The attract reel’s new closer is the fastest thing in the bay. Night, clear sky, both J58s lit: NASA 832 comes out of the west as a spark over the strait, roars past a boat at wave-top, threads the Golden Gate under the deck, bends right over the bay and winds out toward a thousand knots down the downtown corridor — rooftop height, between the towers — then pulls for the stars. Six cameras catch it, air and ground both, and the cut is showreel clip 21 on the upload sheet.
Three new campaign sorties, with portraits.M17 HABU DESCENDING — a crippled SR-71 is limping in off the black programs with failing engines; rendezvous, fight the vultures off, and walk him down to the field. M18 DEADLY CARGO — a rustbucket freighter full of weapons-grade uranium, a sub surfaced to take it off her, six Mk 83 dumb bombs to stop the handoff. M19 WALL OF LEAD — the same cargo under a gunline: fast boats throwing a wall of AAA, MANPADs on every deck, fighters for top cover. Order VIPER TWO onto the cover and he’ll pull the gunline’s fire too — you make the run. All three wear their thumbnails on the board like every other sortie.
T-8 IRON BOMBS joins the syllabus. Flight school’s new strike sortie: two target hulks anchored on the bombing range, six Mk 83s, and the CCIP pipper doing the impact math live on the glass. Dive twenty to thirty degrees, track the pipper onto the hull, pickle, pull out by 800 feet. Note for graduating classes: the syllabus now includes T-8 — earn it and the campaign board unlocks as before.
A sortie only counts when you bring her home. New standing order, campaign and school both: finishing the objective is not finishing the mission. You complete the sortie when you’re down and stopped back at the point of origin — the deck or the field you launched from. Any other strip, and the boat, will still gas and re-arm you on the way — but she doesn’t count till she’s home.
Weapons select goes 1988. The per-weapon voice callouts are gone. Every toggle answers with one short console beep, like the Amiga original — and the stores panel now makes the readback unmissable: the live weapon’s stations burn solid white over an inverse-video label, and the HUD names it outright. Strike sorties rack the bombs on 5.
The net crackles. Every flashed notification keys the radio now — a squelch tick and two static pops stand in for the chatter, so a call sounds like it came over the net even when you only read it.
Spark off the strait, fire between the towers, gone. That’s the way to close a reel. — HB
The boards read better than ever after the large-print refit — but a ready-room board should show you the sortie, not just tell you. Every row on the flight school syllabus and the campaign board now carries a thumbnail portrait of its key objective, twenty-three sorties, twenty-three little stills.
The target, not a stock photo. Every thumbnail is rendered in the sim itself — the MiG-29 you’ll dogfight, the raft you’ll find in the swell, the Bear-H you’ll run down out west, the Golden Gate you’ll circumnavigate on the bay tour, the cruise missile skimming in at dawn. If it’s in the frame, it’s in the game.
A portrait studio in the attract reel. The stills come from a new thumbnail stage pinned scene — one generic setup that poses any subject, holds it dead still, and parks the camera at a hero angle: nose thirty-five degrees off the lens for the jets, broadside for the ships and the span.
Locks apply to the glass too. Sorties you haven’t earned yet keep their portraits dimmed and grayed, so the board still reads as a ladder — you can see what’s waiting up the rungs.
T-1 shows you the boat you’re about to trap on. Mission 8 shows you the balloon. Mission 14 shows you the Bear. Eyes on the objective before you ever bend the throttles. — HB
Not everyone wants to earn their wings before going to war — and this is a tribute to 1988, when every respectable sim had a code you could find in a magazine. The missions board now has one:
ENTER UNLOCK CODE on the missions board (or press U). Type AIRBOSS and the Air Boss signs your card: every campaign mission and every flight school sortie opens immediately — no syllabus, no progression, no graduation requirement.
Your logbook stays honest. All access lifts the locks without forging a single trap: missions you haven't actually flown stay unflown, the COMPLETE marks remain something you earned. Type the code and the board reads ALL ACCESS GRANTED — EVERY SORTIE ON THE BOARD.
It sticks. The signature persists in your pilot save across sessions — unlock once, fly anything, forever.
A shortcut for the skipper:?allaccess=AIRBOSS on the URL signs the card without the overlay, same as the Tomcat's ?tomcat= owner code.
The purist path is unchanged — graduate the school, unlock the campaign one sortie at a time, and the code will never trouble you. But if you just got the game and the fleet is already at war… the Air Boss understands.
Viper Three is in the water twenty-five miles west, alive and smoking, and two bandit patrols are being vectored to make sure he stays there. The rescue helo goes in anyway — your job is written on every SAR briefing board ever chalked: nothing touches the helo.
The Angel flies the whole profile. Off the deck, seventy-five knots at sixty feet, out to the smoke — then two minutes hovering dead still at eighteen feet while the hoist does its work, then the long low run home. She does not evade, she does not climb, she cannot afford to.
