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For those of you Mountain Air pilots that are always
looking for a challenge and some exciting flying, here's a little tweak for
you that will help you to improve your helicopter flying skills. This tweak
is for but not only for the default Bell 206B Jet ranger. Despite the fact
that Microsoft developed the most realistic and complex desktop flight
simulator, it has a few glitches. One of these glitches is that ALL
helicopters used in FS will become more unstable as they are by nature when
the aircraft realism sliders are set to 100%. The slider we are concerned
about is the GENERAL slider. A 100% setting of the GENERAL slider is no
problem and desired when flying fixed wing aircraft (surprise that's what FS
is designed for) but will have a negative effect on the control behavior of
helicopters.
Since helicopters are unstable by nature, the 100%
GENERAL setting will probably set the overall behavior of the helicopter
close to 110% therefore it is almost impossible to control it precisely. To
fix this glitch (you guessed it) we have to reduce the GENERAL setting. We
are looking to reduce the GENERAL setting by 2-4 % depending on your
skill/experience level when flying helicopters. Start FS, from the tool bar,
select Aircraft, Realism Setting and click 2-4 times on the left of the
GENERAL slider, this will set your GENERAL setting to 98-96 % you can keep
all other settings the way you normally have them, we are only concerned
with the GENERAL settings here since these are the ones that will determine
how your aircraft performs and handles. Click ok and select the default Bell
206B. I have set my GENERAL setting to 96 % and have very good results with
it, at around 70% torque I am able to hover and fly controlled.
What have we done ? By reducing the GENERAL setting to
98-96 % we are bringing the overall behavior close to a true 100 % or a
little less. When you are finished flying a helicopter, simply reset the
GENERAL setting back to 100 % (forgetting to do so will not have any
significant effect on most of your aircraft unless you are using the RealAir
SIAI-Marchetti SF260, or their release of the refined flight model of the
default C182S Skylane see:
http://www.realairsimulations.com/downloads/fs2002_freeware.html
Even with these settings applied, flying a rotary wing aircraft
remains rather challenging. REMEMBER: The key to controlled helicopter
flying is to think ahead, "feel", and apply little movement to cyclic,
collective and pedals.
WARNING, FLYING HELICOPTERS MAY LEAD TO SERIOUS
ADDICTION !!
For more information about and how to's see
http://www.hovercontrol.com.
Happy Skies
Rolf Heinemann
MTN311
VP Fleet Maintenance, R&D |
