Sometimes the ever enigmatic internet algorithm can provide introductions to great video content creators that may not always be "staple" channels for Digital Combat Simulator World. Back in 2022, I remember randomly flipping through YouTube Shorts and suddenly learning how to use AGM-65 Maverick anti-tank missiles in VIS mode in the DCS World F-16C 'Viper' in 60 seconds. Definitely not the type of content I was just semi-mindlessly swiping through.
Since this random encounter, Bogey Dope has become one of my favorite YouTube channels producing content for DCS. Recently his playthrough of First In - Weasels Over Syria by Ground Pounder Sims became, in my opinion, one of the better recorded playthroughs of a single player DCS campaign. Skyward Flight Media reached out for an interview to learn more about this creator.
Thank you for accepting our interview request. I do have to say, I am a bit of a fan. I’ll keep it together.
Well, thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. For those of your readers who don't know me, my name is Bogey Dope. I'm an ex F-16 Crew Chief, and I'm currently running a YouTube channel by the same name where I make DCS tutorials, reviews, and general information about the simulator. I try to make DCS a little more digestible for newer players.
Starting at the beginning, how did your interest in aviation start?
It's actually pretty corny. My Dad let me watch Top Gun with him when I was about 5 or 6 years old, and from there, I was obsessed with aviation. I wanted to go to airshows and I made model airplanes with him, and the house was suddenly littered with paper airplanes everywhere.
I still can’t believe how influential the first Top Gun movie was. Seems like anyone with even a minor interest in aviation was touched by it in some way. Are there any flight games or simulators you especially enjoyed when you were growing up?
My family didn't get a computer in the house until I was well into Jr. High. Once we did, that was one of the first things I did with it. I found a flight simulator. I can't remember the name, but I had to learn how to work MS DOS so I could fly it. It was just a Pitts sim, but I spent many hours a week flying the one sim I had. From there, I would save money and buy my first JANES flight sim, and that opened up my fantasies of flying fighter jets since I was 5 years old. It just progressed from there until I was flying Falcon 4.0 later on in High School. My favorites were definitely the JANES series and Falcon, when I was growing up.
I stumbled onto your content via YouTube Shorts in 2022. That is definitely not a medium I was expecting to see some pretty solid Digital Combat Simulator tutorials. As I started to check out the rest of your channel, I saw the series “Stories Of A Crew Chief”. Can we talk about your time in the military a bit?
Absolutely, what would you like to know? I joined the Air Force fairly soon out of High School. I was seduced by my recruiter with the idea of having my name on a jet. Once he told me that, I was reaching for a pen. I had a very small idea of what I was signing up for, but couldn't wait to get started. At the time, my favorite jet up until then was the Tomcat of course, but once my name was literally on a Falcon, that changed. There is definitely pride that comes with the job.
You know, this is something I've wanted to ask a former or current member of an air force. I’ll take this chance. When you signed up, did you explicitly go in wanting to be a pilot?
I knew before I signed up that the main prerequisite for being a pilot is that you have to be an officer, and to be an officer, you have to have a college degree. I signed up right out of high school, so I didn't sign up with any intention of being a pilot. Though it was my dream, it wasn't what I ended up going for.
Do you have some advice you could give to others that may be considering signing up for a specific position in the military, but are concerned about ending up with a different “job” they did not expect?
I can only speak to when I signed up. Back when I joined, you got to pick your job. I'm sure there was a way you could just sign a paper that put you in a random job, but I had the option to pick my job. The list of jobs you have available to pick from are completely reliant on your ASVAB score. If you want to have the largest spectrum of jobs to choose from, I recommend studying for your ASVAB. The higher the score, the more jobs you have to choose from. If you get a lower score, you'll only have a few jobs to choose from. Honestly, though, my biggest advice I can give is, choose a job that translates to the civilian world well. When I joined, the USAF didn't give Crew Chiefs A&P Licenses. Which I thought was stupid because that's what we did! However, the last I heard, the USAF now gives Crew Chief's A&P licenses.
Now, if you are a Crew Chief, and you finish your enlistment, you can go right into the Civilian sector and continue to work in Aircraft Maintenance. Same with other jobs like Cyber Systems Operations Specialist. I'm fairly certain the Air Force gives you all the Microsoft certs that you would need to continue to be a server admin when you get out. Do your research and find a job that you would like to do when you finish your enlistment. That way you have options when you get out.
