The three helicopter assists at the moment work fine for hovering, but once you try to cruise or make smooth coordinated turns they can be just as frustrating as flying without them and with the Airbus helicopter they dont really work at all (they should, I dont care that the H225 has fly by wire, the in sim assists and the simulated fly by wire shouldn’t conflict in the sim).
As you accelerate the cyclic assist should help you hold the pitch of the helicopter where you leave it and the tail rotor assist should always keep the turn ball nice and centered as you make turns.
Im not even sure what the collective assist is supposed to be doing.
The way it is now, the tail rotor assist keeps the nose pointing at a constant heading no matter your speed which means you have to force it to turn, and when trying to cruise the cyclic assist is constantly trying to force you to hover like your flying a drone. Its very unconfortable and clunky.
All the forces acting on the helicopters in MSFS2024 makes it miserable and unenjoyable to fly using anything other then expensive and non centering flying sticks. Its fine for helipilots with sim setups and expensive gear but its just miserable for the rest of us.
I want to fly them but just hate it.
Another thing I should mention. The reason airliners dominate the sim market is how hands off they are. Your autopilot does most of the work, and you get to enjoy operating the systems and planning the flights.
Helicopters would be a lot more popular if it wasnt so miserable and unenjoyable to fly them in the sim. I never make it maybe more then 2 minutes before getting tired of white chuckleing my joystick and quit and go do somthing else.
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Sounds like the helicopter assists are for using it as a game, rather than learning how to fly the helicopter correctly. A few months ago I was asking here why the helicopters were so hard to fly and that they didn’t act like real helicopters. I was told to turn off the helicopter assist and WOW it made a world of difference. Now the helo acts like a real helo.
What you describe is what made flying fixed wing for a living so boring that it made me leave after 1 year. Once I moved to helicopters, I was actually flying the aircraft and I enjoyed doing it all over the world for decades. Now that I retired I’m building a helicopter & airplane sim.
I’m one of those you mentioned that paid a lot for the 3 basic helicopter controls (pedals, FFB cyclic, collective) so I wouldn’t need to use airplane controls and I could make the experience way better. It also made it more realistic, yes it does make a humongous difference. Before I bought those though, I flew the helicopters with a $50 combo I bought on marketplace. The cyclic was ok and for the collective I used the airplane throttle, but I installed it sideways with velcro so I could pull the throttle UP (back) and it would act as if I was pulling the collective UP.
I still enjoy flying my real life Wilga (they call it Draco on MSFS) on my grass runway but helicopters are my real passion. The sim scratched that very expensive itch so for now I don’t expect to buy another real helicopter.
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Check out a small program on flightsim.to called Input Viewer (https://flightsim.to/file/14925/input-viewer) that shows you where your cyclic and collective are at while you are flying - great to learn and get a visual feel for what you are doing. Will help you get a better feel for the helos.
