AlphaOneSix

Day: 4xM80 Ball, 1x M62 Tracer Night: 9xM80 Ball, 1xM276 Dim Tracer If low on dim tracer, then just use regular tracers at night, although it's a bit blinding. You could also use dim tracers during the day, but you won't see the tracers.

"Stick and Rudder" by Wolfgang Langewiesche https://www.amazon.com/Stick-Rudder-Explanation-Art-Flying/dp/0070362408

Don't worry, we are saying the exact same thing. It is normal in the sim, and it is a bug. It is extremely low priority, as far as I can tell, which does not mean much of anything anymore. SO I don't think we should expect this to get fixed anytime soon and be prepared to just live with it.

So in-game and in real life they work the same. The only difference is that in-game, the heading channel light turns off when you move the pedals, but in real life the light would be staying on when you move the pedals, but that does not affect the functionality.

Does the light come back on (and does the heading channel start working again) when you stop moving the pedals? Or does it not work at all until you manually re-engage the heading channel?

No. Well, a Chinook is smoother than an Mi-8 in ETL. The UH-60 is about the roughest shake I've ever felt in a helicopter during ETL, with the AH-64 not far behind. EDIT: Regarding the hangar queen comments, that was the rumor when I was in the Army back in the day and we still had a pretty good FMC rate on our AH-64s. Our limiting factor was always parts availability. But the biggest problem was with the wiring and avionics. Mechanically, the Apache is extremely reliable. And I understand that, for the most part, the avionics issues are not quite as bad as they used to be.

Fully articulated rotors don't get mast bumping either. Only teetering systems.

On the Mi-8? It shouldn't. The pitch and roll channels just try to hold the current pitch and roll attitude. Trim button has no effect on that, or at least it shouldn't. On the Mi-8, the trim button only removes the trim spring force for the cyclic and pedals.

Well, overhaul times for one. Very short for Russian aircraft, when compared to Western aircraft. Just about everything on a Russian helicopter can be maintained in very sparse field conditions, with parts that are reusable, while Western aircraft need a little more TLC and very few common parts are simply reusable (e.g. filters and o-rings are washed, inspected, and reused on the Mi-8, while the same filters on an American aircraft would be discarded and replaced, and you NEVER reuse an o-ring on an American aircraft.) There's more examples, but I'm tired.

Oh I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just telling you what it is, it's up to you to decide if you're convinced or not (seems not in this case). I could no doubt give you countless examples of things on the Mi-8 that defy logic, plus several examples in the Ka-50 where they copied something broken in a real Ka-50 cockpit into our virtual one so people think that's how things are supposed to look. Also, with a 70-foot rotor disc, it's kind of irrelevant where the right pylon extends to. And where is the bubble gum showing you where the left pylon is? And why not just use the mirrors to know where your pylons are? Etc. Sorry I don't mean to be a downer, but like I say, if you find it useful for something, then that's awesome, but I would bet money that on the actual aircraft that Belsimtek used to create their cockpit model, there's a red screw in that spot that was used as a grounding point for something that may or may not be installed in the aircraft any more.

It's a screw for a grounding strap. If you find it useful for some other purpose, that's great. It's a known thing that ED (well, Belsimtek in this case) just copy the cockpit of the aircraft that they happen to be using as a reference (I submitted a couple of Ka-50 bug reports because of this), so the reference aircraft had a red-painted screw for a grounding strap right there. Someone says it's for the compass, but maybe it was for something else that is no longer installed.

I like it. I mean you can tell right away that Russian helicopters have a very different design philosophy from Western helicopters, but it's great at what it's designed to do.

We don't fly with a flight engineer. We fly with two pilots up front, and two crew chiefs in the doors*, in the "American-style". Anyway, we took off from an unimproved site with a load of passengers in the back, and the aircraft initially took off at about 99% N1 on the engines and then once we tried to start flying it started sinking (i.e. engines were at the max of 101% and the rotor was drooping anyway). Well the pilots couldn't really lower the collective much or else we were going to impact the terrain (but hey we were going kind of slow anyway, below ETL) so the rotor drooped below 88% (I think maybe 86-87%) and then we finally mushed through ETL, the aircraft started flying better, and the rotor came back up, at which time just about everything came back on by itself, except the AP of course. *All of our aircraft are Mi-17V-5 or Mi-172 with ramps in the back instead of clamshells, and doors on both sides. EDIT: Sorry, I still didn't make it clear, I'm a crew chief/mechanic. My company does not have flight engineers at all, the pilots perform all flight engineer duties in flight.

I believe that it could be, but in our experience here, when has ED modeled anything as a wild approximation?

The book says that the generators will fall offline at 88% rotor rpm. But like mentioned above, you want to keep it higher. By the book, your rotor rpm should never fall below 92%. I've had the generators kick offline during a flight one time, and it was a very unpleasant experience. Everything got real dark and the pilots got real quiet. I don't think our passengers knew what was going on, though.

This is what happens when you try to use a tank as an immobile bunker.

Fair enough, I meant clone in the sense of how it works, not what the outside of it looks like.

These have already been answered well enough I suppose. I will just add that the U.S. decided that the weight savings from removing the radar was a better choice than having the terrain mapping features. Also keep in mind that all of the UK Apaches had the radar, while a little less than half (I think) of the U.S. AH-64Ds had the Longbow radar installed. Maybe the weight issue wasn't a problem for the British Apaches due to their different engines, or maybe because the British area of operation was relatively low altitude compared to where most U.S. Apaches were operating. Or maybe both.

I'm responding to old questions, sorry... This one: All AH-64A's have the non-skid paint on the wings and avionics bays where it's okay to walk. Out of the factory, that non-skid paint is black. However, it was not unusual for an aircraft to get repainted and they would just paint over the black non-skid with whatever color they were painting the aircraft. It did not affect the non-skid really, but it would make it look a different color than the original black.

Pitch/roll channel Hydraulics have nothing to do with the generators.

The autopilot kicks off when the generators fail, and the autopilot does not come back on again until you push the button to turn it back on.

Not modeled. As far as I remember, not planned to be modeled, either. Maybe someday if the ALQ-144 gets modeled, they can backport that to this device, as it's essentially the same thing. Like I mentioned above, it's an ALQ-144 clone. It is some version of the L166 omnidirectional infrared countermeasures system. Here is what it looks like without the cover on it:

When I say zero thrust I mean when the tail rotor blades are flat pitch and don't produce thrust one way or the other. Keep in mind that this does not mean the aircraft will fly straight, since torque effect is going to cause yaw. The tail rotor blades can go to 23 degrees of pitch one way (full left pedal) but only 6 degrees of pitch the other way (full right pedal). With the pedals centered, the tail rotor blades are at roughly 8.5 degrees of pitch, and that is pulling the aircraft to the left. But anyway, more info on this effect can be found by googling "translating tendency".

You say horrible, I say terrible. Float like a butterfly!

That's true. No main gearbox and a helicopter becomes an expensive rock. But anyway this is usually done so that everything keeps running even if you lose both engines. Think of the main rotor as a big RAT (that's a jet thing, right?). :D