A-10C: Basic Flight Training Campaign DLC

I'm a noob when it comes to flight sims, but I've already made it to the 5th mission and enjoying this immensely. The mission briefing gives you enough material to complete it if you take notes and take the time to understand them. Little bit of trial and error is also involved in my case, but either I'm a naturally amazing pilot or the requirements are fairly lenient - I average 2 or three attempts before I pass. My skills have improved immensely in the process, so I recommend this to any other beginner who wants to learn under 'exam conditions' and feel the reward for passing. I've not encountered 'bugs' except when I goof up completely and do something the mission doesn't expect.

very useful tool for starting the study level Hog, great to be used, together with the manual, the briefings, the web video tutorials, and the forums, if necessary, and together with the other two payware training dlcs as well a few glitches (non working features) because this is an old release, against the 2.5 current DCS, yet maybe some were encountered because my lack of knowledge

Quite hard to perform, but if you really want a grip to the basics of the bird, it's a must have. For all the people that keeps saying that this is not a training, please take the time to navigate to the mission folder in filesystem. Here you'll find the single practice missions that will in some way help you to train to the real missions in campaign. I am not saying doing this will make it easy: you'll have to study. Just two notes about the campaign. Training missions should be more easily reachable (a lot of people here is unaware of them). Moreover instructor AI needs some improvement, it quite often happened to me that instructor rammed into my aircraft while I was just flying straight. Even the instructor needs some practice.

As others have said this is "NOT A TRAINING" mission/campaign. This is a Qualification Campaign and you should know that aircraft systems and cockpit lay out before doing this campaign. Do the training missions that came with the A-10C DLC, they can be found in the Training menu and will help you greatly. Another thing that others have said is the some of the triggers do not work. I for one can not get past the 2nd mission because the FE will not tell me to make a turn at WP3. I have tried everthing that people have said and still no fix. I even tried going in to the mission file but there are no triggers showen. Even with this problem I think this is a great DLC and would recommend getting. Hope they patch it fix the problems. Some have asked about the flight manual and where to find it. There are two places to get manuals/checklist, both will be in the Mods sub folder that is located /Steam/Steamapps/Common/DCSWorld/Mods. Flight manual can be found at /aircraft/A-10C/Doc. Here you will find 3 pdf files, one is the Flight Manual Checklist can be found at /campaigns/A-10C -Dasic Flight Training Qualification/Doc. Here you will find 14 pdf files 12 that cover the 12 missions, the Amplified Checklist, and the Operation Chosen Eagle files. The Checklist pdf is 86 pages and has all the checklist; Before Takeoff, Takeoff, Before Landing, After Landing, Alert/Scramble, Hot Refueling, Air to Air Refueling, Combat Operations, plus all the emergency precedures.

The programming in this module is horrendus and frequently likes to think you're off altitude and speed targets. FE instructs you to maintain 200 knots, yells at you when you're at exactly 200 knots, now you fall in the qualified minus (Q-) rating for the entire mission from that one error. Worst of all, in the Instrument Navigation mission, the FE instructs you to go to a set of coordinates at 12,000 feet. With my properly adjusted QFE, I'm at exactly 12,000 feet when I arrive on time, and it says that I'm off altitude. That automatically gives me an unqualified (U) rating. This mission is actually a wall. I've spent hours trying to get past it and I've decided that it's no longer worth my time. Forget about trying to get a perfect qualified (Q) rating on every aspect of most missions.

Highly recommended for anyone who has the A-10C DLC and has done the built-in training missions already, and at least perused the manual. You'll want to refer to the manual and checklists and briefings often while doing this campaign. These training qualifications are very challenging; they barely cut any slack. But you often do have some warning that you are making a mistake. I think this aspect is actually a good thing: while it can be frustrating to keep retrying and hope not to make a mistake, all that practice is very important. And you wouldn't want to be allowed to pass when your technique is actually wrong. This campaign gave me a lot of practice with some of the "boring" parts of flying (the parts that don't involve BRRRRT, Mavericks, JDAMs, LGBs and so on) that I would otherwise have ignored. I now feel so much more confident flying the A-10C. The voiceovers and briefings are all excellent. The mission scripting is almost always excellent too, but I noticed some glitchiness at times (triggers not activating, voiceovers activating at the wrong time and running over each other). This was sometimes just cosmetic, but sometimes forced me to restart the mission. As of DCS 1.5.7 on 2017-11-11, the campaign UI is missing some features like the ability to select a mission within a campaign, if for example you want to skip one temporarily or go back to practice a previous one. This is a pain for training campaigns like this one. As a workaround, you can select Mission -> My Missions and navigate directories to where DCS is installed (for example C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DCSWorld). The files of this campaign are stored under Mods\campaigns\A-10C - Basic Flight Training Qualification, where you can find the .miz (mission) files and also the briefings under Doc.

This is NOT a training campaign. It's a Qualification campaign to TEST your training. Just like a real pilot, you are expected to have studied the Flight Manual completely, be familiar with the cockpit and all systems, and know how to do all of this BEFORE you get into the $19Million aircraft. It's intended to be a way to prove to yourself that you know the by-the-book way to operate the plane, which is both immersive and really satisfying. However, it does provide a lot of information through checklists and mission expectations (and the practice run giving more text about how-to... sometimes), so if you're patient then it could be a trial-and-error way to learn the plane. if you don't mind making lots of notes, Alt-tabbing to the Flight Manual, and checking Youtube to learn the parts you aren't familiar with yet.

After you got the A10C i really recommend this campaign to get even more familiar with the start up pre flight check list, start- up check list, taxiing etc. Got to warn in advance though, the instructor doesn't cut any slack, failed one thing and you're unqualified, so it can get on your nerves. Installation was easy, make sure you have the A10C bought and installed first, buy the campaign and steam does everything for you after that. Once installed go to campaigns, select A10C and start the basic flight training campaign.

I would recommend this campaign because it's overall pretty good. I picked it up as an experienced hog pilot trying to fill-in any gaps I might have in my understanding of the aircraft. For a newb, it'd prove invaluable. For someone just looking to fill-in the gaps, like myself, it's probably not worth the money... HOWEVER! And that's a rather big "However"... It doesn't matter what your skill level, because there's a bug on mission 8 (emergencies) that makes it impossible to progress any further. When attempting a manual reversion in the aircraft, something causes the ailerons to constantly & alternately bounce left & right 100% every half a second. This is NOT a bug with the aircraft module. This is NOT pilot error. Manual reversion works as advertised in every other game mode, scenario, and test I've been able to run in the game. Something with this campaign causes the aircraft to be completely & wildly uncontrollable during that one thing. Sadly, this prevents progressing through the rest of the campaign, and I've waited almost 2 months and tried countless times to get it to work to no avail. I'm done spending hours trying to get a mission to work. Kind of annoyed the developers aren't fixing this. Also kind of annoyed that I don't get to see the last 30% of the product I paid for. Otherwise it'd be an excellent product if it weren't for that one game-breaking bug. Again, I cannot stress enough that I've tested this to exhaustion and it is not pilot error, and it only happens in this campaign.

The name is very MISLEADING. This is not a training thing. It will not help you learn to fly the aircraft in any way. It's basically the exam after you are done training. I was VERY dissapointed by it.