the answer.

The seventies and early eighties were the time of enormous political tension between east and west - the pilots featured here were training for an armageddon that we all feared. In the west, we waited for Soviet forces to pour across the German border, in the east, our counterparts waited for our armed forces to do much the same. My teenage years were spent waiting for a nuclear attack that never came, thank God - these were the people who would have delivered it.

Now look at the faces of these pilots - the people staring back are you and I, but for accident of birth. They are the sort of people you could go out and have a drink with, talk planes with, shoot the breeze with, and, had things worked out differently, engaged in combat.

By the time you have worked your way through the album a couple of times (and there are some absolutely fantastic pictures of aircraft in there - just about anything you can think of) if you are anything like me, it is the people you will remember. Ordinary guys, having a good time, flying airplanes and hoping that siren never sounds and they have to go to war. People like you and me, not the (this will make any former Soviet pilots laugh when they read it) dedicated Communist soldiers so beloved of James Bond films. Why, then, if we were so similar, did we spend so much time on opposite sides of the political divide? Flight simulation has brought me into contact with a large number of people from the former Soviet Union and I am continually impressed at how similar their thinking and even background is to yours and mine. It makes you wonder about the way our politicians run this world of ours.

If you buy the Albatros, or Konotop, or both, then I recommend that you buy the album. For a start it is only $4, which is practically giving it away, and while the photography and commentary are excellent, the best of it is the way it effortlessly transports you into another world. Look at this and then fly the Albatros - and wish that Captain Simulations could bring out their MiG 21 even sooner, because when you have seen this album, you will definitely want to fly that plane.

Enough philosophising. The CFS2 version of the TLK-39c wasn't out at the time I wrote this, but I would hope it is of similar quality to its FS2000 counterpart - which, I should point out, can be made to have nosewheel steering, if you delve into the aircraft folder and rename the extra air file that has been put there for the purpose. It may not be realistic, but if you don't have toe brakes, it certainly helps to get around Konotop, because there are some sharp turns to be made in between the dispersal areas and the runway.

It will be interesting to see what Captain Simulations do next. The TLK-39c, Konotop air base and the photo album makes a winning combination. I can't recall seeing another package which has had such an atmosphere built up around it and anyone who flies the Albatros without exploring the other two packages really is missing out on something. If the Mig 21 is released with another air base and the second part of this album, we are really in for a treat.