Draco

= Anything you can walk away from. if you're still alive and not on fire it's considered by most to have been successful. I can put it down engines out. but I'm usually looking at moderate gear damage. What would be really cool is if someone could find the emergency procedures checklists for the Ka-50.

As Zorrin Said In Ground Effect is a good place to be. As far as turbulence and controllability there's really no difference between hovering IGE and OGE. For those of us who fly Helicopters without wheels, we spend a good bit of time hovering about in ground effect. It's no different, just requires less collective and besides going higher starts to put you in the shaded area of the Height/Velocity Diagram and that's a place you just want to stay away from.

Sigh... It's finally downloading (and yes I will be purchasing the western version to when it's released.) I was trying to patient and wait for the release over here. But after the eternity I've been waiting, seeing all you guys having fun was just to much to take. I actually... no lie... had less work getting into college then getting my money to 1c. the whole pay-pal to webmoney, webmoney to webmoney, webmoney to 1c thing... ridiculous... and as for webmoney any registration process that involves using a barcode scanner is excessive. but, at least it gave me a chance to test 2d barcodes on my phone.

Heh... I always joke with my girlfriend about how many interesting ways there are to die in a helicopter. Just to make her nervous when I fly. I torture the shit out of the poor girl. But SRSLY Helos rock. try landing on a mountain top in a fixed wing. sure we can't break mach, but you can't hover.

as mentioned before you encountered Vortex ring state, also called settling with power. and as stated is a condition where the main rotor down wash is recycled causing the relative flow to exceed the angle of attack, increases until the inboard and outboard portions of the blade stall. once in settling with power as you start to descend and you increase collective you only make the problem worse by increasing the the flow rate further robbing you of lift. It's really best to just avoid the region where it occurs. As a rule when I fly I try avoid greater than 250 feet per minute below 40 knots. This gives me a good margin of safety because I don't want to die or ball up a half million dollar machine. The really deadly region is around 700 feet per minute and less than 10 knots. at that combination the helicopter will be very difficult to control and may require entering an auto to get out of... not an option if you're close to the ground. if you're slightly settling with power apply forward cyclic to increase speed and allow it to build before adding power. it can also be avoided by maintaining a descent angle of less than 30 degrees. There are five main flight conditions likely to lead to settling with power. 1. A powered descent at low air speed with a High descent rate. 2. loss of height during a harsh flare. 3. executing a quick stop downwind. 4. a squashing recovery, when power is applied at the end of an auto 5. a downwind approach so in summary just don't go there.

Having flown literally my whole life and having had the opportunity a few years ago to do a day of simulated(in aircraft) dog fighting in T-6 Texans. From my experiences especially with higher G maneuvering and Max AoA stalls I would say The IL-2 series is by far the best. it's modeling of departures is near spot on. in the T-6 at least you get very little warning, a slight and very short lived burble and than it just rolls over.

Certainly no simulator weather PC or multi-million dollar full motion, will ever be able be able to take the place of actually training time in the aircraft. And I'm not proposing that emergency procedures be learned entirely on a PC but that it can be used to develop a good foundation and understanding of what's going on and the proper response before being taught in the aircraft when lives and large sums of money are on the line. Enter an auto, let your rpms tank in the simulator see what happens learn keep it from happening. Let a new pilot find out why an approach at 400 foot per minute descent rate at 20kts is a really bad idea. Then he'll learn the importance of avoiding those situations in real life. I’m not proposing to “learn to fly on your home computer” but a supplement where straying outside the envelope won’t actually kill you. But the results of such transgressions will still be readily apparent and where you can as I said learn from your mistakes. Of course it will never be perfect but it would be a lot better than using say FSX in your spare time and developing a bunch of bad habits. And thanks for the well wishes Zorrin. My instructor says that most of my flying is at a commercial level and once I have a better handle on autos would be confident to let me solo. Having 14 hours I however plan on getting a lot more experience before I do that.

Idea for ED. Ever think of producing a civilian helicopter training sim? Think about how many new rotor heads start training every year. And while there are great procedural trainers/eyecandy packages like FSX out there which are great if you want to practice IFR navigation or shoot approaches into some far off airfield. But none of them really come to grips with the aerodynamics very well. The autos, as modeled in FS are deadly wrong; it lacks any modeling of settling with power whatsoever, and really hasn’t given much thought to rotor craft at all. Personally as a low time helicopter student, autos in particular scare the piss out of me. Especially doing max glide or minimum decent rate autos, when you’re walking that line where the low rotor RPM horn starts screaming at you about impending doom. If the RPMs drop to low the blades will fold up into an unrecoverable position and you’re skydiving with a helicopter on your back. So from my point of view I would love to be able to practice my emergency procedures from the safety of my home where I’m not going to ball-up someone else’s helicopter and kill myself if I mess up. Helicopters as a rule do not permit learning from your mistakes. Civilian helicopters especially the lower end ones used in training aren’t overly complicated machines, certainly nowhere near as complicated as a Ka-50. I definitely didn’t see a laser warning receiver in the last R-44 I flew. I doubt it would take that much work to develop a Robinson or even a high performance (by our standards any way) ship like an MD-500 when compared to the labor that went into the black shark. I feel the market is there if it is presented as a serious training aid as well as an entertainment package. I believe it would yield a good return on investment. I would gladly pay $50-$70 per helicopter module and I think a lot pilots would see it as a great and cost effective way to get additional practice in and sharpen there skills considering dual place instruction in an R-44 costs about $400 per hour. Even $100 for a package like I’m proposing would be a good investment to most pilots. Just an idea that popped into my head last night driving home from the airport. What do you think DCS: R-44?