Two bandit waves hunt her. The first pair vectors in on the transit; a three-ship comes for her during the hoist, when she is slowest and lowest. Rated-65 pilots — veterans, cleared for the whole maneuver library.
Lose the Angel and the sortie is over. Bring her feet dry with Viper Three in the cabin and the debrief writes itself: that was the whole job — and you did it.
A turboprop contact, bearing 270, a hundred ten miles out, Angels 27 — and she is not out there to take pictures. The Tu-95MS Bear-H joins the sim: four NK-12 contra-props on a 35° swept wing, a glazed bombardier nose, twin guns in the tail barbette, red stars on the fin. She is in the gallery, the print bay, and the store — and she is the centerpiece of the two hardest sorties in the campaign:
M14 BEAR HUNT (80/100). One Bear, two Flankers riding shot — rated 75, aces, cleared for every maneuver in the library. She trucks for her launch point fifty miles off the boat; an expert pilot runs her down and kills the archer with the arrows still on the rails.
If the arrows fly. Two AS-4 Kitchens, eighteen seconds apart, steering for the moving carrier the whole way in. You and Viper Two hunt them — and if one leaks past, the escorts’ Phalanx CIWS is the last wall of lead: mounts pick the closest missile inside 3.8 km, walk tracers onto it, kill odds climbing steeply as the range closes. One Kitchen amidships and the sortie is over.
M15 BEAR PAK (95/100). The demonstration team: two Bears on two axes, four Flankers rated 92, eight killers in the air at once. Bring everything the school taught you. This one is the final exam.
The fleet does not send students to war. The campaign board now stays locked until you graduate flight school — all seven sorties, in order — and it says so in plain amber: GRADUATE FLIGHT SCHOOL TO UNLOCK THE CAMPAIGN. Around it, the board got honest about what everything costs:
Difficulty, numbered. Every campaign mission and school sortie carries a rating out of 100, banded green to red — the first intercept reads 20/100, the Bear PAK finale reads 95/100. No more guessing what EXPERT meant.
Enemy pilots, rated 0–100. Early bandits fly like GREEN patrol pilots; by the late campaign you are meeting VETERANS, ACES, and finally LEGENDS — and the rating is not a label, it drives the AI directly. Higher-rated pilots fly faster, shoot sooner, and only they are cleared for the advanced maneuver library: split-S escapes, barrel-roll spoils, loops to force the overshoot. The briefing now prints the assessment before you commit: ENEMY PILOT RATING: 75/100 — ACES.
New school sortie: T-5 AEROBATICS. Rolls, loops and split-S, graded by the instruments — upright to inverted to upright for the roll, over the top for the loop, inverted then pull through for the split-S, all above 1,800 m or the figure doesn’t count. GUNNERY and DOGFIGHT renumber to T-6 and T-7; the dogfight remains your graduation.
The old glamour line. Pacific Empress still flies the DC-10 the way it was meant to be flown — white gloves, gold cheatline, and three CF6s trailing that unmistakable trijet howl across the Pacific. 268 souls in the back. And one of them, one night not so long ago, was a man half the intelligence services of the Pacific Rim were looking for.
THE AIRCRAFT — McDonnell Douglas DC-10 · length 182 ft · wingspan 165 ft 4 in · three CF6 engines, the third buried in the tail and breathing through the S-duct above the fuselage · cruise Mach 0.82 · range about 5,200 nautical miles · seats 270 and up · first flight 29 August 1970 — the trijet era made flesh.
Where to meet her: Mission 7. When the call comes that an Empress heavy is inbound with a defector aboard, every bandit in the Bay will try to keep him from talking. Get there first, run the escort, and put the old trijet on the ground in one piece. The rest of the week she flies the line like any other transport — treat her accordingly.
San Francisco International is open for business. Around the clock and in every weather, the heavies now work the bay: ALLIED 747-400s, LIBERTY 737s, CASCADE MD-90s and PACIFIC EMPRESS DC-10s, climbing out and letting down on the corridors real traffic flies into SFO. They squawk on the radar with airline callsigns, they hold their routes like professionals, and they will absolutely ruin your merge if you cut across final at the wrong moment.
The Hornet’s fire-control computer doesn’t care what you lock — an airliner tracks, designates and takes a missile like anything else. The Navy cares. Splash a civilian and the sortie doesn’t end with a score line, it ends with a COURT MARTIAL. Fly the intercept, make the visual ID, and keep your finger off the pickle.
Which brings us to MISSION 7: one of those Pacific Empress DC-10s is carrying a defector the other side very much wants back, and bandits will vector in to make sure he never talks. Get to him, see off the welcoming committee, and put him safely on the ground. And because a sky this busy shouldn’t keep moving while you’re reading the menu, the whole bay now freezes when you hit Q — traffic, bandits, carrier and all — and picks up exactly where you left it.
