Newb helo pilot questions

[whisper 0]

A few tips about "fast" landings in ArmA that I use (mind you, I have a joystick + power control with my Thrustmaster Afterburner, so I have the cyclic on the stick, collective on throttle, rudder pedal under my fingers on throttle, and this helps a lot)

First, if you drop the collective at the same time you up the nose by pulling the cyclic, you WILL go high and slow down ... slowly

There's some momentum between the moment you drop the collective and the moment where you effectively lose altitude.

What I do for a rather fast stop is as follow :

- I aim my chopper to the left of my target landing point.

- drop the collective to zero

- when I feel the bird is "sinking", pull the nose up with cyclic to keep my altitude (monitor with altitude indicator)

- at some point, you won't be able to stop losing altitude by keeping nose up. I pull the collective more and more to keep the altitude rather fixed

- I use right rudder to try pointing the nose toward the landing point. Depending on speed, it works, or not at all. It will (rather suddenly) work at some point

- if I see I'm passing by my landing point with too much speed, I will turn the chopper toward it with cyclic, but this nearly always stop me from slowing down (you can't keep nose up correctly while turning), so too often it ends bad, I overshoot the landing point and it ends in a veeery long landing that needs truckloads of corrections.

- if everything goes right, I'm roughly at the correct place with low speed, low enough to use the rudder for the last turn that will drop the speed to zero when I'm right above it. After that I drop the collective for the touchdown.

EDIT : gah, I didn't see the the chopper Wiki Entry. Perhaps a good place to put my above comments

[whisper 0]

Since a lot of people are still having problems getting the hang of flying choppers (myself included), I've set up a Wiki page for it.

Perhaps some of you more experienced pilots could post some introductory information there, regarding chopper control, tips on control setup and how to do certain procedures.

That way we'd have a good place to point people next time they're asking about how to control those choppers.

Thanks!

Updated, I need to check my keyboard and joystick setup though, there's a modification to do for rudder to work properly.

[kronzky 5]

Looking good, whisper!

And you even got pictures!

Thanks for taking the initiative.