Apologies for the sidebar, thank you for your responses. Getting back to it, where did your career as a crew chief take you? I hear you were even involved with setting up a divert base in Iraq at some point.
Yes, typically as a Crew Chief, you follow your squadron wherever it goes. If the squadron deploys, you go with them to maintain the jets. My time in Iraq was actually not with my squadron, however. I was there on TCN duty, basically just escorting local nationals around base while they worked. While we were there, they had a couple F-16's divert to that base, and the base commander at the time had called us in because he knew we were Crew Chiefs. He asked if we could get the jets turned around and launch them home. From there, we set it up so that Balad could divert more jets to Kirkuk if needed. Prior to us doing that, it was a little bigger operation as Crew Chiefs would have to fly from Balad to Kirkuk to recover the jets and send them back to Balad. I made a "Stories Of A Crew Chief" video on it, as you previously mentioned.
I plan to make many more. I've been stationed at a few bases around the US, including Alaska at Eielson AFB. I eventually switched over to the MQ-1 Predator. From there, my deployments became much more frequent, as the pentagon LOVES drones, and used them as often as possible in theater. As a result, I spent the next four deployments in Jalalabad (J-bad) Afghanistan. FOB Fenty. More stories to come in the Stories of a Crew Chief series. I'm hoping Eagle Dynamics models FOB Fenty in the upcoming Afghanistan map (The base that Operation Neptune Spear launched from). I'll definitely be making some "Stories Of A Crew Chief" videos centered on that base.
Digital Combat Simulator has been your primary platform for roughly the past three years. There is a good mix of tutorials and general flight footage, but I absolutely want to talk about the Virtual F-16 Crew Chief mod. When people talk simulation, they are usually thinking about the aircraft while it is in flight. This mod brings realism to pre-flight operations as well?
It does to me, in my opinion. I felt that DCS was missing a big aspect of Air Force ground operations. Eagle Dynamics has put a ton of effort in the ground ops on a carrier. Yellow Shirts, Green Shirts, Brown Shirts, etc. all moving around the deck, marshalling you in, connecting you to the catapult, and launching you out. It increases the immersion enormously. This immersion is simply missing for the land based jets in DCS. In real life, pilots don't just walk out on the flight line, and grab a jet and take off. The Crew Chief is always there to greet the pilot when he steps to the jet. The Crew Chief is responsible for making sure the jet is safe to fly and launches the pilot out. There's a back and forth that goes on between the Crew Chief and the pilot during launches, hotpit refuels, red balls, etc.
I felt that providing a little bit of that experience, that back and forth "team effort" of pilot and Crew Chief to get the jet ready to fly, would even further the immersion in the F-16 in DCS. I wish we had animated Crew Chiefs/Weapons/Specs troops in the sim like the NAVY birds do on the carrier deck. Unfortunately, that may be a long way off on the development road map. I've heard it's something ED devs have talked about in the past, but I have not heard of any timetable of such a thing.
So, the next best thing, in my mind, was to create an "audible" virtual Crew Chief that would talk to you, and walk through the startup and launch procedure with you like you would if you were to launch an F-16 in real life. It was fun for me to make. Brought back a lot of memories. A lot of nostalgia going through that procedure again.
The fact that Virtual Crew Chief invoked nostalgia for you is telling about how realistic it is. On the video content creation front, I believe that your entire series for ‘First In: Weasels Over Syria’ is one of the best examples of balancing input from a creator while not compromising the atmosphere of the campaign. Can I get your thoughts on that campaign and how you are presenting it to your audience?
I actually just finished Mission 12 (the last mission in the campaign) last night and am in the process of organizing and editing all the footage now! I absolutely loved the campaign. It was a lot of fun. Even for someone like me who has spent countless hours in DCS flying the F-16, I enjoyed it and found it to be very engaging and challenging. I'm hopeful that this series is helpful for those who are looking for a "guide" so to speak. When I looked online for help with other campaigns when flying them, I found very few videos out there with people explaining what they were doing and why. It seemed odd to me that the only real DCS campaign walkthroughs (that I found) were just videos of someone flying the missions, but not talking. So you have no idea what they're thinking or why they're doing what they're doing.
