Why isn’t it available in the MS Store? I only buy stuff from the MS store.
I think because it has external modules. Maybe @Techy111 can comment? I would also prefer a marketplace solution so that updates are done automatically.
Thanks for the views but for me $50 Australian is just a bit much at this time.Will wait and see how things go for the future.Cheers.
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Oh I do, The H135 is a great project!
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Cheers for the info Jeremy, I was going to purchase this until I read about having to run an app in the background every time I want to fly, I’ll stick with the (free) H135 for now
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Yeah, I think you are right. It was repeatedly stated that the custom flight model for this helicopter lives outside the sim (just like Accusim at A2A) and gets injected into the sim via Simconnect or some other interface, don’t know. It would make sense that the Heli Manager is where that flight model resides and that’s why it has to run in the background. Until MSFS natively supports helicopters that will be the only way to get that kind of fidelity/realism. Probably even beyond that. Just like Accusim. The difference being, that the Bell 47G transparently shows you that there is an external modul running in the background, while Accusim doesn’t.
But yeah, I think some official clarification will bring more understanding why that app is required.
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I just bought this and I have to say it’s a lot of fun. The external module isn’t annoying and doesn’t distract from the experience. I fly in vr using the realistic flight mode and it’s so much fun. A challenging aircraft to fly and I would say relatively realistic. Good torque effects and capable of auto rotations. Nice cyclic feel. The only helicopter I have flown in real life is the gazelle for a week. But that of course doesn’t compare to these primative helicopters. So would be interesting to hear from someone who has flown the bell. Overall, this is an enjoyable manual heli which is a challenge to fly but very good fun. Great performance with my hp reverb G2. My only negative are the sounds, it has a very noticeable sound loop for the engine that ruins it a bit for me. @Techy111 are you planning to improve the sound?
Jeremy, I think you’re making a fuss about nothing. I’m on a creaky, 2-year-old PC which by today’s standards shouldn’t get the kind of performance I do out of MSFS 2020 (i7 8700k @ 3.70GHz, 16GB Ram, GTX 1080 - can we agree this is hardly cutting-edge?).
I run MSFS 2020 at ‘High End’ all of the time, and I purchased the Bell 47G and obviously have the Heli Manager running in the background. I have noticed no performance issues at all.
Making a tiny, noninvasive background app the ‘dealbreaker’ is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. But that’s your prerogative, I guess. I just think it’s misleading and inaccurate to suggest that this is a good enough reason to pass up on what is (IMO) in almost every respect an excellent payware aircraft and one which looks set to improve over time on what’s already in the package.
My only real criticism of the Bell 47G as things stand one day after release is that I hope they fix the default external view. That really is a tangible irritation, but for me, it’s the only one. The Heli Manager app doesn’t even figure.
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I read that one of the devs has owned a few Bell 47s and has about 11,000 hrs in them, so that’s good enough for me
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It was not stated that it would be running in a background application.
And in their official user manual document on page 7 it says:
If it was required for custom flight model - it should have been mentioned there.
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The Heli Manager can easily be prevented from starting on boot up through the Task Manager so that’s that out the way, along with any resources it maybe using. The scale of the issue here is down to personal opinion with regards to any impact on the system.
Having done that (not loading on boot), you can load the sim and fly all your fixed wing aircraft till the cows come home. ‘Fly’ the B47G and the helicopter will load in, and the popup will ask you to run the Heli Manager. Open it, select your Flight Model, close the Manager. Go to Task Manager, processes, end the FIHeliManager process. Back to the sim, start up the helicopter and off you go. No HeliManager running and no resource or performance ‘hit’ 
to be had as shown in this video clip :
Microsoft Flight Simulator Bell 47 No Heli Manager - YouTube
You can change the flight model by reopening the Manager during your flight session, make a change, and repeat ending the process through Task Manager as above, although I’d advise doing this on the ground.
Talking of resources, in sim, with the HeliManager on, it’s CPU usage for me is at most 0.5% (with the main cores having more than enough headroom to squeeze it in - all core average CPU usage is 30% tops). GPU usage is static at 1.2%
Heli Manager resource usage 01/05/21 - YouTube
So if the one compromise needed for this helicopter to work as it does (given the current state of the sim’s flight model with no direct support for rotary aircraft and the need to create a custom flight model) is having to open up the HeliManager once in sim, either make changes as required or leave it as it is, close it and end it’s process in the Task Manager which takes literally seconds to do, then that’s a compromise that I’m happy to go with.
Perhaps the Devs may offer some insight as to why the HeliManager functions the way it does, and/or may offer to make changes to it, but simply doing the above makes the issue a No Factor as far as I’m concerned. No load on boot, open it in sim, close it, end it’s process. Job done.
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I posted this in the other B47 thread so will paste it into here:
The Heli Manager can easily be prevented from starting on boot up through the Task Manager so that’s that out the way, along with any resources it maybe using. The scale of the issue here is down to personal opinion with regards to any impact on the system.
Having done that (not loading on boot), you can load the sim and fly all your fixed wing aircraft till the cows come home. ‘Fly’ the B47G and the helicopter will load in, and the popup will ask you to run the Heli Manager. Open it, select your Flight Model, close the Manager. Go to Task Manager, processes, end the FIHeliManager process. Back to the sim, start up the helicopter and off you go. No HeliManager running and no resource or performance ‘hit’ to be had as shown in this video clip :
Microsoft Flight Simulator Bell 47 No Heli Manager - YouTube
You can change the flight model by reopening the Manager during your flight session, make a change, and repeat ending the process through Task Manager as above, although I’d advise doing this on the ground.
