Be online at 2200 tonight lol
Glad to help @Hangar200.
Wheels
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Had a great mission in the HIP tonight! I have one where I am slinging cargo up to a Forward Observation Post and to a FARP to âactivateâ units and fill out the structures. I have a flight plan set up, trying to be ârealisticâ in how I see the mission flowing. Got 4 of the crates up to the FOP and got a warning that my left and right fuel pumps were offline as I was lowering crate 5 to the ground. Momentarily panicked, got the crate down hard (enough to damage the crate) and headed back to base ASAP. Looking over all the systems enroute while looking for auto-rotation landing spots along the way, all while avoiding civilian areas. Got it on the ground and was poking around the systems when I checked the fuel levels and ⊠right and left tanks were empty - I was down to what was left in the service tank. Nice! 
I am going to run the mission again, and maybe do up a nice AAR write-up. Been too busy this month to even touch the weapon systems but I may bleed into next month with those. 
The VR Kneeboard app is amazing! Hopefully I can keep my head steady and get a video out of the next flight!
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âŠand then it turns out I lied to you.
I was going through the manual and the manual stated that if the service pump fails, the fuel will be gravity fed to the engines. Huh.
So I tried it out in a controlled failure scenarioâŠand so it was. The service tank failed but I kept flying.
It must have been that previously when I lost all engine power and the service pump warning came on, I also had another, more critical, event at the same time.
Sorry to have misled you!
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No worries - this has developed into a trial and error discussion with good info.
I think one of the things impacting out understanding of battle damage to the Mi-8 is that the gound fire- AAA and small arms, to include RPGs - can be very non-specific when they hit the helicopter. I know that is a MOTO statement but it bears consideration.
A radar missile like an SA-8/SA-N-4 will just blow you apart (as in my Krivak Mutiny mission). A MANPAD might just take out an engineâso the damage/fire is mostly limited to the engine area. True, that damage cascades into generator failure(s) which in turn take out your AP, but it is an expected failure cascadeâŠBang - engine fire light âŠseconds later, there goes a generatorâŠAP off.
Ground fire does not differentiate and therefore you get multiple failures that are often not in the âcascade orderâ you expect. Which then can obscure why a system failed. Was it because an electrical component feeding it was shot out? Out was that fuel pump itself damaged? 
Interesting stuff.
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Or when you catch a Sparrow shot by a certain Canadian.
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Itâs a cool discussion - and from a âgamingâ perspective I like it that the Hip is big enough that it can take a beating but return home if managed appropriately. It adds a new layer of fun.
I love the Huey and the Harrier and they both have quite successfully brought me home with battle damageâŠbut given they are single engine, if you have an engine fire, thatâs that, end of the storyâŠwhereas with a Hip you can have a situation where the mission changes from ânavigate to target and employ weaponsâ to something like âshut down left engine and put out the fire, turn on APU & stby generator and conserve battery power, navigate home and perform a running landing because youâre outside hover parameters for single engineâ. It gives a lot of gaming satisfaction when the challenge changes completely halfway through.
I did more failure modes testing yesterday. Itâs quite fun and you quickly start to understand the failure indications & aircraft behavior changes.
I made a mission with the following failures set at 1 minute into the flight: 50% chance of Left Engine fire and 50% chance of Right Engine fire.
It seems that thereâs a minimum of 1 minute randomization (for the lack of a better word), i.e. if you set the failure at 1 minute into the flight, it will happen sometime within that next minute.
With 50% chance of each engine failure set, that makes for a fun situation where youâre flying in the pattern and shortly a) no engines will fail or b) one engine will fail or c) both engines will fail, either simultaneously or one after another.
That tests your reactions quite well, as you need to identify whatâs going on and whether it is recoverableâŠand be ready to switch from an engine management challenge to autorotation practice pretty quickly if both engines catch fire!
The failure modes testing also quickly builds the awareness of âspeed is lifeâ when it comes to helicoptersâŠif youâre doing above 160kmh above 300m altitude and do the right things, a lot can go wrong with the helicopter and you can walk away from the landing / crash siteâŠbut if youâre hovering / going low and slow when things start happening, youâre up Schitt Creek without a paddle in no time.
Other notes from last nightâs tests:
- Main redactor fire seems to be less likely to spread than engine fires - the main extinguisher charge puts it out quite effectively
- Metal chips in an engine initially only lit up a single warning light - after a while a âshut down engineâ command light came up - and shortly after that light, the engine caught fire. It happened in minutes, not seconds, though - so you may have a bit of time up your sleeve.
- Metal chips in tail rotor transmission lit up a warning light, but nothing further happenedâŠuntil I lost the tail rotor and had a bad day. That took maybe 5 or 10 minutes from the initial failure.
- Loss of tail rotor control (not power) is actually a manageable situation - you can fly the aircraft with cyclic and collective into a rolling landing. I havenât had this happen in combat, though - only as a âsimulatedâ failure.
Another practical learning yesterday was that those voltage meters are quite useful:
I did the Caucasus map âConvoyâ instant mission and took a few .50 cal rounds. The rotor RPM lurched, Gen 1 & 2 failure aural warnings came up, right engine metal chip light came on and the autopilot disengaged.
