Boom and Zoom
by Voss

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Ok, dis is what da Voss does. I fly the FW in Europe, and the F4U in the Pac. Those plane choices mean 90% of the time I'm using B&Z tactics. I strongly recommend learning the turnfight, though. For months, when I started out, I dove in and turned and burned- and challenged every guy I saw better than me to series duels. There's a couple reasons you do this- one, you really learn where the edges of the envelope are, and how to ride them, by turnfighting. Another reason is that good B&Z ain't that far removed from turnfighting. Some people are godawfully cautious, never making a pass doing less than 300 knots, and then extend for a sector and a half- but to me, that's both incredibly boring, and completely useless. If you learn how to use turnfighting techniques in your B&Z, you'll get the best of both worlds- and the most kills per minute. Lastly, you'll always get stupid at some point, and get caught. If you know the turnfight, chances are you'll be able to at least stay alive long enough to call for help.

Good B&Z starts with SA, and I consider this aspect the most important of all. If you learn to read the situation, you'll always know where everyone is, what they're in, what they're doing, and most importantly, what they're thinking. If you know what they're thinking, you know where they're looking- and where they're not looking. Once you know that, you can position yourself exactly in that blindspot and shoot their silly asses off before they even know what hit them.

Some ways to do this: First, get enough alt so that you always have choices. The vast majority of the time, this is between 15 and 20k. Trust me folks, anything more is overkill- most of the fights are going to be low down, and it makes no difference if you are 5k or 10k above the fight. Second, be PATIENT. You don't have to wait forever, just a minute or two- make that one minute rev to let a couple wingmen catch up, or turn away from the bad guys for a few seconds to let them get fixated on somebody else. Third, learn how to make yourself invisible. NEVER point your nose at your intended target. You want to close, but in such a way that he/they think you're going somewhere else. Watch them carefully- you'll learn to tell the exact moment when they say to themselves, hey, that guy ain't no threat. That's when you roll in, rip their heads off, and shit down their necks. And laugh when they come on the radio screaming that they never saw you.

Now when you do roll in, you can very easily blow your cloak. Unless the guy I'm going to kill is just totally fixated, I never, ever roll in from his six- that's the one place they always check. There's two places I go for: his three-nine line is one. The last place someone looks for trouble is off a wing- so if you dive some way out, you can usually get a beautiful pass on a clueless target, and the beam/rear quarter shot ain't that hard- especially when the guy is flying nice and level.

Another place I go for is straight down on his head. You fly at an angle over the guy, as if you're busy going somewhere else. Just before he gets to you, throttle back, roll over, and bore pure vertical down on the top of his canopy. Bet you good money he never sees you. I've flown whole series of sorties, killing lots of people in short order, and not one of the dead had the slightest idea I was in the same universe as them. However, not everyone's stupid. No prob, most are still pretty easy to kill even if they know you're there. The way here is to use what we call the rope-a-dope.

Let's say you're above a guy who is quite aware of you. Now what I see most of the time is the high guy diving, the low guy pulls up, and then the high guy gets this wonderfully useless head-on pass. Whee, great tactics there. What you want to do is roll in on the guy, and the SECOND you see him pull up into the threat, you go vertical. If he's very stupid, he'll try and follow you. In that case, you watch off him off your 6, and you zen his E-state. It takes practice, but trust me, you get to the point where you know his speed +/- 10 kts. You wait until the guy passes below 200kts- at this point, he's wallowing, and trying to get his nose down. Pull over the top, roll in, and if you time it right, he'll not only be hanging in the air, but will have his butt pointed at you. Nice of him. I killed DeadDuck (who is quite impressed with his ACM skills) one night this way, in a total of fifteen seconds.

Now, let's say the guy was decently fast, or wasn't stupid enough to follow you all the way up. Again, no prob. Get to the top of your zoom, and roll out into a level, fairly tight turn. What you want here is to pick him up off your wing. He'll pull over the top, go nose low, and then in all likelihood, will pull back up into you again. If he doesn't, encourage him to do so by making another downward move at him. Once he starts coming up again, just wait- stay in your turn, and watch him off your wing. Once you learn to read his E, you can drop down to the point that he really thinks he can get up to you. This is good. The bigger you can make his eyes get, the more likely he will zoom himself dry. Follow this process- eventually, he'll hang himself out on the line, at which point you roll down and put him out of his dweeby misery. What you don't want to see is a guy who goes nose low and stays there until you're really coming down on him- he'll pull up into you just long enough to thwart you, and then goes nose low again. If you see this, well, the other guy's smart, and it's probably a losing proposition. Eventually the E will even out, and he'll turn the tables on you. Call the great god of patience, extend, and call some friends- as you want really, really want to kill anyone this annoying.

There's about a quadribillion other things, but I'll close with one more very important piece of advice: burn an alarm clock into your head. In a busy arena, you're never going to find a fight in a vacuum- there's always going to be others, friends and foes, streaming to the fight. Use your radar, and listen to the comms, to get an idea of the flow of the battle. Determine what field the bad guys are using, and get an idea in your head how long it takes to get from bad guy haven A to fight B. Once you're engaged, do something truly frightening: check your radar for a quick second or two at the top of your zoom. When you do this, an alarm clock starts ticking. And suddenly you'll hear it go DING DING DING...when it does, no matter how tempting it is to make one more pass, roll out, go nose low, and extend. Look, and I'll bet you see dots popping into being above you. Remember, nothing pisses a group of bad guys off more than blowing a whole mess of them into little broken airplane parts, and not returning the favor.

Pissing bad guys off is good. Vossman