Aww, next time I’ll fly straight and steady to give you a fair chance of making it through! 
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Btw @Freak I got the PG map so just gave the ‘hard’ instant ground attack mission a go - the one your squad buddy asked about.
It’s a reasonably tough one with a vigilant BMP-2 on a good firing location on the apron and a BRDM-2 covering the BMP’s back.
I did get through the mission (I’ll post a video once I’ve had a go at trimming off the most boring bits) but it certainly required somewhat unconventional tactics i.e. I had to get right up close.
There’s a small industrial area behind the airport that lets you sneak right behind the hangars and strike the two IFVs from there.
It’ll feature some of my usual head-bobbing and sloppy flying but hey, a successful mission is a successful mission - it don’ have to be pretty.
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Somebody get this boy an AH-1 before he gets himself killed.
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I couldn’t agree more!
I hope we get some grunty weapons on it, though. Which Cobra are we getting, do you know? If it’s just minigun and grenade launcher, frankly I fear the Huey just about does the same job in DCS…but if we get the 20mm cannon, some better optics and the TOW, that’s another story…
The model has skipped around but I believe we’ll get a PROD-S with M197 and TOW capability. Bear in mind that neither is a magic weapon, but the AH-1 did have a limited head-tracking ability for the gun system, even with the twin turret system. Keep in mind that even the Vietnam era variants were significantly faster and more nimble than the UH-1H ever was.
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Nice. Yes true re agility.
I have to say that in the DCS game world, the door gunners’ eagle eyes coupled with the miniguns actually are an asset that (in certain situations) work better than player-controlled weapons (ability to pick infantry from clutter etc.)…so to match/surpass that ability, you do need a decent advantage in other areas. It’s probably not realistic, but it is how things are at the moment, in my experience anyway. In saying that, a capable AI WSO in the Cobra would perform in a similar manner.
Anyway, without further ado, here’s my ‘2 stiff gin & tonics in’ run of the mission. Plenty of mistakes, fumbling with TrackIR when hopping to the copilot seat and ending up eyeballing fire without a working sight, snagging off one of the skids into a rock to start with, etc…but all good fun 
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Chopper to Chopper action
hell yeah
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I just finished Stan Corvin’s, Vietnam Saga: Exploits of a Combat Helicopter Pilot. Corvin had 2 combat tours, the first of which was as a Loach pilot, and the second flying 212s for the IAD (CIA). It’s an amazing book, but he mentions more than a few times how deadly the .51 cal guns (DShK) were, for man and machine alike.
He also says that flying the Loach that the safest way to get near the enemy was the spiraling descent.
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Blue Thunder was head and shoulders better than Fire Birds.
Wheels
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This is true in DCS also - flown from the right seat, placing the enemy to your front left for a descending left hand spiral keeps him in your unobstructed view for the longest.
You can dodge tracers both by controlling the rate of descent with the collective and fwd/aft cyclic and by altering the path of the spiral with cyclic and pedals, all the while looking down at him.
In the Huey this also places the enemy in the firing sector of both the left door minigun and the left flexi minigun, leaving your hands free for dodging while the offensive is taken care of by your copilot and crew.
The tricky part is, as you get lower and closer, you have both less time to react to tracers and you either have to keep turning closer in or lose sight of the enemy as your own fuselage blocks your view…so ideally at the bottom there’s something to dive behind before you have to expose your belly.
As I understand in real life this was the riskiest moment too, which is why you had another chopper timed to dive in and keep the enemy’s head down as #1 breaks off his attack.
If I remember correctly, the biggest killer of low-flying aircraft in Vietnam was the humble towed ZPU-4. One of the advisors on our AH-64 project was actually on the receiving end of a DShK burst during a tour in Afghanistan; it was quite a story. One has to have a healthy respect for simple AAA, especially when it becomes a numbers game.
7 year old me would disagree and Fire Birds will always have unique AH-64 shots that no other film has had thus to date, but Blue Thunder had a much better plot overall. Fun note: Malcom McDowell was scared of flying and took a lot of coaxing to get into the aircraft. 
This is kind of the limitation of the xH-1 rotors, namely you have to watch out for negative Gs and certain maneuvers. I don’t know if the DCS version simulates mast bumping, but it was one of the key reasons why the AH-64 had a fully articulated rotor.
It sure does and you do need to be quite aware - you can unload the rotor a little, but too much and you quickly find yourself flying in a much looser formation with your rotor than you’d like. I can see why they wanted to change that for the Apache.
In the Huey any straight downward evasion that you’d do by pushing forward in an airplane has to be mostly done by dropping collective…you can push cyclic a little but you have to be very careful.
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A rather large number of craters in my DCS maps prove this right. Yes it is very much simulated.
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Yup, better off sticking to transport and cargo hauling then… Trying to shoehorn the UH-1 into anti-armor or attack ain’t good odds!
Pshh nonsense
In my mind the Huey pouncing onto a BMP before it can turn its turret is the aviation equivalent of this realistic fight scene:
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Save for rockets being extremely inaccurate, especially when launched from the UH-1’s armament subsystem, and the fact a kick in the shin will blow a Huey up.
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Cobra isn’t much tougher than a Huey, is it?
Depends on the variant, but most of the post-Vietnam era aircraft had some additional armor and reinforcements. I’m not 100% on the Vietnam era AH-1G, but it did have more protection than your stock UH-1 did. Not to mention the AH-1 had better flight characteristics tailored for the attack mission, though that’s beside the point of durability.
The speed run version of the same mission (all I’ve had time for in DCS is quick stints between baby duties - ha).
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