Unrealistic flight characteristics

[shaunwallis21]

i was talking to a real veteran Huey pilot who said when he was on some mission in a hurry out of some south american country they put the collective all the way up and cyclic full forward and they where able to maintain 155 knots in a straight line. he said the Huey he was in was identical to the one in game but the one in game is to fragile.:(

[msalama]

Weight? Atmospheric conditions? Altitude? Etc.

[Penshoon]

Robert Mason references huey airspeed many times in chickenhawk and but never as high as 155kt which is way past vne,I think he would have mentioned it if it was possible.

https://books.google.se/books?id=kYPC4HqsCLwC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=chickenhawk+speed+dive&source=bl&ots=p6QXQPkbLi&sig=mTG6DLjXEeHB37RGNYOnf2wswT8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitxuyyzObOAhXMEiwKHZaFDVkQ6AEIPTAK#v=snippet&q=Knots&f=false

[QuiGon]

Robert Mason references huey airspeed many times in chickenhawk and but never as high as 155kt which is way past vne,I think he would have mentioned it if it was possible.

https://books.google.se/books?id=kYPC4HqsCLwC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=chickenhawk+speed+dive&source=bl&ots=p6QXQPkbLi&sig=mTG6DLjXEeHB37RGNYOnf2wswT8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitxuyyzObOAhXMEiwKHZaFDVkQ6AEIPTAK#v=snippet&q=Knots&f=false

 

Indeed, what shaunwallis21 said doesn't really match to what it sounds like in the book.

 

Great book btw :thumbup:

[Penshoon]

Indeed, what shaunwallis21 said doesn't really match to what it sounds like in the book.

 

Great book btw :thumbup:

Yeah, highly recommended for any Huey fan! :thumbup:

Does the speed gauge in the Huey even go up to 155kt? Think it's limited to 140kt, no?

Guess the quoted 155kt would be possible with a fair tailwind if he's talking about ground speed but that should also be possible in DCS ?

[doodenkoff]

The speed dial tops out at 150 knots, but there is some space between that and zero that may be usable?

[Naughty_17]

Yeah, highly recommended for any Huey fan! :thumbup:

Guess the quoted 155kt would be possible with a fair tailwind if he's talking about ground speed but that should also be possible in DCS ?

I'm sorry for the off topic, but if you liked Chicken Hawk, you should probably check out Jayhawk 2-1 books by Michael Trout.

[Zimmerdylan]

i was talking to a real veteran Huey pilot who said when he was on some mission in a hurry out of some south american country they put the collective all the way up and cyclic full forward and they where able to maintain 155 knots in a straight line. he said the Huey he was in was identical to the one in game but the one in game is to fragile.:(

 

 

If there is one thing that I have learned from DCS and my own experience with real pilots of any kind it is that you can sit one guy down who has flown an AC that's here and he'll say one thing about it. You can sit another guy down and he'll contradict the first guy. Both in his opinions of DCS and the performance of the A/C.

I have had 3 Huey pilots come to my house and fly, or watch me fly DCS (some pilots won't do it). All 3 had different takes on it. At best 50% of their opinions actually matched with one another's on the actual sim itself.

I have a music student that just retired from the Air Force last year. He was an A10 pilot with years of flying the A10. He retired as an instructor from D.M.A.F.B. here in Tucson. He would not actually sit down and fly the DCS A10 but he agreed to watch me do it. He told me what seemed more accurate, and what was not accurate. He tells me about procedures and things that he taught about the A10. And there is another guy that I went to college with who was a retired A10 pilot. He likewise sat with me and DCS, he had some different accounts of the plane. I started posting the things that both pilots were telling me on these forums and there were guys who attacked what I was reporting saying that they knew from experience that all of it was completely a$$ backwards.

I do not solicit the advice or responses of pilots or whatever any more. And I'm even less inclined to report anything I see or learn because many people here seem to know much more than the people who I know I have seen fly some of these planes.

The bottom line is that it is a simulator that's this side of being a game. And unless it is the actual aircraft, none of it is going to be 100% accurate. So I quit trying to find that middle ground and I just take it for what it is.

Too many people take it waaaay to seriously.

[Rogue Trooper]

i was talking to a real veteran Huey pilot who said when he was on some mission in a hurry out of some south american country they put the collective all the way up and cyclic full forward and they where able to maintain 155 knots in a straight line. he said the Huey he was in was identical to the one in game but the one in game is to fragile.:(

 

I think this Vet dude does not truly express the foot and hand work he puts in naturally to achieve this... it is simply natural to him with the controllers he got..... lucky swine!

In Sim and with my kit... I do the same as he does, what is the problem? :D

Edited August 30, 2016 by Rogue Trooper

[Penshoon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_533

"The Bell 533 was a research helicopter built by Bell Helicopter to explore the limits and conditions experienced by helicopter rotors at high airspeeds under contract with the United States Army during the 1960s.

