Helicopter CONTROLS

[FWC]

Well as I fly helicopters, You also must understand when at speed you do not use your rudder pedals for turning, only your cyclic, rudder pedals are for planes and used to coordinate your turn, helicopter pedals are anti torque, and used only to offset the spinning of your rotor blades, when at speed the tail works much like the feathers on a arrow and keep it straight. The anti-torque pedals speed up and slow down the tail whan hovering. It does depict ground effect very well. So the using your pedals at speed in a helo is just not done for flying or turning you actually just turn the stick right a little and pull back, use the pedal if you want to fly sideways while turning.

[Beagle]

I solved my problem with helicopter by tweaking the controler setting in game.
I'm usinf the complete Saitek X52Pro including Pedals. A very important part is the sensitivity setting. all number exeeding 1.0 make handling to twitchy, all numbers under 0.5 make handling to slow.

Set your X,Y axis at 0.75 and check if the Z Slider (Throttle) is always at 1.0
Setting larger than 1.1 will make the Helicopter drop out of the sky whenever the throttle ist lowered to less than 50%.

With a good setup of your HOTAS you will get a completly different "flight model"

This is my controller cfg.

class JoysticksList
{
class Joystick1
{
guid="50698240-3037-11DE-8001-444553540000";
name="Saitek X52 Pro Flight Controller";
offset=256;
isXInput=0;
sensitivity[]={0.75,0.75,0.5,0.5,0.5,0.5,1,1,1,0.75,0.5,0.5,0.5 ,0.5,1,1};
mode="Custom";
};
class Joystick2
{
guid="5F60CEC0-3325-11DE-8001-444553540000";
name="Saitek Pro Flight Rudder Pedals";
offset=512;
isXInput=0;
sensitivity[]={0.5,0.5,0.75,1,1,1,1,1,0.5,0.5,0.75,1,1,1,1,1};
mode="Custom";

[Zerikin_Loukbel]

You're all missing the pink elephant in the room. The freaking cyclic. You press one button to go up, one to go down. If you don't it sits there. And the airplanes are a pain to taxi with as you can't set your thrust to a certain level, and instead have to move in bursts.

Analog thrust control please. None of this "accelerating" stuff. It's a basic principle that got glossed over when it shouldn't have.

I think that that takes more precedence over something that is already up to par (though not quite perfect)

This drives me nuts as well.

[Mr.Peanut]

Please tell me you can bind gamepad axes separately for fixed wing and helicopters? I would like to be able to use the same axis for throttle and collective, but with the axis inverted. I could never get the hang of pulling back to climb in a helicopter in ArmA. Drove me crazy. And I was never entirely sure I was getting full throttle in fixed-wing.

[Max Power]

Please tell me you can bind gamepad axes separately for fixed wing and helicopters? I would like to be able to use the same axis for throttle and collective, but with the axis inverted. I could never get the hang of pulling back to climb in a helicopter in ArmA. Drove me crazy. And I was never entirely sure I was getting full throttle in fixed-wing.

Unpossible.

[Mc Speedfreak]

So, let me get this right, there are two posters complaining that with all their wisdom and experience of virtually flying Helicopters in different games (BF Helicopters are nothing like the real thing, they were dumbed right down for ease of use) they feel that BIS have got it wrong?

Arma II is not perfect, though the helicopter flight model is fairly accurate. This is expected from a 'jack of all trades' simulator rather than a specific flight /infantry /vehicle simulator.

What is actually being complained about is the actual realistic way a helicopter flies, it is obvious that you have not experienced a realistic helicopter flight model, other than DCS Black Shark, and that helicopter is an exception, in its typical Kamov co-axial rotor design it uses a rudder control surface which allows for higher manouverability at speed.

The problem is not with the flight model in Arma II, it is with your misunderstanding of an accurate flight model through the experience of games rather than simulators on the whole.

Take time out and clock up some hours in the editor and give the helicopter some respect and assume you do not know it all and you will be all the more satisfied when you master it.

Learn, adapt and enjoy.

I cannot agree more!

It's a challenge... overcome or give up but please dont whine...

[BLKSmoke]

Just to clarify, "Right Turn" and "Left Turn" are weird hybrid control that try to make one joystick axis do what should take two joystick axes by switching from yaw authority to bank authority based on speed.

Thanks Frederf - you have just explained what i have been experiencing - I have been playing the ARMA2 demo version (with no real instruction manual to speak of) so I had no idea that the Right Turn / Left Turn controls are actually combining turning and banking (once over a certain speed)!

Can't wait to get home and give it a try.

Cheers

[Lukio]

Yeah I'm mighty late to the party I guess, but anyway I'd like to chip in some things I've learnt so far. This seemed to be one of the few useful threads I've found through searching the boards, sorry for the thread necro.

Unfortunately I haven't found any decent tutorials or really helpful texts on how to fly these things in ARMA 2, maybe I can add some things that may be apparent but aren't at all to the complete noob.

1) Imo the tutorials in the game are pretty worthless because you suddenly are expected to master flight with sharp turns, landings in difficult spots (surrounded by phone wires, trees and buildings) etc. without much prior practice or understanding how the controls work in ARMA 2.

2) What everyone is saying "Make a custom map and fly around there, get some practice". This is really nice if you already are good at flying and don't loose choppers too often. But this just means people have to figure out how to set up a chopper without the crew inside, make it usable etc. Imho its much easier to just go to the Armory and select a chopper there, the MI-18 for example unlocked pretty early and is quite comfortable to begin with.

3) Start engine. Use thrust to go up 20-30m, move forwards just a little (nose down), reduce speed (nose back) a little until you are hovering, try to land gently. Repeat until it you can do it wherevery you want to land and in between obstacles or behind a treeline.

4) Go up 50 - 100m and just fly, fly, fly practice curves, sharp turns, following streets, make waypoints on your map and do a low altitude approach. Do this again and again.

5) If you are using a controller (gamepad in my case) try to increase the bars in the advanced controller setup (customize) a bit upwards until they are around 60 -80% depending on your liking, elsewise controls might be jerky and this is very counter intuitive for learning.

6) Thrust seems to only mean increasing altitude/decreasing altitude, not more speed (this was very confusing for me)

7) Try to level out when landing without too much banking. If you have side-winds or somehow are drifting to the left and right, carefully "counterbank" and then immedately do another very light bank in the other direction again to level out. If you are going very slow and the rotation from the main rotor is turning you, gently use the pedal to counter this.

8) Use the pickup missions in the armory to get a feel how it is to select a decent approach and landing site (LZ is what the pros call it) close to a pickup location and to feel a bit of time pressure (especially with those old grandmas limping to the chopper!)

9) Learn to use mountains, buildings, treelines as cover when flying around

10) Helicopters with wheels do not actually roll at all. Its more like rubber prongs sticking out downwards.
---

Now some questions that are still a mystery to me:

- What is the difference between Thrust And Thrust analogue? On the Analogue stick I didn't notice any difference.
- How do you keep the Helo from skating around / sliding if the LZ is not completely flat? I understand that I cannot land on a mountain side , but it seems as soon as there is the slightest angle on the landing site the heli starts to slide downwards.
- How do you set several waypoints for a route? Currently I can only set one with Shift + Mouseclick on the map.
- How do you go from fullspeed (160+) to 20 within such a short time? Whenever I try this "full stop" by pulling up, the helo of course keeps lots of the inertia and thus I often overshoot the landing site. For me the transition from normal flight speed to "landing speed" is currently the most difficult thing to do.
- If I go down just a little bit too fast, immediately INST indicator goes to yellow or orange, if I go down too slow I start getting side rotation or a skating effect. How do you go the middle path? Its very difficult for me to guess how fast I'm decreasing altitude.

[Calazur]

I wish arma helicopters behave like Take on Heli, but some players would not like or able to fly, so an option to helos to behave as ToH would be nice.

Thanks,

Wilson Calabresi

[Max Power]

I think you may have to wait for ArmA 3 for that.