Flight Director and AP Selections

[Jimbolya]

I'm a bit confused with regards to flight director and Autopilot Selections. Currently I will typically only use Roll and Pitch stabilization with the Autopilot. I just recently read that the Flight Director allows more pilot input? Do you still leave your desired AP selections on as well as the Flight Director? I'm under the impression that the flight director cancels out the Autopilot modes that are currently active.

[atsmith6]

Yes. Ensure all three AP channels are selected at all times. With the flight director button NOT selected this will cause the AP to stabilise your helicopter and fly in your designated direction or toward your selected steerpoint.

 

If you now enable Flight Director mode, the AP will simply stop trying to fly for you, i.e. it will stop trying to steer you to the last heading programmed by the trim button or the waypoint selected on the PVI-800. But it will still continue to stabilise the helicopter. If you disable any of the three AP channels you will find yourself fighting to control the aircraft.

 

In short, with flight director ON the KA-50 flies like an easy to control helicopter without the additional yaw input that a normal tail-rotor equipped helo uses, i.e. you're simply trimming pitch, roll, and yaw.

 

With flight director OFF the AP takes control and flies the helo in the last direction you told it to, taking your last trimmed pitch as an indicator of how fast you want to get there.

[Jimbolya]

I typically fly with Heading hold toggled. I find that if I have it on then it's really hard to steer to a new direction. However, if I have the direction i want I turn the Heading Hold back on.

[xxJohnxx]

You could do the same by just holding down the trimmer. It will overide all AP inputs but will still keep the damping active.

[Jimbolya]

Yea - it's something that I definitely have to figure out for myself. I can leave the Heading Hold on, but then if I need to make a bunch of changes I'm constantly trimming (i.e. snaking through a valley or something). I'd rather have the ability to make those corrections, then in straight line flying have the Heading Hold back on so that I'm not constantly making small inputs to stay on course.

[GGTharos]

Keep heading damper on. In RL the Ka-50 is flown with a lot of trimming, exactly like what you are experiencing.

 

If you don't want the heading hold, then turn on the flight director, do not turn off the heading damper/ap channel.

[Jimbolya]

I see so toggle between using and not using the Flight Director. I'll have to try that out. It will definitely make it easier to simply map a single key to my joy stick set up lol.

[Suchacz]

Read articles in my sig, maybe they will bring a little more light into your problem...

Edited March 11, 2014 by Suchacz

[karambiatos]

Keep heading damper on. In RL the Ka-50 is flown with a lot of trimming, exactly like what you are experiencing.

 

If you don't want the heading hold, then turn on the flight director, do not turn off the heading damper/ap channel.

 

 

you can turn it on an off freely, i turn it on and off, when i need to, having it off is much better when doing rocket or 23-250 runs, and when you want to do some turns fast, its also very useful to turn it off while keeping auto turn to target, on, and you want to turn away from a target, while retaining the ability to turn it toward the enemy quickly, and accurately.

 

i have the heading pilot bound to my joystick.

 

 

Basically dont listen to people telling you "its not realistic"

because you probably dont have a good FFB joystick, or any kind of FFB joystick, and even then its not comparable in accuracy to the actual joystick, you may or may not have pedals, and then they arent comparable to the real thing, and to top it all off click trimming in the game is just frustrating, that is to say it doesnt work realistically at all.

 

Do what works for you, and what you feel most comfortable with.

[Jimbolya]

Sounds good -