Initial testing

During the first phase, a general clean-up of the airframe was performed to reduce drag. New aerodynamic fairings were developed using fiberglass honeycomb sandwich for the rear fuselage, a cambered vertical stabilizer was developed which, in cruise flight, aerodynamically unloaded the tail rotor. The skid landing gear also had streamlined fairings applied to it and the rotor mast was replaced by a mast that could be tilted in-flight.

 

The reconfigured helicopter was first tested in the NASA Ames Research Center wind tunnel, which confirmed the modifications had significantly reduced the aircraft's drag. The 533 made its maiden flight on 10 August 1962 at Bell's Fort Worth, Texas headquarters utilizing the two-bladed UH-1B rotor. Before beginning the program flight testing, the helicopter was fitted with a gimbal-mounted three-bladed rotor. Modifications to the flight controls allowed either rotor to easily be fitted to the aircraft in a short time, and the three-bladed rotor could be mounted on the gimbal or rigidly to the mast. In this configuration, the 533 achieved a true airspeed of 150 knots (173 mph, 278 km/h) in straight-and-level flight."

[msalama]

So I quit trying to find that middle ground and I just take it for what it is.

 

No middle ground in real combat AC either, at least according to the contradictory comments you received from those RL pilots :music_whistling:

[Schwarzfeld]

Every pilot interprets things their own way, and flies each acft their own way. I recently wrapped up learning how to fly a taildragger locally with a CFI, in a Piper Cub.

 

This sounds pretty damn hokey, so I'll brace for impact, but honestly the most realistic simulation I've flown of the Cub was Dovetail Flight Simulator's Super Cub flight model - I bought the game for my son and tried it out.

 

Next to that, the DCS taildraggers, fundamentally, do handle and fly like the real thing, but the Cub I flew in with my CFI weighed 700lbs and generated nowhere near the horsepower or torque of any of the three tailwheel prop jobs in DCS - however the core fundamentals are there in DCS and they ARE realistic. I was ready to solo that cub in less than nine flight hours, and I'm willing to bet my time on the stick & pedals here at home with DCS didn't hurt, and may have helped.

 

With this thing RE: the Huey max airspeed - as I am a student pilot myself and have been around pilots and raised by one my entire life - pilots, like car guys, will say ALL KINDS of stuff that makes sense to them, but makes NO sense to you, and easily is misinterpreted, because you weren't there, and you're not a pilot, or aren't one that was checked out in what they flew, when they flew it.

 

Also, we pilots are NOTORIOUS for tall tales - more so than fishermen, especially in combat. Pilots remember things differently as time passes ;)

 

Now, as far as exceeding VNE in a chopper, I grew up as a kid next to MCAS El Toro, and we had a CH-46 pilot at my church, growing up.

 

He said sure, you can exceed VNE for a minute or two here and there, and we did - he said "I used to stick my hand out the cockpit window and cover the pitot so we could override the cyclic interlock mechanism that prevented the CH-46's rotors from colliding at high speed when we were in a seriously dire rush, and we just felt it out."

 

Pilots can find ways to make acft to all kinds of things they shouldn't be doing in the acft, and sure, maybe this guy put his UH-1H in a seriously steep dive, had just about no fuel onboard, no cargo/weps or load, and had a monstrous tailwind. Maybe... but it's pretty unlikely.

 

And as a general rule, yes, simulation flight models, especially DCS, tend to err on the side of being overly fragile and overly difficult to handle, because frankly its a non-movement sim (your butt is static in the chair) so that makes choppers VERY difficult, as you must anticipate torque literally through your butt in the seat, and in the sim you can't do that.

 

As far as combat acft systems and procedures being inaccurate, bear in mind ED and the devs are limited by age of the acft they study and also classified gear. For example, the A-10C in DCS is on Suite 3 software/avionics, and some classified items are not there. more recent A-10Cs fly with Suite 8 software & avionics - the one ED studied for their simulation was meant as a desktop training aid to transition A-10A pilots to the new bird, so it was doubtless a very early C model.

 

Take the simulator as always with a grain of salt, and also bear in mind you're not going to get anything genuinely useful out of DCS as a flight simulator if you nitpick it for specific numbers, speeds, or roll rates - its usefulness as a simulator is only something you can cash in on if you pay attention to the raw, hardcore fundamentals of the FLYING, the flight model - FLY the plane. If you do that, you can no joke take those stick & rudder skills you've built in DCS, hop in a real aircraft, and you'll be a leg up on your training vs. the other guy, I promise you.

 

But if you sit there and pick apart all the "He-said/she-said" stuff about specific top speeds or what it could do/how high it could fly, you will have blown so much money on such fantastic simulator modules that are so fundamentally realistic to fly, that it brings a tear to my eye lol