That’s a great observation, @chipwich. I figured I was suffering just because I was flying with a gamepad. One of the great joys of flying is that moment when the skids get light. It’s where you know pretty well exactly where to position the cyclic for a nice level takeoff. It’s also where you figure out exactly how much pedal that’s required for torque and wind. But MSFS helicopters pretty well just jump off, and then, mysteriously, settle back unless a substantial amount if collective is pulled, throwing off the pedal input. So the liftoff, which should be one of the highlights of the flight, becomes a bit of a pisser. Ten thousand helicopter pilots (both real and virtual) are complaining so they’ll get it right. I hope.
2 Likes
Thanks. I edited my post replacing “power” with “collective”. Duh. You caught my drift regardless. The other related behavior that I notice is during approach to land. When you transition to what initially feels like ground effect and think that you are in a stable hover, and then the aircraft begins to sink. It must be a big challenge to program a helicopter FM. So many variables affecting flight.
10k out of 10M MSFS pilots !? … not bad 
did few hops.
was bit frustrated with the controller setup initially. for some reason I saw my PS5 twice in the controllers menu and had to set just one of them while they looked identically. strange. maybe Steam thing.
but in general I have to say helos in MSFS are fun. much better than FSX, hands down 
in more detail now.
sure the unstucking of helos from ground is really too much and should be corrected. xplane has this part much better simulated.
my feel for ground effect is quite tricky both in MSFS and XP I would say. maybe its just me and my lack of proper controllers. never flew XP or MSFS with dedicated collective. previously I used X56 throttle now PS5 thumbstick. so there is that.
but describing LZ approach : one should initially apply aft cyclic to decrease forward speed while decreasing rotor pitch to prevent ascending. then, as the speed reaches almost zero, apply forward cyclic while increasing rotor pitch to prevent descending as the rotor disc is now in hover and is less effective than in forward flight. plus oc appropriate antitorque pedal input.
thats one important detail. while hover in ground effect is much more efficient than out of ground effect at the same time hover is much less efficient than forward flight. here some explanation from the webz :
Translational lift is improved rotor efficiency resulting from directional flight in a helicopter. Translation is the conversion from the hover to forward flight. As undisturbed air enters the rotor system horizontally, turbulence and vortices created by hovering flight are left behind and the flow of air becomes more horizontal. The efficiency of the hovering rotor system is greatly improved with each knot of airspeed gained by horizontal movement of the aircraft or wind speed.
[one small note here : “turbulence and vortices created by hovering flight”. these turbulent flows can affect collective input. and these turbulent flows can be affected also by the cyclic input. so can happen that one is in stable hover with constant collective input but the aircraft can start to sink because cyclic or some other horizontal air flow disturbed the stable situation. and there are constant changes to all the variables in flight. so stable hover is achieved only with constant controls input including collective.]
in XP I have the feeling that I dont have enough resolution in my collective axis to prevent initial ballooning while in MSFS I have the feeling that I need too much collective to prevent sinking in the later part.
it doesnt mean that one or the other have it wrong. it just means that one need to get used to it. at least I will have to with my cheap controllers.
did also flight in EC135. apart from the UI category correction there is not much changed. the new helo flight modeling affects also this bird what is obvious from the rotor torque effect now much more pronounced. but it still relays on the old controller scheme. plus it feels like some kind of SAS is in action. and I am sure I had ‘Advanced’ set on the tablet and AP was off. but maybe I missed something obvious.
seems like the devs did just the necessary. I guess they are spending their dev time on the EC145 instead. but I dont own that one so I am unable to compare these two birds.
and one shot for the atmosphere 
5 Likes
FSLTL TRAFFIC UPDATE!
- XMAS PRESENT TO THE FSLTL COMMUNITY
THIS IS A BIG, WIDE IMPACT UPDATE AND WILL FORCE A FULL PACKAGE DOWNLOAD
A huge amount of work has gone into this update by the whole team. We hope to offer much more frequent (smaller!) updates from now on.
