Rongor

Lowering gear won't affect your chances to achieve an autorotation landing. It's certainly not mentioned in the manual point 5.2.2 to enable your autorotation, rather to improve your chances of a safe landing. We can assume that in cases of flight heights below 100 meters, lowering gear might be omitted to leave the pilot more capacity to concentrate on surviving. You wouldn't want to autorotate from 100 meters. You would have merely seconds to achieve the correct attitude and shouldn't bother with landig gear anymore.

I don't think so either, yet thank you for posting this. Tried to reproduce this yesterday by violently yanking the stick to its back detent, so far I couldn't achieve tailstrikes.

where did you get this from? You can slow down to a stop by pulling the stick slightly backwards just fine. It's actually much smoother than applying the wheel brakes...

I tested while leaving all the AP channels off. While hovering a few meters above the field, you can clearly notice how giving left pedal (easing power demand) induces descend, giving right pedal (demanding power) causes a slight climb. Why? The anti-torque pedal (right pedal in the Mi-24) is demanding more power. Regularly this would draw away power from the main rotor for some moment, until the engines match the new power setting and deliver the increased power. Giving right pedal would cause a small descend, not a climb. Giving left pedal actually is reducing the power demand of the tail rotor. Hence the main rotor will benefit from the surplus power and generate some more additional lift and a slight climb, until again the engine control notices the decreased power demand and decreases engine power to match the new situation. It seems mixed up here in the Mi-24. Doesn't make sense...

No and no. There is no such thing like VRS in level flight. VRS is caused by a descend rate which drops you into your own downwash. The only VRS in causing LTE would be a tailrotor VRS which also wouldn't happen during level flight. Btw LTE generally might not matter that much during level cruise flight, since the wind vane effect keeps your helo pretty stable. What you are describing may be some undesired steering input of the AP channels. I recall to have them put me into significant sideslip situations, which could very well be a factor for LTE, maybe even a tailrotor VRS. There is no point in double tapping trim reset. It's just 2 times resetting your trim. If you experienced a need to trim reset to regain control, chances are high that there is a misunderstanding between you and your selected AP channels.

Regarding the tailrotor VRS, inducing factors (for the Mi-24) would be hovering or slow speed in a strong crosswind from the left or flying sideways to the left.

You got it right. Correct name comes in handy though when conducting exchange in forums

You lost RPM because the engines where delivering power at their limits. Keep in mind that pulling the pitch lever isn't just applying 'moar' power. What is realy happening is that the angle of attack of your rotor blades is increased to generate even more lift. Increasing the AoA increases air resistance, so more power is needed to keep the RPM stable. There is a threshold at which your engines can't deliver more. So while allowing you to increase the AoA, your RPM will decrease proportionally. Regarding the LTE, yes, not being able to stop the spin is some kind of LTE, yet you can say it is induced by bad piloting skills. Also LTE isn't the same like tailrotor VRS. You didn't say this, but other people around here seem to mix it up. What is important to know (and I am not sure this is conveyed by DCS manuals sufficiently or maybe simply nobody reads them) is that your helicopter main and tailrotors have interwoven power demands and share the same power source. There are limits which may shift depending on your flight envelope. Few people take time to understand these. Let's be creative here: Say you are in that hover, slowly spinning to the left. Your helo is heavy and outside air is hot and dry. Your pitch lever is already under your armpit, engines are at their limits. Now you want to apply right pedal to counter that spin. While doing that, your main rotor RPM decreases. Many people would assume a bug. Not you. You know that right pedal will increase power demand. Since your engines are already at their limits, delivering power to keep that huge main rotor AoA to generate enough lift to prevent a descend, the additional power demand of the tailrotor is just too much, RPM decreases. You probably won't be able to stop that spin. Understanding all this is necessary to prevent states like this. In a helo you have to anticipate stuff like this so much more than in fix winged aircraft. Exactly this made me stop using the yaw AP channel, as I noticed it can kill me by denying me full authority over right pedal actuation...

It's probably just a matter of practice. You didn't tell us in which flight profile this happened. It can happen when slowing down and not applying enough left pedal. Stopping the rotation needs much more tail rotor power than preventing the rotation. When you will have gained a feel when and how much you have to counter increasing torque moment when slowing down, this problem will retreat.

