Very well put.
It’s difficult to relay the experience with so many perspectives to draw from. There are also users from around the world that may not speak English as their first language.
However, it is slightly frustrating trying to help relay that experience. It seems that everyone wants to know what a real pilot thinks of the flight model. Then when we speak up and relay our experience, it seems that it is disregarded because of someone’s experience with some other software or simulator.
I have a full size 1:1 control setup (Pro-Flight Trainer Puma) no curves, and with the assists off, the helicopter FM feels very good. Just as good as the other top home simulators, and even the FAA certified FlyIt sim I have flown (see the FAR/AIM for how many simulated hours can be logged towards your rating). It responds how I would expect from my experience flying Robinsons. Both the 407 and Cabri have some systems issues that need to be addressed, but overall, they fly convincingly like helicopters.
As far as real world application for simulator training? Your mileage may very. It depends on what you take from it. Some instructors may appreciate that prior experience, some may consider it a hindrance.
No instructor would put a student at the controls without some ground school first, so they know what to expect.
There is no substitute for the real thing. Your mind and body react differently when the ground is approaching quickly.
From my experience and point of view, it seems most of the issues may be due to control setups.
I use my 1:1 control setup, linear, no curves, across all sim platforms and I can jump into XP11/12, DCS Huey/Apache as well as MSFS 407/Cabri/Airland-RSP R44 and hover/fly just as well as I can in the R22, R44 or R66 IRL.
…but I am a low time private pilot with a lot to learn.
Also, a big part of the training is muscle memory, which you can’t train on a home simulator, unless perhaps if you have the exact same cockpit with the exact same controls with the exact same force responses as a 1:1 rebuild at home.
Hell, even in the real world one machine is very different from the other. You don’t need to be a pilot to experience that. If you drive one stick shift car and you switch to another you have to relearn (or at the very least adjust to) the way the clutch and the gas pedals behave in the new car. How much gas pedal pressure is required? When does the clutch bite? How much motion range is there? etc. If you can drive a new car immediately without (almost) stalling it or at least adding too much gas on the first few tries, you are REALLY good.
hey i found this one works for the bell407 just in case you missed it
Try the LVar mentioned above.
Open the “Add axis” dialog
Move your desired control/lever
Type “L:CollectiveGrip, Percent” into the “Enter variable” box
Set Axis Min to -10 and Axis Max to 100
Hey real pilots - I was looking at a video report covering the World Cup celebrations and in it I noticed a Bell 406(?). It was hovering, dead still in space, 120 feet above the deck. So, can you do that in real life? Obviously. Can you do that in the simulator? I can’t. I can get the bird to hover in place but it will immediately proceed in one direction or another, and rather quickly.
Then I look at real life videos inside the cockpit and see that the heli is hovering with very little pilot input. How is that possible? According to pilots here, one must always be adjusting.
I will say that the helis are all flyable but it feels to me like they use a similar if not the same algorithms as FSX. They all fly well but to me, they all topple off hover too easily. I don’t expect much from a “game” sim but I still feel they’re modeling the body mass too high along the rotor (center) axis above the disk.
Hello,
Welcome to the forums!
As a new user, you cannot create new topics. But as you advance, you will be able to. When that time comes, you can create a topic in Wishlist, which is the area of the forums where you can request new features about the base sim. When and if you do, please tag that post with #aircraft and #helicopter so that other people can find it.
In the meantime, this is a topic about the new Bell 407. So I would ask that conversation in this thread stick to this aircraft only. Thank you!
I haven’t seen the video you mention, however in my experience these things can be deceptive.
One thing I would say is that an out of ground effect hover in a single engine helicopter at 120 feet is a recipe for trouble, if that engine or tail rotor quits the pilot has absolutely zero chance of entering a successful autorotation before hitting the ground very hard and out of control. Even recovery from incipient vortex ring would be doubtful at that height above the surface. Height or speed are your friend, if you give up both it better be for an important reason.
A great deal of my Police flying and some of my early military flying required ultra stable ‘out of ground effect’ hovering at heights of up to 4000 feet, but mostly around 1200 feet. The perspective from a person on the surface would be a rock solid hover while up there in the cockpit I would be constantly making very small corrections/pressures to the controls to maintain the required position. After a 10 hour windy night shift with up to 7 hours of flying my knees would be complaining the next day!
Certainly my time flying the completely non stabilised Gazelle was a very hands and feet on experience with constant little control inputs. As you gain more experience, you anticipate the drift from the required position much faster and therefore the control movements are much more nuanced and less obvious.
When in the hover you’re constantly referencing your position compared to points on the ground and any drift away from those points is the trigger for control inputs to get those reference points back to where they should be. If you look at most modern helicopter designs, they have a rounded or pointed nose with a tapering tail boom and a fin and stabiliser at the rear. This makes the aircraft very efficient in forward flight but much less so with an airflow from ant other direction, particularly from the rear quarters. Most helicopters are easy to fly above 60kts airspeed or so, and increasingly unstable towards the hover.
So when you’re in the hover, any wind and particularly gusts will upset the aircraft position, and the pilot will need to react immediately to counter the resultant drift. Even a wind from the front will cause an increase in lift which will mean the aircraft climbs and moves backwards, if the pilot pushes the cyclic forward and lowers the collective to regain the hover position, the secondary effect of the control movements will require the pedals to be moved to compensate for the change in tail rotor thrust required, so it’s very much a constant juggling act for the new student.
Fired up the 407 for the first time today. Without touching any other control surfaces I raised the collective a few inches. The bird rose straight up in a controlled assent. Lowered the collective about an inch for a controlled hover. Lowered it another inch for a controlled descent. Hopefully the flight model will get better.
Didn’t check that. I was flying the B-47-G2 a little prior to the helo update. It was OK’ish. I may be a little spoiled by the DCS Huey.
If the 407 is decent then I may have to create another head for my collective.
the 407 is technically flyable but you almost gotta throw out everything you know about flying whirlybirds trying to figure out the nuances. it’s not perfect and you do use way more pedal input than you actually need to be doing for example. That’s with the assists off too. It’s not disappointing just…leaves an empty feeling. You got the helicopter but it’s like…eh…
Like most base stuff in the sim, you need an addon that fixes up the model a bit. There’s one on Flightsim.to that’s in active development afaik and it does make it way better.
Would the 4-bladed composite rotor in the 407 make a difference in maneuverability compared to the 2-bladed teetering rotor in the 206? (All my real-life flight experience is in fixed-wing aircraft, so I wouldn’t have any experience to compare it to.)
I’d like this also, but note that I think it would show up as a separate aircraft variant rather than a livery choice; my understanding is that the livery only affects the textures and that the avionics are affected by stuff in some other folders, though I could be wrong on that.
I believe I’ve seen some previous work in progress on G1000 flight decks for the 407s in other sims by some of those 3rd-party developers (or mods thereof) prior to MSFS 2020, but I’m not sure how far those got, as I don’t think I’ve seen videos of those in a completed form so far. Not sure how easy it would be to migrate that work over to the MSFS.