New Models - Embraer 190 and 170 - Airbus A380-800 - Airbus A220-300 - Bombardier CRJ700 - Boeing 737 / 738 Freighter
New Liveries - 250+ new liveries bringing the total to almost 1400
- Details at Liveries – FSLTL – FS Live Traffic Liveries Focus on filling out missing major airlines - Adding in some carriers for regions that had very few liveries like China
Pack Wide Improvements - Improved contrails - Fixed issue of permanent contrails on multiplayer aircraft - A320 family now have multiple engine sounds (CFM/IAE)
-
Fixed engine fan animations always playing - Minor sound improvements, idle and taxi sounds have a bit more ‘body’ (once SU11 AI sound issue fully fixed by Asobo)
-
Fixed broken shadows on some models
-
Texture fixes, removed WiFi domes etc. - Takeoff acceleration tweaks
-
Added suppression of generic airliners and added a ‘Generic’ FSLTL A20N when using default MSFS live traffic
We appreciate all the positive support we have received since launch and will continue to make FSLTL better in 2023. But for now we are going to take a break to enjoy the holiday season and we hope you have a good end to 2022 too!
4 Likes
HEADS-UP! INIBUILDS NEW P-40: ONE DAY HOLIDAY SALE $9.74 USD
1 Like
didnt want to spend any more money this year for airplane addons but this seems to be must have module at that price point
1 Like
Oooh! A Jet Ranger!
2 Likes
hopefully it will be reasonably priced this time. I consider their Bell47 quite pricey for what it offers.
It says $37.95, so a few dollars more.
Cowan Sims are comin to MSFS with their full stable of helos so we will see some healthy competition in near feature
4 Likes
Niiiice!!
That means a MD 500 too, right?
1 Like
FROM THE FSLTL DISCORD: FINAL 2022 UPDATE!
@everyone, 2 patch builds available in FBW installer to round out the year. We found a few issues in the recently released base pack update and it also raised a couple of things that could be improved in the injector. This really is the final change for 2022!
Base Models Patch 1.1.1
-
Fixes to door placement textures on all E170s
-
E170 UAL livery accidentally had DAL texture in folder - now fixed
-
UAE / QTR A388 Arabic lettering direction fixed
-
Contrails use a unique GUID to prevent interference with other packages / default effects
-
Registrations for ‘special’ liveries added where they had been lost e.g. AAL retro specials allowing accurate injector match
-
E170 ASA paint for E75L fallback, E190 AZU paint for E195 fallback.
-
New BER, BEL, ANG, APG, CXI, FBA, HBH paints
-
ICAO match for JLJ e-jets changed to JAL to match FR24
Traffic Injector 1.3.4
-
Fix for user profile names that contain multi-byte chars like Ø
-
Re-worked model matching to improve handling of operators to airlines matches post e-jet additions
-
Alter the ATC callsign update code so that the correct operator is used, this does not kick in until the aircraft takes off due to MSFS bug (so you might hear Brickyard during taxi which becomes SkyWest on take off)
-
Add a fix for the injector crashing with invalid links in community folder, which can be common using tools like Addon linker.
With the holiday season around the corner, support on the discord channel will be on a best-efforts basis. As a free product, we need time with our families to recharge as much as anyone else!
So take the time to read the FAQs and user guide to support yourself during this time!
Released! It looks really nice, I doubt I’ll be able to resist (edit: I couldn’t…). It even comes with some addons like a spraying kit and a nose mounted cineflex camera which should be usable in a future update. Not sure how usable but it’s pretty neat.
If I remember correctly, yes that’s the plan.
3 Likes
2 Likes
Global AI Ship Traffic MSFS - GAIST Ultra Version 3 Released
This is Version 3.0 of the Global AI Ship Traffic Ultra. More than 400 new ships have been added since last version bringing the number of unique ship models close to 900 and the number of ships including repaints close to 1800. The route coverage has been expanded increasing traffic density though focus is as usual to have a diverse ship traffic according to what you could see in each region. To reduce load on computer systems, the ship routes have in this version been included as separate regional packages, so you only need to install the routes in the area where you intend to fly. Also the ship models have been prepared to work with a future Real Time Version of the project under development.
https://flightsim.to/file/9529/global-ai-ship-traffic-msfs-v1
4 Likes
Looks pretty nice!
5 Likes
NEW BETA UPDATE
1 Like
This is an interesting airplane that turned up on the marketplace this week… the Farman F60 Goliath by RedWing.
The F60 was first designed as a bomber towards the end of WW1 but it didn’t fly until a few months after the war ended. The design was then modified into an airliner.