This is entirely possible without a tailrotor ring state. Since you transitioned into a hover, and lateron into a climb, you caused a maximum torque at the mainrotor and therefore a maximum need of antitorque for the tailrotor. The trick is to not allow it into any left yaw movement at all why transitioning into the hover. The power of the tailrotor will be just that sufficient to keep your yaw controllable (if you apply pedals early, before letting a spin happen). In your situation you already had a left yaw moment. While your tailrotor would have had just enough power to keep your nose steady, it's just not powerful enough to stop a left spin in a high power situation (hover), which would demand even more power, much beyond the antitorque required to not get into a spin in the first place. IRL, If you are in a hover without any yaw moment, you are advised to generally only yaw into the direction in which you need to apply more power with you pedals, you don't yaw into the direction where you reduce power. Because of this exact problem. I don't know anything about the real world Mi-24, but there are actual operations procedures for several helicopters which prohibit or restrict use of pedals in low speeds and while hovering. Since the rotor spins to the right in the Mi-24, the toque will always try to pull your nose to the left. So whenever possible, during low speeds (hover), only yaw to the right. If you transition to low speeds and/or into hover, anticipate the left yaw and counteract instantly, don't let that spin happen. Your engines are already at their limits and your tailrotor won't be able to apply enough antitorque to stop that spin. They will perform just fine keeping you stead though. If you have to yaw to the left, do it with caution and slowly. The more weight you have, the more important this is. If you let that left spin happen, you are overwhelming your tail rotor. It may not be able to catch that spin and neutralize it and this might kill you. What you did was actually a good solution. Probably you faced a clear risk to hit some obstacles, but reaching for altitude to then pitch down and gain speed was indeed your only chance, well done!

It's mainly a matter of practice. Maybe adjust your controls curves to at least 20. Then practice taxiing from a cold start. Commence with very slow speeds. Practice to find the neutral stick position on ground, it will be slightly to the right and backwards, trim it there. Experiment with the AP channels. Personally, for taxiing on wheels, I use the roll and pitch channels only. Practice anticipating roll moments. Practice taxiing with very slow speeds at first. Make use of the wheel brake. Also brake by pulling the stick back gently. If you taxi through turns by applying pedals, expect the helicopter wanting to roll into the opposite direction. Practice to counter this roll moment by moving the stick in the direction you want to turn. Concentrate and practice this by driving around all the taxiways on your airfield. When you start feeling progress, do all that again, only this time you concentrate to taxi exactly on the yellow centerlines. 1. Keep it slow, until you feel progress. 2. Keep in mind you can control all taxi speeds with your stick alone: accelerating and slowing down. 3. If you give right pedals to taxi into a right turn, move stick slightly to the right, to counteract the roll-over tendency to the opposite direction. The amount of stick movement depends on your speed. You'll have to find your personal feeling how much stick movement is necessary for each situation. 4. Don't try to learn this while landing with speed. You don't want to learn how to revover from uncontrollable rolling (you can try that later), you want to learn how to not get into a state of uncontrollable roll moments. Start slow. 5. Keep practicing. In your training, as a thumb rule, if you need to apply wheel brake, you were too fast already. Try to do it with stick only.

You got it mixed up. The default option has the delay. The return to center mode has no time trigger, it's waiting for the controls to return to their center position. It's in the DSC manual as well.

I can confirm that the 0.5 seconds input pause seems to be missing in the Mi-24. Open up the controls info box with RCtrl+Enter. Notice how after releasing the trim the pitch/roll inputs from the stick almost instantly are followed. There seems to be a fraction of the usual pause, but not the ususal 0.5 seconds. In the Huey you can clearly see that 0.5 seconds freeze. Not here. If others could confirm this, it might be worth a bug report.

Port of Sevastopol needs assets urgently...

you mentioned double tapping trim for adjusting the new yaw value. What you are doing with this is a trim reset. Resetting your trim to center-neutral is not only abandoning your current perfect roll/pitch attitude, you also don't want that happen when hovering near the ground. Try it out while in slow speeds near the ground, especially while descending. Your yaw channel has a hard time to understand what you intend to do. In some cases, the yaw channel will take away enough authority to leave you with insufficient anti-torque. You don't want that seconds before landing. The yaw channel in its current state seems to work for running landings, not so much for air taxi and settling down vertically.

unfortunately it doesn't work. Try turning while transitioning to lower speeds, it will kill you.

The delay happens after releasing it, not after pushing it. Quick depression of the trim button induces this problem. Try to get used to keep the trim button pressed throughout your entire maneuver, then release it only after finding the desired attitude. This helped me a lot reducing these hiccups after trim release...

