Flight advice?

[Scrim]

Well, I've bought the Mi-8 quite a while ago, but have flown it very little, because I simply feel that it is the most uncontrollable vehicle in DCS. I fly the Huey quite well, but getting my head around the Mi-8 is like running head first into a brick wall for me. I used to be quite bad at the Huey at first too, but there I felt I almost always learnt a little something for the future after every crash, but in the Mi-8 it's just crash, fly again, nothing new.

 

So, for those who've grown rather proficient at it, what would your tips be about learning how to take off, fly around, land, etc. this helicopter?

[Paradox]

Use the SAS, turn on heading and roll when you advance the throttle to max at startup. My advice is to assign the autopilot controls to your stick (I bind those controls to the hat switches on the warthog) and you'll have a much easier time flying it.

 

whenever you move the pedals it will override the heading hold SAS channel which is good because to perform a co-ordinated turn with SAS turned on you can just hold in the pedal and turn to your new heading, use small cyclic corrections to make sure you don't lose any altitude.

 

Losing and gaining speed is a matter of managing the collective and the pitch SAS channel, you should only need very small corrections to the cyclic forwards and backwards.

 

Entering and exiting translational lift is tricky in the Mi-8, you need to know when you're going to exit it (rather too sharply in the sim I feel) and then apply collective to arrest your decreasing vertical speed, don't be afraid to apply quite a lot of collective at this phase especially if you're running heavy.

 

If you're running heavier than you feel comfortable transitioning to a hover from forward flight then just do a rolling landing, the Mi-8 has wheels for this reason, it's often too heavy to land vertically especially in hot and high conditions. Soviet pilots used to land horizontally quite often in Afghanistan.

Edited March 2, 2014 by Paradox

[RagnarDa]

+1

 

Think of it like a bus or a airliner. You mostly just set the SAS and make corrections to it as you go along, much more hands-off than in the Huey.

 

Edit: Make sure you do the start-up properly. Try a hot-start if you are feeling it acts strange and see if there are any difference.

[Bushmanni]

Hip has lot more mass and therefore it's lot more easier to over control it than the Huey. Basically you need to make all the maneuvers much slower (in regards to stick and collective movement) than you would in Huey. This also means accelerating and decelerating will taker longer time and distance in Hip compared to Huey.

 

The biggest difference between Hip and Huey is in response to collective though. Vertical acceleration feels like it lags quite a bit the collective setting in Hip as compared to Huey. If you descend while hovering and then increase collective to stop the chopper it will start climbing after a few seconds and you need to reduce the collective to prevent that from happening. Collective actually controls vertical acceleration and in this sense the behavior of the Hip is completely understandable. In smaller and lighter choppers drag will make it seem more like collective controls vertical speed but that is only how it seems. In Hip due to it's mass the real nature of the collective is more pronounced.

 

Hip also hovers slightly tilted to the right. All single rotor choppers hover leaned to the side of the tail rotor thrust unless the rotor mast is tilted to compensate for this.

[kam]

So, for those who've grown rather proficient at it, what would your tips be about learning how to take off, fly around, land, etc. this helicopter?

 

Practice!

 

It took me a very long time to get comfortable flying the hip.

[Spasticatedtoad]

Over time, I have found that the Flight Stick you use can have a massive effect on your flying. I used to own a Logitek Extreme 3D Pro. I thought I was doing ok with that stick. But then I had an opportunity to buy a Saitek X52 ( not the Pro Version ) and my flying advanced quite a bit. That was back in BlackShark 1 before DCS World.

2 Weeks ago, my Saitek X-52 expired and I replaced it with a Thrustmaster Warthog and Saitek Combat Pro Flight Pedals.

And once again, my ability to handle these aircraft took a Massive Leap forward. Waaaay more than I could have anticipated.

Many moves I could not do with the Twist Grip Saitek, now come almost instinctively.

I'm enjoying that very much.

