I have been enjoying FG very much for a couple of years. (A big THANK YOU! to all the developers and modellers! This thing is Wonderful!) I have flown many aircraft quite well. Lately I have been exploring helicopters again. As to their realism: for some models this is plausible. For others, I cannot believe it.
I recently succeeded in getting my joystick configured in FG. That was an interesting story in itself (for another post). Now it works well. Its twist "rudder" ability makes helicopters much more manageable than using only the mouse. (THANK YOU John Check for the "Users Guide to FGInput - Joystick an Keyboard Bindings for FlightGear!")
But...
I find the Bo105, S58 & S76 challenging but manageable. I want to fly the Robinson R-22. Try as I might, this thing is so unpredictable and violently erratic I find it completely unmanageable. The S51 responds more slowly and is much more manageable, but both of them constantly and readily get into a state of spinning around very fast to the right (always to the right), ignoring my hard left "rudder" input, oscillating violently side-to-side, then tumbling around and over until they crash.
Now here's what makes me suspicious of this. I live in San Diego, California. We are surrounded by a dozen airports large and small. Helicopters of all types and sizes, Navy, Marines, civil, Coast Guard, police, news media, LifeFlight (medical), fire-fighting, private and training fly around us every day of the week, and nighttime as well.
Five miles north of us, Corporate Helicopters flies Robinson R-series machines out of Montgomery Field. They do training, so many of these flights are students.
Every helicopter -- every single one -- moves very smoothly. They are very stable. If real helicopters behaved as unpredictably and erratically as the FG models, particularly the Robinson R-22, we would see them moving erratically as the pilots struggled to keep them under control. This does not happen. So I really question whether our R-22 model is properly configured.
This led me to wonder about my joystick. Whether low quality potentiometers were throwing spurious inputs. This hasn't been a problem with fixed-wing craft, but I explored it anyway. I learned about the "tolerance" and "factor" properties in the xml files. Those seem to help a little.
I saw a posting about the UH-1 being one of the most realistic in FG and tested by a real pilot. But in my machine it has a frame rate of 3. That's right -- 3 fps. So it's un-usable for me. Most aircraft run around 30-40 fps. That makes a usable simulation. As long as the simulation is reasonably accurate.
Are there any real helicopter pilots out there who have tried the Robinson R-22 in FG? Can anyone find a pilot and ask them to try it? I would really like to know. For my part, I will see if someone at Corporate Helicopters will try it on my laptop and give an opinion.
Incidentally, for anyone reading this who is near San Diego, C-H has a full-size, sit-in-it FAA-certified simulator that simulates the R-22. (www.corporatehelicopters.com. Release your script blocker and look under "Flight Training / Flight Simulator" for vivid photos of it.) Not sure I can afford it. But that would be a guaranteed realistic simulation.
Thanks.
Erick
My system:
HP Pavilion a375c; Pentium 4, 3 GHz; RAM: 2 GB; Video: GeForce FX5700LE, 256 MB
Windows XP; DirectX 9.0c
Joystick: Interact Raider Advanced FX