Getting back into DCS World: How hard can it be?

After several months of being grounded for one reason or another, I decided to finally dust off my controllers and start retraining myself to fly in DCS, which I knew was going to be quite the process depending on if I had actually retained the information from the last time I flew.

I stopped flying consistently around January, and spent months without a proper flight on an actual simulator, leading to me feeling as if I had lost a part of myself. I yearned to get back into the rabbit hole that is learning systems on aircraft I would never get to fly IRL. My boys and I got together and actually, for once, booted up the simulator and started flying. At first, I was a bit shocked at the fact that I somehow managed to convince my friends to fly again in DCS. We hadn't gotten a proper flight in so long that I thought it would have been an impossibility, yet, here we are.

I focused all of my training hours to reacquainting myself with Heatblur's masterpiece, the Phantom. If any plane would knock the rust out of me, it would be the archaic flying brick.

I didn't even need to learn the start-up again, thankfully I remembered everything and I had my bird in the air in record time. Now, the issues started when I tried doing anything that wasn't just flying. Weapon deployment was easy enough to relearn, especially the superficially-complex but practically-simple AGM-65. With a bit of patience, I was putting warheads on foreheads in no time. I did struggle a lot to start rippling them at several targets in a short span of time, but I got pretty confident at handling one target per pass.

The sight certainly doesn't help with its atrocious image quality, but it gets the job done.

Bombing-wise, I got some proper practice with DT mode and Direct bombing modes. For the latter, I practiced buddy lasing with Blue and dropping GBU-12s. Coordinating with another aircraft to get ordinance on target was extremely refreshing. It reminded me that DCS is not just training hell, but an experience better enjoyed together. As for DT mode, oh boy. I had to basically relearn everything. From telling Jester my parameters, to locking the ground to acquire the position, and then the smooth pull-up after hitting the pickle button to get the bombs on target. It was such a pain, but it was well worth it.

After that, I even hit up the tanker for my first refuel in 5 months, which actually ended up with me successfully refueling most of my tanks after the tanker decided to turn way too sharply.

In the end, it ended up being one good, successful restart of my life as a dumb virtual pilot! The next step is just getting back into public multiplayer servers and doing the same missions I used to do. To answer the question I posed on the title: No, it is not. Go do it.

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About the writer

Santiago "Cubeboy" Cuberos

Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as the co-founder and writer ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy