Chocks away! It's another flight sim for the PlayStation! We sent our answer to Tom Cruise on a reconnaissance mission to check it out. Does it look like being a top gun or a bit of a bogey?
Gideon Kibblewhite

Ah. One of them flying fings. They're crap on the PlayStation, aren't they?
Not any more. Not since Namco's Ace Combat 3, in fact, which was pretty dammed good.

Ah yes, it comes back to me now. Ace Combat 3... It was a bit of sim and a bit of a shooter, with a storyline thrown in for good measure.
That's right, and Glass Ghost have gone down a similar path with Eagle One: Harrier Attack, it having a world-in-peril (or United States-in-peril, to be exact, though it amounts to the same thing) storyline too, complete with 'news footage' in between missions to keep you involved.

Harrier Attack... You're leaving me hovering with delight.
The hovering bit is good fun, actually, although the control configuration is tricky to start with. It takes you well into the game's fifth or sixth mission before you really feel at home in the cockpit. The first few missions, in which you do things like rescue downed pilots and 'liberate' towns from the enemy, are reasonably easy. After that, though, things get tougher, and the enemy planes and helicopter gunships seem to keep on coming. In the fifth mission, for example, you have to free an agent from a prison complex and then cover her as she tries to make off in a jeep, a task that seems almost impossible to start with, such is the stiffness of the opposition. This isn't helped as the game's air-to-air missiles seem less than reliable.

Less than reliable? What do you mean - bugged?
Not sure. They certainly aren't very accurate, particularly from a distance, and especially against helicopters for some reason.