You guys. Some of our own have been known to build stuff. Some of that stuff is known to be WTFawesome. This thing @TeTeT, @EightBall and mayhaps some others (Please correct if wrong) built is too awesome not to have its own thread.
I just installed and flew this for a bit, and the flight model feels like the OH-58D, except even quicker, lighter. Insane little mother beast. Wild fun!
It does feel quite realistic too, what I would expect of such a small and powerful little chopper. The graphics are quite perfect for externals and right up to par for a good mod for internals.
What a thing. Why does this baby not get more hype?! HYPE!
Wow! This is a different machine entirely from the one I downloaded in May. Itās a joy to fly. I need to delve deeper but hereās what Iāve got after 15 minutes:
Hovers about like I would expect. Itās a tad less unstable than an R22 or R44. Very similar to a Hughes/Schwitzer 269/300. Less stable/twitchier than the Agusta 109. Thatās as accurate as I can get as it is the entirety of my experience. But it also feels accurately unstable in hover. By that I mean that it isnāt overly hard. Whereas before it was like someone said to themselves, āI donāt fly helicopters but I heard that they are hard so I am going to script some instability into this thing.ā This was my head-cannon for the early Gazelle (No longer. The Gazelle is pretty well dialed in today).
Maneuvers just as I would imagine. That little machine was an extension of the pilot and this model is honest to that reputation. You feel like you can fly circles around a hummingbird.
I have some doubts however. It is way too powerful. I donāt know what the I-didnāt-touch-anything startup weight is. Probably single pilot and 1/2 fuel. Certainly not max gross. But even at a very light one-up weight on a standard day, youāre not going to hit 120 knots at 40% torque (EDITED, misread gauge). It might have a turbine, but it is a tiny 300+ HP Lycoming. A good motor, sure. NOT a powerful one.
The other is the drag curve. In a normal helicopter you can lift up to skids very light (say, simulating a hot heavy day where you donāt have the power available to hover). You then nudge forward and slowly accelerate with the skids gently skipping on the asphalt. At 12-20 knots the efficiencies of ETL kick in and you start to climb with no added power. Or conversely you can push the cyclic forward and continue to accelerate in ground effect. Either way, the advantage will end at some speed. In my very limited experience, that speed is 40-50 knots, depending on the machine. In this scenario, the OH-6 will happily accelerate to 90 knots. It seems to recognize ETL fine, just not drag. The reverse is also true. From 90, you can slow and the need to add power will be constant as you do so. In a real helicopter, the need to add power during a gentle deceleration at speed is not noticeable until decelerating through ETL, at which point you need a lot.
Even though those two ādoubtsā paragraphs are bigger than the āI love itā paragraphs, please donāt misunderstand. I love it. The doubts mentioned donāt detract from it flying like a helicopter. They do make us, as pilots, probably more god-like than a real little bird was capable of doing.
Itās pretty cool actually. And quite dramatic in a helicopter. A rotor system in a no-wind hover, or a system drifting with the wind, is chopping through air that is already descending. The air is doing so for the very reason that the system is sucking that air down. Once the system translates fast enough in a given direction, it begins to meet unaccelerated air, giving it āfreeā added downward thrust.
Iāll add that the Mi8 has a nice audible rumble that matches what many (most?) helicopters experience during ETL, usually without the noise. If you are doing a steep approach, say 15deg or more, the risk of VRS increases. So the mantra is āride the rumbleā. If you can feel it, your chance of a VRS encounter regardless of vertical speed is near nil.
In reality ETL is a reward system that promotes a natural way of flying, with forward speed, instead of the unholy and unnatural floating in the air, in much the same way that bricks donāt, that helicopters tend to do.
It is a fun little chopper, I can see how itās maybe overdoing the power. Maybe some of the inefficiencies in power transmission are not modelled or something? Huey was stupidly overpowered for a bit too after a rework some time ago.
I love how this thing flies however. Like the man said, running rings round a hummingbird. It also made me better at other choppers strangely. Its so easy to take into a hover and somehow I can replicate that in the much bigger and heavier apache.
Next fight club weāre all in eggs with miniguns, better believe it baby!
Makes sense. Casmo was on a recent Mover and Gonky pod riffing about a bunch of interesting stuff. He was diplomatic and careful to emphasize what he didnāt know when he pointed out a slew of issues Apache pilots who grew up on the Lakota are having just hovering. Hovering is not generally a smart thing to do in an Apache. It gets you an RPG in the face. But in peacetime pilots spend a lot of time hovering and they arenāt as good at it as pilots once were. Older trainers required footwork and gave budding pilots a set of organic skills that, over time, might get dulled but never go away. He was careful not to trash the Lakota. Budding pilots also needed early exposure to technology and automation and instrumentation that the 206 lacked. But the pendulum had to swing somewhere. And stick and rudder weakness is where it swung.
Yep, that show made one heckuva impression on my young brain. A presidential candidate recently praised Arnold Palmer for the size of a certain body part. Like now, as a teenager Iād rather not know and anyway would not care. What impressed me most about Arnold Palmer was that he inspected his golf courses with his very own MD500E.
