I did not have any CTD by night so far. Note that I don’t use GPS and modern avionics. Old fashioned VOR is fine for me.
Going through a helicopter kick lately, loving this bird so far. I’m on Series X, no issues except I can’t figure out the trim situation. The trim hat on the stick does not appear functional to me, do I have to map one to my external stick?
Edit: one more question, I can’t seem to get the throttle back into the off detente. My axis won’t have it decrease less than 25%. A shortcut to cut helicopter throttle doesn’t seem to work.
I’m not seeing that behaviour at all though?
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Nor am I. Strange.
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Is there any chance that you are increasing the collective as you apply forward cyclic?
If so, the yaw that you experience is exactly how the helicopter should behave as a result of the main rotor torque. This would also make sense as why the Alouette is opposite, because its rotor spins in the opposite direction.
Perhaps you could describe the issue a bit more?
OK, when you say “a quick yank up and then down on the cyclic” that leads me to think that e might have a nomenclature mixup.
The Collective is the lever mounted to the left of the pilot that controls the pitch of the rotor blades. In very rough terms, when you want to go up from a parking spot, you pull up on the Collective.
The Cyclic is the lever between the pilots knees.
If you are experiencing yaw when increasing collective, that is normal behavior for a tail rotor helicopter.
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Just discovered it seems to have working whipers - as in whiping away water droplets!
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Torque yaw can be induced by cyclic movements too. If a large enough input is made, the drag created can reduce rrpm and require an engine response.
In the normal flight envelope you wouldn’t make cyclic inputs that large and abrupt though. It’s also not physically possible to make a full travel input on real controls at the speed you can move a gamepad control stick.
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I have never noticed this behaviour but I am on PC and that may make a difference.
My first thought is that you might be trying to fly the helicopter by manually adjusting the throttle. Double check that you are using the govorner - i.e. rolling the throttle to full before you try to pickup and attempt to fly.
Not verifying my throttle setting and having the governor not engaged is the only time I’ve experienced the uncontrollable yaw on pickup.
I’ m on pc and I have noticed the behaviour. I have ‘increase and decrease rotor lateral trim’ set to two bindings on my joystick (Thrustmaster T16000).
Initially I carefully set ‘decrease’ to balance the rightward tilt. I play with these buttons to correct tilt when I am slowing down or speeding up.
The FAA Helicopter Flying Handbook is a great resource that covers the physics involved with rotor flight.
Some of what you are describing is exactly how real helicopters behave. At least the ones I’ve flown in real life anyway.
Is the sim behavior 100% perfect at the edges of the envelope, probably not.
It IS pretty accurate for most of the flight envelope if you control them the way you would a real helicopter though. We may never be able to confirm if the behavior is entirely accurate because you can’t move real helicopter controls at the speed and amount of travel that you can move a gamepad or controller stick. The controls are smooth, but there is mechanical resistance in the connections of the cables, rods and cranks.
The cyclic and the collective both change the pitch of the main rotor blades. When you increase the pitch of the blades, it increases drag, the increased drag slows the rotor rpm down, the governor will then increase the throttle to maintain rotor rpm, the increase in throttle increases the torque on the main rotor shaft, the increased torque causes the fuselage to yaw in the opposite direction of the main rotor rotation…(right yaw for the 407, left yaw for the Alouette)
It is a constant balance of canceling out each control input with another in order to make the rotor disk do what you want it to do.
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Thanks for the resource !
Could you perhaps record a video of this behaviour and post it so we can see what’s happening? I have watched many YouTube videos of MSFS helicopters hovering and I have never seen this yaw movement. Thanks.
There are flaws in the software. To varying degrees on the different helicopter addons. It’s not black and white to describe which ones are realistic and which ones aren’t. Is more of a scale and different models sit at different positions on the scale. They all do some things better or worse than others as compared to real helicopters. Not only from addon to addon, but sim to sim. There isn’t a simulator available that is a perfect representation of real helicopter flight. The 3 main consumer sims, MSFS, DCS and XPlane are all pretty reasonable simulations for about 90% of the flight envelope when controlling them with realistic inputs…but again, I stress this, none of them replicate everything perfectly.
As for the S300, I posted a video demonstrating what I’m talking about above in another thread. I recreated the control twist responses as you were describing, but then flew it around realistically without any problems making control inputs the way I would IRL.
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I believe we have an N.R.T. situation.
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