I used to find ( with the X-52 ) that flying was about 8/10th's wrestling and 2 parts luck. Now with some decent Flight Controls, I am finding the ratios have flipped. I hardly have to wrestle the Mi-8 any more and actually feel like I am guiding it. As it should be. :)

Edited March 2, 2014 by Spasticatedtoad

[hitman]

The one thing you should always pay attention to is your blade angle. In the Huey, the torque meter tells you how much pressure it takes to lift off the ground - in the 8, its blade angle. The dynamics are the same.

[Cibit]

Trim Trim Trim, then trim some more:)

Dont turn on your alt and heading SAS until your in stable flight and heading where your going.

 

Way more sedate than the huey and a joy to fly IMHO:thumbup:

[Scrim]

Thanks for the tips, especially about the SAS and treating it like a full blown 747 :P

 

Flying somewhat stable now, but I still don't understand quite how to use the SAS.

For starters, exactly how do I use the heading knob? When I turn it, it alters the direction I'm traveling in, but I can't seem to find any sort of ratio between how much I turn the knob and how much that turns the helicopter.

 

I don't really get the altitude one either. It turns on just fine, and I can make it take me lower and higher, but when I stop pressing the button upwards or downwards, I immediately start gaining/losing altitude, depending on how much collective I have, so what's the point of the altitude feature?

 

Can anyone sort of give me a dumbed down explanation of how the autopilot/SAS works, i.e. what the different features do, and how I'm supposed to use them in flight?

[hitman]

The SAS works in conjunction with trim. Unlike in the Huey, you have two sets of trim in the Mi-8. Im not too familiar with the autopilot, but I do know that the SAS controls the pitch, roll, and yaw of the aircraft. You have the basic trim button, and you have a trim hat that does the finer trim adjustments. The difference is that in the Huey, you have to hold your stick in order to keep a stable hover, while you can fine tune the Mi-8 so well, all you need to do is keep your feet on the anti torque pedals to keep heading. I have my hat switch for the SAS trim functions. Keep in mind that the rotary knobs on the pedestal only turn left and right, so you have to do some trial and error to get it right if you want to map it to your stick. Mine works just as it should in an aircraft - up for nose down, down for nose up, left for left wing down, right for right wing down.

Edited March 2, 2014 by hitman

[Scrim]

I thought the SAS was the autopilot, albeit a simple one. Using the same hat switch thing, it really works well, what I'm wondering though is what the numbers on the dial that's turned for heading and such actually mean. Like, when I turn the heading knob to 3, what does that tell me?

[hitman]

If I were to bet, Id say pitch, roll, and yaw in degrees attitude.

[GunfighterSIX]

The SAS works in conjunction with trim. Unlike in the Huey, you have two sets of trim in the Mi-8. Im not too familiar with the autopilot, but I do know that the SAS controls the pitch, roll, and yaw of the aircraft. You have the basic trim button, and you have a trim hat that does the finer trim adjustments. The difference is that in the Huey, you have to hold your stick in order to keep a stable hover, while you can fine tune the Mi-8 so well, all you need to do is keep your feet on the anti torque pedals to keep heading. I have my hat switch for the SAS trim functions. Keep in mind that the rotary knobs on the pedestal only turn left and right, so you have to do some trial and error to get it right if you want to map it to your stick. Mine works just as it should in an aircraft - up for nose down, down for nose up, left for left wing down, right for right wing down.

 

90% of that is incorrect. Only 1 trim system, the mi-8 has heading hold so you could take you feet of the pedals in a hover, but don't. SAS and trim are two different things and I think you guys are confusing some of the functions of both with the AFCS. Best just to read the manual or online description.

 

 

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/magnificent_eight/?PAGEN_2=4#446370

Edited March 2, 2014 by GunfighterSIX

[hitman]

Then how do you engage heading hold? I had no idea you could do that. I thought that was just a system simplification in the settings.