that's vortex ring state also called settling with power as Tito mentioned and it'll definatly kill you if you let it get away from you. you're descending into your own down wash causing the rotor system to loose lift. adding collective actually makes it worse. the recommended recovery procedures are moving the cyclic forward and to one side and wait until you've left the disturbance. if you get into a really deep VRS dropping collective into an auto rotation may be necessary to break up the vortex. I got to experience a deep one a few months ago. my instructor and I pulled into a hover at 8000'. I lowered the collective until the onset of VRS then raised collective to max allowable manifold pressure and just dropped like a rock for about 4000'. to recover I just lowered collective to enter an auto, built forward airspeed and added power and all was well again. VRS scares the crap out of me as I used to have a tendency to bleed air speed before altitude on approaches ending up slow and high over my landing spot and being very nervous ridding just outside that zone to not overshoot. but I have since corrected this bad habit. starting to feel the vibrations start during a pinnacle approach over a bunch of trees will definitely cause some pucker.

if you are referring to retreating blade stall which is different from rotor stall then yes coax systems are more stable in that the loss of lift is symmetrical across the two rotor disks.

or are you referring to the rotor stall that occurs during low-RPM conditions from pulling to much collective? Or from the opposing flow condition that occur during powered descent? having never played EECH I'm not sure what dynamics are modeled. from what I've read that last one is LETHAL if not caught and corrected for quickly.

I was actually just about to post about that with out the tail rotor leaching power from the engine there's more power available for lift. must be nice to without the changes in power demand from using the tail rotor

I would guess greater induced air flow through the lower rotor disk. like a permanent ETL. but now I'm curious and I'm gonna have to look that up. too bad none of my training books deal with co-ax rotor systems.

I have an Indian "Palm Frond" camo jacket. it's actually one of the most effective woodland patterns I've ever seen.

it's a laptop so I'm... not going to open it. may give the MOBO drivers a try.

turns out it has sometyhing to do with my sound card, a realtek AC97 I disabled it and got LO to initialize and run, just without sound. updated the drivers and reenabled the soundcard and it still has no sound but still runs. so I've replaced one problem with another but atleast its' a step in the right direction. if anyone has any ideas on this one let me know.

no one has anymore ideas?

ran the bat file and it didn't resolve the problem. I've done every thing I can think of. I'd really like to be able to fly again this is driving me nuts.

the problem started with FC. then I reinstalled everything. I'll try running it and see what happens.

it never evan makes it that far... since reinstalling to 1.0 the order goes click launch, splash screen comes up for a few seconds goes away tray Icon comes up I get the missle launch sound and about two beeps of the old startup sounds than the sound stop and the tray icon vanishes.

I've been playing Lomac since it came out and it's always run great. but recently I've developed a problem where it crashes during initialization. I've tried everything i can think of... reinstalled lock-on, updated my graphics drivers, tweaked settings... everything short of re-formating becasue that just isn't an option. so please if any one has any ideas I havn't flown in weeks... specs: pentium 4 3.4ghz 2 GB RAM Ati mobility radeon 9700 w/ catalyst 6.9 drivers windows XP service pack 2

doing a little warm-up modeling... being an FX guy I don't do much hard surface modeling anymore. this is two days work. i have to tweak some things before I freeze it and start cutting into it and detailing it out.

I know it's hard. and I know max is the in-house app but alot of modelers use other programs. for instance I use lightwave. I can export objects to the max format no poblem, but a conversion tool that has to run in max itself does me no good. if there was a lightwave plugin, or better a standalone utility to convert from max format to .LOM it whould make the pipeline alot smoother for none max users. most programs can read and save as .3ds so they whouldn't need to write support for other object formats just make there current converter work alone.

any chance of getting a lightwave version or a standalone app for object conversion for those that don't run max?

I'm not sure if a renderer is what your looking for. if you want to make models, you need a modeler. if you want to make pretty pictures you need a renderer, though most software packages have both. to make models for lomac I believe you need 3ds max. don't know if it's version specific or not. a converter for lightwave would be great. its better for modeling than max.