by John Hargreaves » Sun Jan 13, 2019 6:59 am
Hi guys, just a bit of feedback on the January update flying the Bell 407 (full realism mode). Firstly, I am far from being an expert on this, I'm merely an enthusiastic amateur, so you need to speak to people with extensive real world experience, (I have a lot of sim hours in DCS and XP11, a lot of time spent in books learning the theory and a few hours of real lessons in an R44) but I guess any feedback is welcome.
First impressions: big improvement. Feels like we are moving in the right direction over what we had before.
Leaving the ground: the point where the helicopter goes light on the skids and starts to tell you where it wants to go seems to be quite brief. It currently feels that the collective comes up to 'biting point' and you are straight off the ground. I'd expect a small period where you feel the aircraft go light but still stay on the ground, then a little further pull on the collective brings it up into the hover in the cushion of air you are creating. It might just be due to lack of g-force in a sim.
Hover: feels not bad at all. I got into a pretty stable hover first try, it just felt quite natural. The pedals allowed me to rotate and I could taxi around quite happily.
Moving forward: nudging the cyclic gently forward and adding a tiny bit of collective got the 407 going in the right direction and did generate a bit of translational lift, but I felt the effect was a bit weak and I didn't feel like I was picking up much momentum, almost as if the density of the air was too thin. Also as I picked up speed, I would expect the weather vane effect to start to keep the fuselage going a bit straighter, but the torque effect of the main rotor seemed to be present, then disappear abruptly at a certain speed rather than being a gradually decreasing effect. Once up to 60 knots or so I was able to come off the pedals, so the effect is there.
In forward flight I was feeling a general lack of lift, and lowering the collective, even at quite a fast airspeed, the helicopter seemed to drop quite quickly rather than cut through the air. Again it felt like the air was very thin.
Cruising along and pulling the collective up without doing anything else, the 407 just gained altitude rather than screwing itself over my right shoulder, so there was no torque effect from the increased power going into the system. I'd expect raising collective > increased lift > increased power to rotor to maintain rpm > increased torque > left pedal to balance it.
Hope this helps to keep improving, as I said, overall it's a massive step forward and very encouraging, and there will be far more experienced and knowledgeable guys than me who you can draw upon. Onwards and upwards!
i7-7700K/MSI RTX 3080/Win10 64bit/64Gb RAM/Asus Xonar DX+Beyer Dynamic DT990 Pro headphones/LG 34" UM65 @2560x1080/TM Warthog+VKB MkIV Rudder pedals/OE-XAM R22 collective/Reverb G2