If the air displaced by the main rotor can’t go anywhere quickly because there is terrain underneath, it forms a ‘cushion’ of air that keeps the helicopter afloat. The final important ingredient to understanding helicopter flight is the ground effect. Finally, the pedals control the tail rotor action – they can be used both to stabilize the craft against the main rotor torque as well as swing the nose around into a new direction in hover flight. It is actually quite feasible to fly a helicopter sideward, or even backward if it is done slowly, only once the airstream becomes fast, the fuselage tries to align with the wind like for an aircraft. The main rotor can be tilted by moving the stick, this provides a combination of forward and sideward motion. Rather, the angle of the main rotor blades is changed by the collective control- this provides upward/downward motion. Unlike in an aircraft, the turbine RPM is usually not throttled. The rotating blades try to yank the helicopter around against their own motion, and only the action of the tail rotor prevents this – so pedals need to be used carefully to counter this effect. Yet perhaps the hardest thing to master for beginners is the torque of the rotor. The pilot always needs to recognize when a motion is part of this oscillation and will dampen out on its own and when it is actually part of the flight dynamics. Helicopters reach this condition only when they accelerate, but just after takeoff and before landing they move through the air slowly, and they’re in fact dynamically unstable – any perturbation needs to be countered quickly with the controls, or it will grow and the pilot will lose control.Īnother thing that takes some time getting used to is that the body of a helicopter swings like a pendulum underneath the rotor. Normal aircraft are usually dynamically stable – if they feel a perturbation, they return to a stable attitude.
If you’ve mastered flying normal aircraft and have the idea that helicopters can’t be so different, you’re likely wrong – helicopters are very different. Ready for takeoff? Let’s take a quick look at some helicopters FG has to offer. But there are also hundreds of helipads in the FG scenery, located on places like hospital rooftops or oil rigs.
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And of course you can land pretty much anywhere you like, airports are no longer a must, any flat patch of terrain will do. Piloting a helicopter is also a nice opportunity to see the terrain in a different way, because usually the view downward is much less restricted than in aircraft cockpits – here a good graphics card to support all the hires terrain texturing and the various vegetation and building overlays that can be enabled really pays off. This makes learning to fly a helciopter quite a challenge, but also very educational. While most Flightgear users seem to mainly use GA aircraft or airliners, the simulation of helicopters is not only possible but comes with a nice degree of realism.
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