Talking of resources, in sim, with the HeliManager on, it’s CPU usage for me is at most 0.5% (with the main cores having more than enough headroom to squeeze it in - all core average CPU usage is 30% tops). GPU usage is static at 1.2%
Heli Manager resource usage 01/05/21 - YouTube
So if the one compromise needed for this helicopter to work as it does (given the current state of the sim’s flight model with no direct support for rotary aircraft and the need to create a custom flight model) is having to open up the HeliManager once in sim, either make changes as required or leave it as it is, close it and end it’s process in the Task Manager which takes literally seconds to do, then that’s a compromise that I’m happy to go with.
Perhaps the Devs may offer some insight as to why the HeliManager functions the way it does, and/or may offer to make changes to it, but simply doing the above makes the issue a No Factor as far as I’m concerned. No load on boot, open it in sim, close it, end it’s process. Job done.
Perhaps the @moderators can consider joining both threads
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If it is not needed to run in background to fly B47G, then the way how HeliManager was implemented does not make much sense.
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I’ve just done a round of my local golf course and will have really upset the virtual greenkeepers by landing the B47G on the 9th green, right in front of the virtual clubhouse.
I’ve overflown the course in fixed wings before, yet even the slowest and most agile don’t allow for the experience you can get with the B47G.
It was awesome fun and i can honestly say that i didn’t think about the Heli Manager once. 
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I can’t offer a factual reason why and can merely speculate but that’s not particularly helpful or constructive, so as I stated above perhaps the Dev’s will. My aim was just to demonstrate that with very minimal user input, any performance hit (0.5% CPU - 1.2% GPU here in sim) can be quickly removed should it be as big an issue for some as it is being made out to be.
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My opinion stands - I also wasn’t “making a fuss” - it was a big annoyance factor to me. If the flight model lives inside that app, it IS reasonable. But that point wasn’t clear and at this point is an assumption.
About the A2A thing - if their model lives inside a process, the difference is A2A isn’t asking me to run it and I don’t have to kill anything afterwards. It’s very transparent.
Again, this one thing running in the background all the time may not have a performance impact. 40 of them running WILL have an impact. And like I said, I want to be able to have 40 more aircraft. If everyone starts running apps on every bootup, regardless of whether or not I want to fly any one of them, it will become an issue.
One better way to do it would be to simply configure it to not run in the background all the time unless and until you are flying the Bell. That’s easily achievable now by disabling it from auto-start on Windows boot in Task Manager. But that ought to be a default way of doing it. I may know how to do that… there are a bunch of people here who can’t even locate a Community folder on their machine let alone disable tasks from auto-starting. This should be user-friendly. I am fine with a box popping up asking you to start it when you want to fly it. Then you can kill it after you are done. But again. I think it would be better this way versus it deciding to run on every Windows startup by default.
My two cents.
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I’d like to address the Heli Manager stuff.
The Bad News: Heli Manager isn’t handling flight model, that’s all done inside the heli on the WASM side. It’s nice for configuration, but the reason it’s required is for activation. If this were Prepar3D, FSX, or X-Plane, we’d be doing activation inside a DLL gauge and it’d be near-transparent. Instead we’re sand-boxed with WASM gauges and it’s not a good place to handle this sort of thing.
The Good News: It’s not really “always on” activation. Heli Manager isn’t constantly calling home to check your license key or report your usage. If you use a network inspector tool, you’ll see it checks for an update once when started (no personal info sent), it verifies your serial number when you press “Activate”, and it re-verifies your serial number if you make major hardware changes to your computer.
Once it lets the heli know it’s activated, you’re good to fly. You can exit the Heli Manager and the heli will keep flying until you reload it. So it doesn’t need to be “Always On.”
The Fix: I hear you regarding wanting to keep resource usage down. We set this to start with Windows for convenience, but for those who care about what’s running in the background, it’s not ideal. In the next update we’re going to add two big checkboxes for you.
“Start with Windows”
“Run in Background When Closed”
This way users will have an easy way to turn this off and run it manually when they want to fly the 47, if that’s what they prefer.
We’re also going to look into the resource utilization stuff. When Heli Manager is iconified to the system tray, it shouldn’t be using any GPU at all (and just the tiniest bit of CPU), so we’ll fix that.
In the mean-time, you can turn programs that start with Windows on and off from the Task Manager “Startup” tab, and you can exit our program by right clicking the icon in the system tray.
The Future: Right now Asobo isn’t enabling their copyright protection for third-party devs not in the Marketplace, and we haven’t been able to get the 47 on the marketplace yet. Once we’re in the Marketplace, or Asobo allows us to use their own copyright protection outside of it, we will happily switch over. At that point Heli Manager will become purely a “run when you want” settings application.
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It’s hilarious the faith people have for the supposedly eventual in sim helicopter simulation while post upon post about comparatively simple fixed wing dynamics is universally critised.
Any review of a helicopter model that can focus on such a minor issue without anything useful to say about flight handling isn”t really worth bothering with except for those who just want visual candy and don’t care about anything else, they won’t buy it for helicopter operations anyway and are already adequately catered for by the H135 which is excellent for that purpose.
For the DRM method, being so tiny an overhead and minimal hindrance to the average user, if that’s the biggest issue then they weren’t going to buy it anyway. There are far worse DRM methods out there and with the proposed options all this will come back to those willing to pay for a ‘real’ helicopter flight model versus simple eye candy for free.
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Does that mean WAN must be connected before every session of using the 47, or can it still be used offline?
Can be used offline. The serial number is only verified with the server initially, and after major hardware changes/windows updates. Otherwise, Heli Manager caches your activation on-disk.
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