The aircraft is a little rough around the edges in it’s present state but already has some really nice features such as animated ground crew and passengers. Instrumentation is all nicely done too.
At $30 it might seem a little expensive at first glance, but there is a lot under the surface here.
With the cargo version, you can also do a mail drop and pickup if you are at one of Redwing’s 1935 series airports (I have Croyden and just picked up Le Bourget)
The pickup point is between the two flagpoles… The red chevrons, followed by the triangle lead you in to the pickup point.
Downwind with the hook lowered…
On this pass I missed the wire. I haven’t tried it in VR yet, but the forward visibility over the nose isn’t great…
On the subsequent pass I snagged the wire. You can see the mail bag below and behind the airplane
This is a pretty neat feature. You can also drop mail bags, the target area being marked as a bullseye circle just beyond the pickup poles… I haven’t seen any animation of the bag dropping, but you are told by your flight engineer when the bag is on the ground. If it is out of the prescribed drop zone then you are informed that the bag and its contents are lost.
So, it’s not an airplane I knew anything about, and certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like it so far.
15 Likes
JUST A HEADS-UP ON NEW(ISH) COMPATIBILITY BETWEEN MSFS FLIGHT PLANNER AND THE FBW A320
(Spotted on the FBW Facebook Page)
Jan 12 at 12:33PM
We fixed all known issues with MSFS World Map flight plan (.pln) imports in the latest Development Version, which were:
Order of imported waypoints was wrong
Waypoints were missing (not imported)
You can set “Sync MSFS Flight Plan” to “Load Only” or “Save” in the EFB to enable it.
See here for more information: https://docs.flybywiresim.com/…/featur…/flight-planning/
We’d still recommend using SimBrief to import flight plans into the A32NX MCDU. But for all of you who prefer the MSFS World Map for flight planning, feel free to try it.
FSLTL TRAFFIC UPDATE
whakamolenz — Today at 2:48 AM
@everyone Welcome to 2023 and our next 2 patch builds available in FBW installer.
Base Models 1.1.2
-
Regional operator changes to provide better matching and callsign allocation
-
Fixes an issue with DH8C texture bleed
-
FSLTL effects suite added to AT75 / AT76 / DH8C /DH8D
-
Flight model tweaks for E170 / E190 / B737 / A20N / A21N
-
Callsign fixes for DTR, RYR
-
MD11F FDX path fix
-
Clean up NAN / NOZ duplication
-
Variable length contrails
-
New Liveries
-
A20N - AAN-Oasis VA, VOC-Volaris Costa Rica
-
A319 - TBA-Tibet, VOC-Volaris Costa Rica
-
A320 - BMA-British Midland, CRK-Hong Kong Airlines, TBA-Tibet
-
A321 - ART-Smart Lynx, HKE-HK Express
-
A333 - CRK-Hong Kong Airlines
-
AT75 - CAV-CalmAir
-
AT76 - CCM-Air Corsica, GUY-air Antilles
-
B737 - AAN-Oasis VA, ADO-Air Do
-
B738 - ANG-Air Niugini, HGB-Greater Bay, GHN-Air Ghana, CND-Corendon Dutch, KMI-K-Mile, MON-Monarch, SWT-Swiftair
-
B748 - AAN-Oasis VA
-
B789 - AAN-Oasis VA
-
DH8D - ANG-Air Niugini
-
E170 - AAL-American
-
E190 - OAW-Helvetic, GER-German Airways
-
A388 - ETD-Etihad Airways
Traffic Injector 1.3.5
-
Independently adjust the insert radius for on ground vs in air traffic both by config file and in toolbar
-
Further improvements around model matching of operator flights
-
Changed the removal distance to be 10km more than the insert radius setting rather than fixed at 200km
-
Lowered the max spawn radius to be 150km for both in air and on ground
-
Fixes to help reduce the amount of ‘Removed by MSFS Traffic Engine’ issues
-
Fixed the ‘stuck’ removal process and allowed it to remove those stuck in pushback, 120secs or more secs is a good setting
-
Config file is now pretty formatted
-
VGHS airport missing - fixed
-
Resetting traffic via the toolbar would double up the number of static being used at an airport - fixed
Read the FAQs and user guide before raising support queries.
4 Likes