Virpil has setbacks. Bless them

Hardware & Tech Questions
1

Hey guys,
I ordered some items from Virpil in December. By now I am becoming impatient. Today I woke up to this email. I have to say, I feel guilty now. This is the real world and Sh**t happens. I really hope they have a good year. While not perfect, and I dont like everything they make, I sure do love the quality of the products i have received from them. I ordered pedals from them because I feel a need to support them. Love their grips, not so hot on their throttles.
I am sure a lot of you have similar sentiments and I wanted to share this email with you all.

Peace, my brothers.

"## Hi Mark!

We’re reaching out to provide an update on the pending orders with VIRPIL Controls. We have experienced some unfortunate delays with order processing and we wanted to shed some light onto the current situation.

We have just finished with the holiday season and are grateful for the incredible demand and support from the community! We have a huge number of orders to process and we are hiring and training additional production teams at our EU facility.

We have been working extremely hard behind the scenes to expand our production lines at our EU facility over this year, with the majority of our catalogue now being manufactured right here in Lithuania! Moving the production over to our new EU facility has been an incredible amount of work, but we are looking forward to a fantastic 2025 with the support of the VIRPIL community.

We have also experienced an unfortunate logistical setback; some of you may have heard about the tragic DHL cargo plane crash in Lithuania at the end of last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftair_Flight_5960). We have been informed that a significant quantity of components from our suppliers were aboard this plane which we’ve since been told are unfortunately not recoverable. We have re-ordered the required components to fulfil the current production needs.

Our support team is providing updated lead time estimates to all enquiries so please do not hesitate to contact us. Our warehouse teams are dispatching orders out everyday and are working around the clock to get all remaining orders out as fast as we can. We are actively working to cut down the current lead times as much as possible. We hugely appreciate everyone’s understanding and patience with us!

We’re looking forward to getting your new VIRPIL gear into your hands. Again, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us!

Happy Flying!

VIRPIL Controls Team"

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2

I ordered my collective and grip towards the end of last November. Knowing it was a back order I didn’t expect it before Christmas but sent a message to their support team at the start of this year and they got back to me within hours to let me know they had unprecedented demand and it would be shipped around mid January. It arrived last week (only took three days to get from Lithuania to Canberra :astonished: )

I impressed with the quality of the product itself and I will be happy to do business with them again.

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3

Well, that’s honestly a decent reason!

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4

A tragedy for sure. But it does bring to my cynical mind a story from the book “Chickenhawk” where squadrons would take advantage of accidents to account for supplies that had gone “missing”. One lost Huey was attributed to be carrying various payloads that, when totaled, equalled ten times the helicopter’s load limit.

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5

I really should add Chickenhawk to my reading list.

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6

Glad to hear you finally received your collective. Hopefully you are enjoying it as much as I have mine.

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7

Still early days. It took me a while to come up with an adequate mounting solution. The grip more than doubles the total length! I ended up modifying one of the spare/unused brackets for my NLR seat. Ideally I would like it to be about two inches lower and an inch closer to the seat
 first world problems.

On the plus side, the ‘counterweight’ is almost perfectly tuned and I only need the slightest amount of friction dialed in.

My only complaint is that even with the 30 degree limiter it is too much. It is a long lever arm, especially when using the ‘mission’ grip and 20 degrees would be plenty. I have seen chatter on the interwebs that Virpil are looking at it. An interim solution is to jerry rig some sort of external stop to limit the travel, but once again - first world problems.

It does make flying the Apache significantly easier and being able to map the buttons to their actual function (even if I doubt I will ever use the searchlight) makes it a heck of a lot easier for me to remember what they do.

Overall I am more than happy with the purchase

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8

REALLY GOOD BOOK. Enough Said.

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9

REALLY REALLY GOOD BOOK.

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10

I’m going to jump on this bandwagon.

REALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD BOOK. I must have read it at least four times.

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