Helicopter career missions suggestions

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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So here’s my wish list:

That you can start a helicopter career without ever having to touch a fixed-wing aircraft like in real life. Private then commercial just like fixed wing.

And would be nice to have real world beginner helicopter career missions like:

Sight seeing: like banner towing in fixed wing, in the real world we get hundreds of logged hours by doing endless laps around some big city or vacation island by flying sightseeing tours endlessly. One place, it wasn’t uncommon to have a hundred people standing in line to go on a helicopter tour around an island all day, everyday especially on the weekends or on holidays. The tours are usually pretty short like 5, 10 or 15 minutes but you will do them for an hour at a time usually. Sometimes we even have multiple helicopters running. You could log easily 40-80 landings in a single shift on any day. And 44/66 Robbinsons are standard for these missions. Especially the R44.

We occasionally also do ball drops at golf courses, or candy drops at schools churches or other places.

We also have to do ferry flights for various maintenances on the helicopters.

It would also be epic if you could also allow us to take off from and land on variously sized dollies/carts at the end of the flight.

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Light cargo

Cinema photography

Aerial survey work

Cherry crop drying

Shark beach patrols

Law enforcement

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Career has the ch47. Can we please have internal cargo missions for helicopters?

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This will be a bit of a mix of Search & Rescue and Medical Flight. It will also allow the mission to be flown in cities, increasing the number of city mission variety.

The mission steps would be something like

  • Take off from Airport
  • Fly to the scene of an accident - be it car accident, wounded kid in a park, ferry sinking in the river or whatever.
  • Evacuate the wounded person to a hospital helipad.
  • Depending on the size of the helicopter and the accident, you may need to shuttle more than one person.
  • Return to airport.
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Love it! When I was working on my H-CPL a few years ago, and likely still true today, this was generally the ultimate goal for a budding civilian helicopter pilot in the US. You first teach, then you tour, then maybe you do some offshore and finally you do medivac. No, that’s not everyone’s desired progression. But it is common enough in my experience to make it a bit odd that it is absent here.

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BLUF: For the helicopter Search and Rescue missions, it’d be great if the crew actually did the things they’re supposed to do to recover the victim. This could greatly improve the quality of life and realism of the missions.

For example, during the standard SAR missions, if there is no viable landing spot within 0.03 miles (which seems to be the trigger for pick-up), I would expect the retrieving crew to hike out to the patient and carry them back to the bird. Not something crazy like half a mile, but maybe extend that pick up trigger to 0.1 miles with a longer wait on the ground holding position. It could be an indicator stating “Crew moving to patient” or something like that and a similar one when they’re on the way back. Or just make it radio calls, something to let the player know to keep doing what they’re doing. No cut scene needed.

Another example, something that’s driven me nuts since I first saw it in FSX: dragging the crew through the water during SAR hoist missions. If a crew member is in the water, it doesn’t make sense for them to just lay there and be dragged across the water until their centroid coordinates intersect with the centroid coordinates of the motionless victim. It’s reasonable to expect the hard-charging guys and gals who do that for a living to actively swim to the victim and perform their recovery operations. I’d like to think the same could be simulated in MSFS 2024. While victim not retrieved, If helo within 0.02 miles of victim, crew swim animation and movement to victim coordinates at a realistic rate. Else, crew just lay there. Just an idea, no clue how to actually implement that.

Career Mode, for all it’s current hiccups, has been an absolute blast to play and I can’t wait to watch it improve. Thank you all and please have a great day!

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An additional mission type of heli ski operations. Take off from ski lodge, heliport, airport fly to snow mountain covered mountain top, toe touch landings, drop off the skiers, pick them up at the bottom. Skiers could ask to go back to the top or to another mountain, 2-5 drop offs, RTB. Simple addition, if you want to get fancy add configuration of skid baskets for skis.

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Firefighting missions with a bambibucket equiped H125!

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Second that. Love the H125

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Vip mission with a h155 and land on a yatch :slight_smile:

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Worked with helicopter maintenance in northern Sweden for almost my whole life, some things we have done…

*Reindeer herding
*Powerline inspections
*Heliski
*Every spring large bridges are installed over mountain rivers by helicopters
*Supplies to mountain cabins (Already in the sim)
*Fire fighting with Bumbibuckets
*Chalking of lakes
*Sling load during moose hunting season, bring killed moose to a road
*During research campaigns on the space station we recovered the baloon/cargo from the middle of nowhere
*Helicopter HEMS missions, everything fom broken arms, heart attacks, car/snowmobile crashes…
*VIP flights
*Inventory of predators, Bears, Wolfes, Lynx etc.

And loads more…

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Moderator edit: The title of this post was:
“Helicopter VIP Yacht to yacht or yacht to villa transfers missions (career mode)”

Title is self explanatory. I just think it would be nice, I was expecting it as it is some pretty common operation and quite challenging at the same time. Moving yachts would be even better.

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Yes yes yes to firefighting missions.

I came back into MSFS simply because we were promised firefighting missions, and me coming from that background/interest I was extremely disappointed in not only the fixed wing application of this, but it’s complete lack of it in the sim for helicopters, despite it being advertised to have firefighting ops for helicopters too. So I also vote for adding this huge part of the use of helicopters in firefighting and other related fields like others have shown here.

We need:

Fully functioning S-64F, as the firefighting version is a big orange paper weight currently.

Adding firefighting equipment to the H125, Bell 407, and CH-47 as well. All of these aircraft operate with a bucket or external tank and snorkel setup.

Add the firefighting missions! And please, please for the love of all things holy. These types of missions should not be AI generated. The issues people and myself have experienced with these AI created missions for rotary wing are absolutely horrendous in terms of not being able to complete missions due to the bugs and the AI putting assets in trees or in locations you can’t safely get your aircraft to to complete missions.

Aircraft like the H125 and Bell 407 are often used in Helco missions for coordinating ground personnel and even other helicopter drops. This may not be able to be implemented, but I think it probably could. In addition, these platforms do carry bambi buckets or even external tanks with snorkels on them. Adding that capability and mission type would be steller. Also, heli-torch ops are flown on these helos. Setting back fires would also be a mission type.

The heavy helicopters like the S-64 and CH-47, they need to be functioning in this ssense too. The S-64 I already mentioned as not being functional. The CH-47 is unique in that it can carry slightly more in some configurations than the S-64 can with their assortment of internal water tanks many have now. The liveries included with these CH-47s also are firefighting operators. Like Columbia, Billings, and I think one other that escapes me. If a tank isn’t your thing, they also carry buckets.

There’s so much potential here if some time was put into it by the developers, instead of a horrendously watered down AI added/created mission sets for some of these arguably super dynamic missions.

Sorry it was long winded, but like a lot of people I’m just super passionate about this stuff.

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+1 to all the above. So many interesting and challenging things can be done in a heli career. Can’t wait to have more mission types etc added in future.

It would also be nice if the current ones could be made glitch free.

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