I got out of dodge, trimmed the bird best I could and started looking at whatâs going on. Both engines were running and the rotor RPM was back up to nominal but the right engine was clearly unhappy with the metal chips situation. I could not turn the autopilot back on, either - so initially I thought the generators had failed and I turned on the APU stby gen to support the battery. The generator failure lights werenât on, thoughâŠso I cycled the voltage meter selectors to gens 1 & 2 and found that they were actually working! So I did have time from a battery power perspective and the autopilot failure wasnât caused by the generators.
I flew to a nearby village and slowed down to a vertical landing, at which point the right engine quit. Didnât catch fire this time - just shut down. The governor compensated automatically, though, and increased the remaining engine to emergency power, so I had enough power (I was IGE) to complete the vertical landing.
So learningsâŠcheck the voltagesâŠand chips do not automatically lead to an engine fire, but can also cause a simple shutdown without a fire.
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Completely random aside but that is why I loved the P-38 on long missions in IL-2 1946. You get to the target and take battle damage that destroys one of your engines but you still had a shot of getting home if you could keep that other fan turning.
Wheels
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Same thing!
I remember playing Warbirds (just the free offline version - I was a kid back then so didnât have a credit card or salary to pay the subscription, ha) and bombing an airfield with a B-25, got all shot upâŠlimped back with a single engine, which was leaking oil and quit on finalâŠI glided down to a greased landing with 2 dead propellers. This was ages ago but the moment stuck with me, hehe.
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Iâve had something similarâŠGens back on but no AP. At least one I noticed red lights on under the Yaw and Vert Velocity AP switches which I assumed meant something like, âDude! Your AP is like totally trashedâ
Just knowing that the AP is gone, for whatever reason, is important because of the dramatic differences in how the aircraft handles in and out of AP P&R. I have actually augured in trying to fly it in what I thought was AP on,âŠI had gotten distracted and missed a step in the TO CL.
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I can sort of fly it now without the AP, but I think a stick with more throw and less spring would make it a lot easier - you want to be very gentle and fighting the spring tension doesnât help.
I am getting more comfortable in the bird, though - I did a pilot rescue on Through the Inferno MP server, where the pilot was in a dense forest so I had to hover over him for the pick up. Couldnât have done it 3 weeks ago. The video is just boring hovering footage but it was exciting to me 
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Nice job @Bearhedge! I need to try that in VR. Were you using a âglance downâ command to look out the window and down?
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Yes I did - I canât yet do corrections whilst looking down for a longer period, as it can be a bit disorienting, but the quick glance helps a lot in establishing where you are.
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Speaking of correctionsâthe grammatical kind that isâhere is the really corrected version of the Persepolis Problem read me.
A special thanks to @wheelsup_cavu for the proof read! 
Persepolis Mssion.pdf (182.1 KB)
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I see someone not only updated the brief but they went into a little more detail in that brief.
Sounds like a fun and challenging mission. 
Wheels
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Oooh Iâm very much looking forward to this. I also have the oilfield campaign to try as well at some point when someone peels me out of the hornet for 10 minutes
Oh dear!
dont forget youâre in a helicopter - everything thats spinning must continue to spin - or EVERYONE is going to have a bad day
one of the things our instructors were adamant about when we were learning all our emergencies, was that ANY chip light, Main Transmission, TR transmission, engine⊠it didnât matter, your entire reason for being from that point was to get that helo onto the ground in the most rapid & safest manner you could, autorotation profile was out the window, when things stop spinning there is no such thingâŠ
Get it on the ground, get it there yesterday! - youâre life IS depending on it!
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Taking a leaf out of @Freakâs book and getting the Spring Tension campaign underway. The first mission is mainly an orientation flight, but with a few high altitude landings in mountain river valleys. The weather was good, but I still found a couple of the landings âinterestingâ, considering being a few beers deep on a Saturday night. 
Taking off from home base:
We were not expecting any trouble but I still wanted to fire up the countermeasures system and blow out the cobwebs to make sure we were ready for anything.
The old Soviet spaceship cockpit feels like home.
Dropping in to one of the operating posts.
A shortcut? Youâre on!
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Thanks for filling in for me @Bearhedge!
Beautiful shots and aptly narrated.
I flew Mission 5 of Spring Tension last time, and totally forgot to take screenshots. Gosh I hated mission 3 (which is where I left the campaign last time), but I skipped it by putting lies in the logbook.lua. Iâm not sure what the consequences of that are in the virtual military world, but so far nobodyâs complained that I canât aim with this helicopter.
Missions 4 and 5 were a blast, Iâll try to dig up the old thread from years back when I started this campaign and try to remember to take some ugly screenshots (VR, Odyssey, 980Ti, I know, will look for upgrades)
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I still canât quite put the Hip down as fast as the Huey, but this combat zone landing went roughly as I wanted it to.
The Mi-28 was shot down by a SAM from the village (according to the storyline) so I popped a few flares on the way in and kept my speed up and energy high until the âbase legâ of the landing.
I was still about 10 meters higher than intended through the final approachâŠbut I managed to mostly control the airspeed and descent rate through the descending turn and hover transition, which felt good.
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