Grizzly is the guy (real QHI) who has been giving me lessons on the Black Angels squadron/Low Level Heaven server. We typically do three circuits as a 5/12 ship Huey formation (staggered, trail and echelon. Changing formation twice in a circuit. taking turns as lead once you are good enough. I am not good enough. Then this is followed by one or more of - low level navigation in poor weather, underslung loads, spot landings, (also formation spot landings), restricted LZ’s, a combat mission or something else. I am allowed to lead the formation in navigation in bad weather.
Extremely informal and very friendly. No bullshit. Mostly Germans but Brit, East European and French as well. English is spoken or German translated for you.
Tuesday and Thursday nights at 2000 German time 1900 UTC. Some Saturday night flying if people are keen.
After an evening doing this Felicity has commented “how alive” I appear, and “how completely knackered”.
I have spent the morning in a low cloud base and heavy rain with a French professional helicopter pilot.
I am still not good but I am learning a lot.
1:1 training provided as required.
I commend the group for fun and helicopter training
This is just the thing I am looking for! I took a lesson the day before yesterday. We practiced steep approaches to touchdown riding the ETL shake all the way down. I was doing 30 mph and it was thrilling! I’ve been flying helicopters in DCS since Black Shark 1 and X-Plane since, well, whenever Austin introduced them. And I have always been flying them slightly wrong. Not because I didn’t know any better. I can read! But because it didn’t matter. Doing things properly is SO much more fun then doing them half-assed and roll-yer-own.
Syria is the closest thing to an X-Plane level of detail and realism I’ve seen yet in DCS. I’ve just started playing on the server. A huge amount of work has gone into their CTLD mods. Great map as well.
My recent deep dive has been the Persistent PvE Rotorheads server. I’ve not seen such intense helicopter action since the early days of Black Shark. It is also the first time that I have made practical use of sling loading, troop transport and Combined Arms. They have expanded the CTLD script in some interesting ways. The best is terrifically unrealistic but highly helpful: You get a “Sam Launch!” audio always when launched upon. The fighting is intense and you’ll likely die anyway. But this one little cheat gives just enough chance for survival that you want to come back for more. If anyone wishes to team up, I am always game if I am on discord. One requirement from the server is that you must ferry whichever helicopter(s) you wish to fly from “Alpha” FARP to “Bravo”. The flight takes about 15 minutes. Once you’ve done the ferry once, you are good forever on that helicopter. There are some fixed wing slots also available. They have very limited ordinance so that helicopters remain the primary platforms for moving the ball downfield. When the 5 hour map rotates, all units and downed pilots carry through the rotation. There is also a real-time map that updates AI unit position and intel when player or friendly AI units come within visual range. This also is a bit of a cheat but, again, it makes the game way more enjoyable.
I enjoyed that server, I should give it another go one of these days.
How are the frames? There was a bit of server lag and stutters when I played there - I had a chat with the host and he was trying to tweak things a bit for better performance. This was last year so might be much better now.