[Paradox]

It's on the panel that sits between the pilots, the SAS channels are turned on with the green button and off with the red button.

 

The heading hold is the one on the far left.

 

My problem with the Mi-8 is weapons employment, I haven't found a good way of engaging with rockets or guns with the fixed sight.

Edited March 3, 2014 by Paradox

[Slazi]

If you want to improve your piloting skills, fly on the coast and practice landing on the oil rig for an hour or two. No weapons. Just get a feeling for how it flies. Take eveything slowly. Your main focus should be not crashing.

[hitman]

It's on the panel that sits between the pilots, the SAS channels are turned on with the green button and off with the red button.

 

The heading hold is the one on the far left.

 

My problem with the Mi-8 is weapons employment, I haven't found a good way of engaging with rockets or guns with the fixed sight.

I know how to turn on the SAS, just never knew you could trim the pedals.

The trick to this is to keep your aircraft aligned nose-tail to your target. Your crosshairs are accurate, but the ship likes to drift so your munitions arent always going to go to the crosshairs. It takes a lot of practice....

[Raptor9]

Yeah, going from a smaller single-engine helo to a larger multi-engine helo is a bit of a change, simulator or not. A lot more mass to deal with. When I went from a 3,000lb helo to a 17,000-pounder, I would skid right through the final approach path when making my turn from base to final. Took me a while to get used to how much momentum was working against me.

 

Another trick you can try for when you're slowing through ETL on landing, to keep from dropping from the sky, on takeoff do a hover power check, and note how much power (blade angle/torque) is required to maintain an in-ground-effect hover. When you come around to land, right before you go through ETL, set your collective at that power setting. As you slow through ETL and come down to IGE altitude, your descent rate should arrest itself.

 

Other factors might preclude this, like excessive bank or pitch angles if you're executing an aggressive landing into an LZ, if you have a large tail wind, or if you're landing at a different area than where you did your hover check (different altitude or weather conditions will require more/less power).

[CoBlue]

I find the Mi-8 easer to handle than the Huey.

Just use the stability augmentation for pitch (green button in the middle), you don't need anything else for manual flying & practice, practice...:thumbup:

[Scrim]

Well, just to revisit this topic: Pretty much at once after going after the advice things shaped up a lot, and by now I'm flying the Mi-8 even better than the Huey, despite a lot more time in the latter (OK, might be because it doesn't have an autopilot).

 

Especially big thanks to Paradox, Ragnar and Bushmanni, could not have gotten my head around this quicker if it weren't for your advice!

[Paradox]

I'm glad you've got it, it's a cool ship and it's worth learning how to manage it.

 

The better you learn the Mi-8 the better you'll learn the Mi-24!

[Scrim]

I never thought I'd say this, but I might've gotten hooked on Russian helicopters, at least more than before. Actually realized that, and that I'm looking forward to seeing a Hind module a lot more now that you mentioned it. Maybe it's just that there's only two helicopters in DCS (KA-50 doesn't count, just a flying weapons station :P), but I'm at least no longer only touching Russian helicopters with a 6 feet stick.

[Scrim]

So, a bit of a resurrection of this thread: What's up with the crazy pitching that occurs?

 

I find that especially when flying over uneven terrain, the SAS system will go crazy and go from out right suicidal downwards pitches to equally suicidal upward pitches. Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a bug, or does it indicate I'm doing something wrong?

[lmp]

I can't say I noticed anything like that in the Mi-8. Are you sure the SAS is what's causing it? Maybe you have your axis assignments mixed up (e.x. unused throttle or pedal break axis mapped to the cyclic)?

[Scrim]

Nope, nothing like that. It's very specific, pretty much every time that I get into mountains and hills there'll be wild pitch adjustments from the SAS, and I'm not even touching the stick or throttle.

 

Can pushing the speed limitations and using a high collective cause it? I've usually gathered quite some speed when I reach said terrain, and to avoid fly right into a mountain I tend to push my collective up a bit.