Hard time flying the new helicopters

Got the exact same issue. As soon as I get airborne my helicopter starts oscillating left and right, I can’t stop it no matter what I do. Adding rudder with increasing collective does nothing. Helicopters are unplayable right now for me.

3 Likes

Helicopters fly pretty well, none of the reported problems here, except that I seem to need 90 % collective to lift it from the ground.

Thx for the report. That’s mean I’m not going crazy :smiley:

Has everyone here who is having problems got their trims worked out as per TFEV1909’s post near the top of the thread. They’re absolutely essential.

What you see are the normal physics of helicopters not a problem with controllers sensitivity. For instance as soon as you apply any force to the collective the whole fuselage will try to react in the opposite direction to the rotor rotation resulting in yaw that needs to be compensated with pedals and even with cyclic. That´s because rotor is not a fixed wing melted with fuselage as it is in an aircraft but an axis to which a rotating wing is melted, so to speak. Specially in the case of changing collective torque you are expected to perform many corrections on both cyclic and pedals at the same time because you are adding an extra force to the rotating axis.

You can find a similar behaviour in tailwheelers while you apply power and wings are not fully horizontal yet. Fuselage is going to yaw and there´s nothing you can do to prevent it other than applying corrections in the opposite direction.

Cheers

2 Likes

Same issue here with the helos, however I noticed my stick is all fowled up for all aircraft.
Looking at mine further after update, my flights tick (Logitech 3d extreme) is showing axis’s either on or off. Wonder if it got set to a digital mode (on or off, no gradient).
Hope to investigate today to reveal what changed. Report back if I find my resolution. Might relate.

**UPDATE: For me: changing the flight model back to Legacy rather than Modern, corrected my issues.
(my stick was acting digital rather than analog. I totally forgot updates re-set some things.

I knew this was going to happen. Rushed and no public beta testing.

1 Like

Moved to #self-service:aircraft-systems

That changes nothing for a certain portion of us who encounter the huge oscillation issues. It’s not a normal behavior at all.
The way I understand it, some of us (no clue who or why) experience a HUGE dampening happening on cyclic input. It’s like a 2 to 4 sec average function is applied to cyclic input. it ends up with the crazy stunts you see in videos outlining the issue, where the assist system desperatly tries to stabilize without compensating for the dampening.
Pilot deactivating the assistance share the same fate, they react instantly to a bank change, expecting the helicopter to react immediatly after, which does not happen because of the dampening.
I managed to mitigate it by manually oscillating my cyclic around the point where I want it to be to put the chopper in a proper position. And it’s pretty ■■■■ hard to oscillate a cyclic both axis around a moving point you imagine in your head being the correct one ! :smile: I SHOULDN’T have to pilot that way, no chopper behaves like that.
And when I compare with my mate, they don’t experience this behavior at all, so it’s only a subset of us that are facing this issue.
I can’t tell what is causing it :frowning:

2 Likes

Check this geloxo: New helicopters oscillating wildly - #16 by threedee1243 (same videos as here but in a bug thread)

There is a bug some people are getting: wild roll oscillation on takeoff. Helicopters can be difficult, but these bugs make them truly impossible for some :slight_smile:

1 Like

Have tried. Notting helps. Thx

No helicopter takeoff is performed with collective only, to start with. That´s the first mistake while trying to handle a helicopter. On the other hand as soon as helicopter starts to yaw without any correction on pedals you can face additional roll as well as seen in the video posted above by Jigsaw407. That can be caused by wind adding resistance to the nose yaw for instance, while rotor is still pushing the rest of the fuselage. If that happens then you need the cyclic to compensate roll and eventual pitch because nose and tail are facing different forces in that situation. If you don´t correct that the whole fuselage will continue moving and that will make the plane of the rotor to move as well in accordance, resulting in even stronger forces to the fuselage and a worse situation than the initial one. It´s very important to make corrections in time and make them gently or you will end in a never ending pendular osillation and a crash.

Cheers

That was another tip I was going give. When you’re practicing make sure you don’t have any wind to add to your difficulties.

Awww, please …
Just a little CV : I have a few thousands hours of helicopter simming under my belt already. There’s not much need for a chopper course right now.
I’m pretty categoric on this one : an helicopter does NOT behave like I see the MSFS 407 do right now.
I understand not all players encounter this, so you may think we are mistaken, but please, it’s not a chopper newcomer error.

4 Likes

There´s no need for such answer as I didn´t say anything about your skills nor anyone´s skills. I just wrote that takeoff won´t result in a steady hover if you do it with collective only and if you don´t perform corrections properly it will just get worse.

Cheers

1 Like

I agree with you on how takeoff should be performed, but if someone did it with collective only you would expect to see a lot of yaw and some roll to one side that would pretty soon go out of control. Here we have a case where some people get that and some get very strong roll oscillation (with maybe yaw missing). I tried all sorts of incorrect takeoffs with and without assists, but could not reproduce the problem shown on the video. That’s why I think there’s a bug only some users are experiencing.

1 Like

I did: clear sky, no wind at all. I can’t practise because I can’t fly :wink:

It’s a nightmare with a controller. Firstly, you can’t fine tune the yaw/pitch trim. As soon as you highlight the knob and move the stick, the figure runs away. It’s a reflex game trying to stop it at a reasonable value… and sometimes the stick axis are not consistent either. You never know which trim will start running and in which direction.

Stick sensitivity is all over the place, flying is basically a constant struggle. Earlier today I spent 10 minutes rotating, climbing and falling around the departure spot before I could finally stabilize and start flying somewhere.

Even when you’re en route, the helicopter keeps bobbing up and down, descending and ascending, never being stable in flight. Again, trim simply cannot be adjusted properly on the fly.

Turning is another challenge as the rudder input only upsets the aircraft mid-flight. Oh and if you have rotor assist off, then no amount of rudder can stop the helicopter from spinning endlessly.

1 Like

Please contribute to this topic: Helicopters are hard