I was just looking for a thread like this, as I am wondering if this is a bug. Currently your rudder neutral point wanders along the yaw axis. You can check this with the RCtrl+Enter controls readout. The controls yaw axis had its neutral shifted to the left, the pedals in the cockpit also showed this shift, while my home cockpit rudder pedals were actually neutral. This way I couldn't apply necessary amount of right rudder while landing, as my physical rudder already was at its rightmost limit. Only pressing the trim reset brought it back to neutral. Hence rudder pedals are somehow affected by some kind of trim, even if rudder trimming is set to off in the special Mi-24 config settings. This happens when the K and T channels are active. These channels seems to have full control of your yaw axis. Switching them off stops the adjustments. Yet you then can't bring it back to neutral without doing a total trim reset. So maybe the authority of the channels is currently way too powerful. Also it's weird that you can't apply any trim command to the pedals (without switching rudder trimming on in the special config), yet the AP can do so. When we have rudder trimming set to off (as this is more realistic, as we are told), in the Ka-50 you can't trim rudders but the trim action "tells" the AP which azimuth target it should respect while applying the AP's percentage authority. In the Mi-24 your trim action seems to have no yaw affect at all, so the AP governs the rudder trim like a dictator. Maybe we should switch rudder trimming on for the Mi-24? If not, the AP trims the rudder, while we can't. Is this realistic?

I see how any wishlist'ish discussions seem to just ever want to get more, but I think there are several DCS maps which in fact would be just perfect if adding more terrain. Not because "more" is always better but because the respective theaters feel incomplete because of terrain which was left out. DCS Syria could have been DCS Levant with the southwestern edge following the Eilat - Kairo - Cyprus line... In the east, we could imagine Mosul and maybe even Baghdad. At least completing Israel and the Sinai would have given endless historical playgrounds...

You are right, I didn't mention all this and there are possibly other dozens of potential issues. In fact I didn't mention any of these because none of these factors were contributing to the described situation The left engine was put out by hostile small arms fire. After that, all external factors remained constant and had no further effect on what was happening. So it is no question why the left engine failed. I was focusing on the correct actions to continue flight with OEI. Sadly it didn't work because the healthy engine decided to lose power after putting the throttle lever to max. This last fact is the only thing I was questioning. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear with this.

Ok, so the bottom line appears to be: - hydraulics system failures have some dubious effects but aren't really simulated deeply at the moment - in critical hydraulic states, accumulators currently only get depleted by wheel braking Btw Volk, I really like your youtube Ka-50 videos...

Yesterday, my left engine shut down after suffering from complete loss after oil pressure had dropped to zero. "No problem" I thought and pulled the yellow throttle lever left of me to the upper position, for compensating the loss of left engine power by maximizing power of the healthy right engine. My rotor pitch indicator was at around 10, so in a pretty regular power regime. Yet only after a few seconds of the left engine still winding down, the right engine started to loss rpm too and soon it was following the left engine in to complete power loss, albeit it appeared to be struggling to keep power but ultimately slowly went down (within half a minute or so). I was surprised by this. I'd expected to continue with the healthy right engine. Yet it literally behaved like it was wasting all its energy to keep the left engine going to. As we know, this isn't technically possible as these turbines work free and have no direct connection. Any ideas why my right engine might have been affected in this case? Right engine parameters (oil pressure, temps) were just fine.

Hey guys, yesterday I lost hydraulics. After the Ekran told me there was a problem, I noticed both the main and the common hydraulics circuits showed zero indication. Yet besides losing the AP augmentation channels, I could continue my RTB just fine. I had to yank and keep the cyclic stick in weird positions at time, but as I was unable to trim, this was to be expected. Now I wondering how I was able to maintain control at all after the hydraulics loss. As far as I'd expect from own RL experience, there is no way to apply reasonable steering forces with the controls without the amplifying hydraulic force. I mean, that's what it's job after all. There is this hydraulics accumulator and of course we could assume, that my maintaining of control was supported by the remaining hydraulics pressure in the accumulators. The gauge showed the accumulator at around 80 %. Yet this indication never changed. However hard I did steering inputs, the indication didn't change at all. So I am still clueless what happened exactly, how I could maintain control without any hydraulics and why the accumulators didn't show any pressure change. Sadly, hydraulics aren't among the well explained features in the flight manual. Any ideas?

What about Vandenberg? The left edge of the map looks like it would just fit.

Hey there, i just noticed that while in the familiarization mission and in the docs, Belted Peak and India are announced 53 and 55 NM from TPH, the mission planner only measures 36 to 40 NM, which is quite a difference... Any idea what's going on?