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I'm trying to remember the name of a PC DOS Combat Flight Simulator that I played around 1991/92. I can give the following details:

  • It was named after a US fighter plane that would have been in active service during the 1980's and 1990's.

  • It ran fine on 286 hardware, so may have seen an original release in the late 1980's

  • It had a dogfight mode where 2 players could compete via a serial cable linkup

  • If you attempted to turn too quickly, you could experience a blackout/redout

Can anyone identify the game?

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    Falcon 3.0 would fit this description except it ran terribly on '286 CPUs.
    – user722
    Sep 10, 2018 at 13:30
  • Chuck Yeager's Air Combat also fits the description well, apart from point #1. I initially thought #1 said, "named after a US fighter plane pilot"
    – Octopus
    Sep 10, 2018 at 18:31

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This sounds like F29 Retaliator: it has low hardware requirements, supports head-to-head play, and has blackout/redout. Only its name doesn’t fit: it follows the US nomenclature for fighter planes, but the F-29 never existed (except as the X-29 experimental plane).

The Falcon series nearly matches, but not quite: the original Falcon, and its immediate successor Falcon AT, run reasonably on 286s (with one or two enemies) and support head-to-head play, but they don’t have blackout/redout; that appeared in MiG-29 and was retro-fitted to Falcon 3.0, neither of which ran well on 286s at all.

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    Thanks, it was F29 Retaliator. I remember the Zulu Alert mission. I never realised at the time that it wasn't a real plane.
    – pmarflee
    Sep 10, 2018 at 16:55
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    This game appeared on the Amiga also and was notable for having a very fast polygon engine for the time. No surprise its port ran well on low end PC's
    – PaulHK
    Sep 11, 2018 at 3:34
  • Incidentally, the other aircraft you can fly in F29 Retaliator is listed as the "Lockheed F22", but it has canards and no horizontal tailplane, which means it's not the real F22, either. My guess is that it was based on early concept designs; the game was released in 1989 and the first F-22 prototypes didn't fly until 1991. The F29 depicted in the game is a pretty accurate reproduction of the experimental Grumman X-29, though.
    – anaximander
    Sep 11, 2018 at 8:52
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For dos there was F14 Tomcat from Activision, Air Warrior from Kesmai, F15 Strike Eagle but I don't know if that had 2 player functionality, Air Warrior had black out effects, I forget if redout was there also, but then it didn't have modern jets

Falcon3.0 sounds most likely but not on a 286 There was also F16 Combat Pilot from Spectrum Holobyte And Mig-29 from Domark which I think had red and blackout effects

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