Tetraptous

The helicopter flies beautifully now--lots of fun. Looking forward to diving back into the campaign!

I wanted to note that the real SA342 Gazelle is notable touchy in response to pedal inputs. There's a nice evaluation of the SA342 handling qualities by the US Army available through DTIC here. They suggested that the pedal travel be doubled (effectively halving the gain) because it was so touchy compared to other US helicopters. The directional response was over seven times that required by the standards at the time (report predates ADS-33). I'm a helicopter engineer, not much of a pilot, so I'm not really qualified to say much about "feel." There's lots of great data in the report--I don't know precisely how the SA342M differs from the older model tested (I think just systems, weight, and power, but I didn't find differences in the aerodynamic components)--but the concerned citizenry of this forum could perform the same tests and see how well the results compare.

It's a real shame, because the Sabre is so fun to fly. I do hope we'll get an official campaign sometime in the future; I know they can do it, because the Mi-8 campaign is quite good! The Georgia map is fine--I don't expect new maps from the 3rd party module developers, since they're clearly a lot of work--although I'd love to see a Korea map someday. I'm interested in the MiG-15, but will probably hold off until there's more to do.

So, maybe I'm just bad at this, but it seemed to me that when I allow the flight engineer AI to tune the autopilot, he doesn't respond quickly enough to my changes in the flight state of the aircraft. In particular, if I've been cruising for a bit with the heading autopilot on, the nose will pull to the side when I enter a hover unless I manually manipulate the pedals and override the autopilot. For me, this is often worse than just turning the autopilot on and ignoring the drift--I might cruise in a bit of a sideslip if I leave the heading channel on, but I can also hover at any time without much pedal input. For pitch and roll stabilization only, the flight engineer AI seems OK to me. But again, doing nothing isn't really that bad either. EDIT: Huh, I actually don't think the AI engineer is supposed to be adjusting the heading--but the helicopter sure doesn't seem to hold heading in a hover worth a damn if I leave it on and fly around for a bit. Maybe it's just a coincidence... anyone know why this might be?