I wanted to change this and create a series for the FIWOS campaign, where I explain everything I'm doing (or at least as much as I can) and talk the viewer through the mission, so they understand what, why, and how. I created my channel to help newer DCS players, and I figured I could continue this with the FIWOS walkthrough series because, even if they aren't interested in flying the campaign, they would be able to learn some things and be entertained at the same time... hopefully.
Once your series on First: In Weasels over Syria is complete, do you have any other DCS World campaigns you are considering recording in the future?
Yes. I would like to do this again. I've struggled to find time, as is evident by my video post tempo as of late. However, there are a couple of campaigns coming out soon that I want to fly. The Gamblers campaign and the Arctic Thunder campaign. Baltic Dragon gave me a preview of the Gamblers campaign and it was a lot of fun. Very intense scenes in it. I made a quick video on it recently. I've been able to work with Reflected Simulations on his Arctic Thunder campaign recently, and it's sounding like it is going to be another very fun and intense campaign as well. I'm anxious for both of them to come out!
What are some considerations and hurdles you experience creating content for flight simulators on YouTube? I know that flight sim is not exactly a top genre on YouTube.
The biggest consideration that I look at when creating content is what will be helpful to the community. Sometimes, I take liberties and just create what I want, instead of a tutorial, but I typically want to find ways to create things that help either grow the community, or help those who are new. I feel when someone tries something as complicated as DCS can be, they become overwhelmed and quit almost immediately.
I try to create content that shows it is not as difficult as it seems, and is quite rewarding once you get the hang of it. Sometimes I have an idea on a video that would be entertaining, not necessarily helpful like a tutorial or anything. Just something that is fun to watch. Like a cinematic, or a mission, or a quick short I came up with in my mind. I try to find ways to make DCS look fast paced and fun to watch, in hopes that some viewers who have never heard of DCS or seen anything on it, would find it intriguing and maybe look into it. The flight sim world can only get better if we help grow the community. What better way, than to make fast paced, fun combat sim videos if you can. The biggest hurdle of mine lately has been time. I spend hours and hours just recording the things I want to create. Then hours upon hours organizing it all and editing it into something that I find useful. I've kind of created an expectation for myself, in the quality of my content, and I don't want to deliver anything less on my channel.
So, it requires a lot of time. Finding that time, can sometimes, be very difficult because I have my real job on the weekdays, and family things on the weekends like baseball tournaments, and practices, etc.
As you are clearly a ‘Viper’ focused simulator pilot, I have to ask your opinion on Falcon 4.0 / Falcon BMS. Have you revisited it since the major update in June 2024?
I have not. I intend to though. I recently bumped into "Aviation Plus" at the Flight Sim Expo, and got to talk a little about BMS. I need to get back into it. Falcon was a huge reason I got into more intense combat flight simulators. Before that, I played around with the JANES flight sims, but after Falcon came out, I was more interested in the details than just screwing around firing missiles off into the air.
Do you have any observations on the simulation of the F-16C in Falcon BMS versus Digital Combat Simulator?
The BMS F-16 is more complete. There are more pages in the DED that don't exist in DCS's F-16. There are some things that are modeled and simulated in BMS that DCS has not yet. Obviously BMS has the dynamic campaign, and DTC (Data Cartridge), but when it comes to the F-16 itself, BMS also provides more "blocks" to fly. In DCS, we are only given the block 50. In BMS, you can fly a number of different blocks of the F-16. Which is fun because you have different systems and capabilities in the different blocks. Among many other things. I need to get back into BMS... it's been a long time.
Your most recent trip was to Flight Sim Expo 2024. Have you ever been to a flight simulation focused event like it before? How was your experience?
I've never been to anything like that before. It was a ton of fun! I got to meet some fans. I got to meet some creators like Juice from the Air Warfare Group, Tuuvas, Aviation Plus, GD Viper Works, etc. An entire expo, full of like minded people. It was great. Being able to see things that haven't been released yet, and touch and feel new sims and equipment was thrilling. I enjoyed it a lot.
Thank you so much for your time with this interview. Good luck on your future endeavors. I know I will be watching for sure!
Thank you for reaching out and for all the kind words!
About the Interviewer
Co-founder of Skyward Flight Media. After founding Electrosphere.info, the first English Ace Combat database, he has been involved in creating flight game-related websites, communities, and events since 2005. He explores past and present flight games and simulators with his extensive collection of game consoles and computers. Read Staff Profile.
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