Flying the Bell JetRanger 206B
Helicopter in FS98

by Rick Lee (click to send Email)

Helicopter over Manhattan

These instructions are useful for FS2000 also.

Note: Put the included STN files and VID files in your FS98 "Pilots" folder. Put the BGL files in your "Scenery" folder. When playing an FS98 recorded video, you must select the helicopter aircraft and the cockpit or spot view before starting the video. You can watch the video in Cockpit, Spot or Tower Views, but you can't change views after starting.

What a helicopter is and how it works

I'm not going to go into detail on how a helicopter works. I'm assuming that the reader has some knowledge of this. If you want in-depth information, I suggest you read The Art and Science of Flying Helicopters by Shawn Coyle. You can get this book easily by going to amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. I ordered it from the Barnes and Noble site and had it in three days. It's a very readable book and I highly recommend it.

Basically, the main rotor of the helicopter keeps the aircraft up by pushing air down. Changing the pitch of the main rotor blades gives the main rotor more or less lift. The pitch is changed by a control in the cockpit called the collective. This is a lever on the left side of the pilot (in choppers, the pilot sits on the right side) which he pulls up and down. Up for more lift, down for less. It can't get any more intuitive than that.

The huge torque of the rotor is counteracted by the tail rotor. If the tail rotor was not there, the fuselage would spin the opposite direction of the rotor. By changing the pitch of the tail rotor blades, you can increase or decrease the force of the tail rotor, thereby controlling the yaw of the fuselage. The pitch of the tail rotor is controlled by the pedals on the floor, similar to rudder pedals. Since there is no rudder on this helicopter, these are called the anti-torque pedals.

The pilot makes the plane move forward, backward, or sideways with the main joystick in his right hand. This joystick is called the cyclic. Moving the cyclic forward tilts the main rotor forward. Moving it to the left tilts the main rotor to the left, etc.

Controls

Flying the helicopter in FS98 (as in real life) is difficult under the best of circumstances. If you don't have a good set of controls, it will be much harder. Here is the way that I set up my controls:

Cyclic: For the cyclic, I use a ThrustMaster FLCS joystick. It's firmly attached to the desk with Velcro strips. A cyclic in a helicopter tilts the rotor disk to make the helicopter go forward, backward and side-to-side. In the photo below you can almost see the joystick. You can also see my fresnel lens attachment on my monitor. If you want more information on the fresnel lens (collimated display) device, see my web site at http://www.rickleephoto.com/rlcoll.htm 

Rick Lee with ThrustMaster FLCS and Fresnel Lens

Throttle: In a Bell JetRanger, as in most turbine-engine powered helicopters, the throttle is controlled via a governor. So you don't really need to waste a joystick axis on the throttle. This allows us to use what is normally the throttle axis for the helicopter's collective control.

Collective: This is the tricky bit. A helicopter pilot sits in the right-hand seat and the collective is to his left. It's a lever that is pulled up and down to increase or decrease the pitch of the rotor blades... increasing or decreasing lift. I use a ThrustMaster WCS2 throttle unit clamped to the side of my chair for this. I have reversed the action of this joystick axis in FS98's Custom Controls Menu so that I get more lift when I pull up and less when I push down. You can use a throttle built into your joystick, but I must tell you how much more intuitive it is to pull up on the collective for more lift, and to push down for less lift. You don't even have to think about it. See photos below:

ThrustMaster WCS2 throttle unit -- clamped to the chair

Operating the collective

Anti-Torque Pedals: In a helicopter, there are pedals on the floor similar to a fixed wing plane's rudder pedals. In a helicopter, there is no rudder (usually) so the pedals work the anti-torque rotor at the end of the boom on the back. Pushing left or right on the pedals changes the pitch of the rear rotor, making the helicopter yaw left and right. I use a set of ThrustMaster RCS rudder pedals for this purpose. I don't have a photo of the pedals handy. But there is nothing special about them except that I have screwed them to the floor. Naturally, it isn't necessary to screw them to the floor but you really use the pedals a lot when flying a helicopter… especially when hovering.

Joystick Setup: In your Custom Controls menu… in your joystick setup, set your Sensitivities to High and your Null Zones to Narrow. Some people without pedals who are using a Sidewinder joystick (with twist-action in place of pedals) report greater success using Low Sensitivity on the pedal axis.

Realism Setup: In your Aircraft menu, look in the realism menu and try setting the slider to easy. Calling this setting "easy" is rather silly. It's definitely not easy, but it does uncouple the torque from the yaw in the flight equations and make learning a little bit easier. (In FS2000, the Easy setting really is easy.  I don't recommend that you use this easy setting because it's so easy it's not much like flying a helicopter at all... and simulation is what this is all about)

Rick Lee at the controls

Frame rate

As I said before, controlling the helicopter is difficult under the best of circumstances. It is much easier with smooth frame rate because you really need to stay ahead of things. If you have choppy frame rate, you won't realize that you're getting out of balance until it's too late. A fraction of a second is too late. I find that I can't adequately control the helicopter with a frame rate of less than 13 frames per second. 15 fps is better. 20 fps is even better still. There is a very noticeable difference in controllability as you get closer to 20 fps. If it's less than 13 fps, I know that I'm in for trouble. Hit Shift ZZ to see your frame rate. Don't just shrug this off! If you can't manage to get smooth frame rate (by turning off features or using a smaller window) then I'd say give up… you're wasting your time with this.

I use FS98 on a Pentium 166. When I first got FS98, I was using an ordinary SVGA card and I had to turn off most of the scenery complexity, use 640x480 resolution, and even reduce the size of the scenery window to get my frame rate up over 13. See the photo below of that window setup.

Helicopter at Meigs with reduced window size for faster frame-rate.

Now that I have a new 3D accelerator card (STB Velocity 128) I can have a full screen 800x600 scenery window and I can even use the Virtual Cockpit which I love. I can turn on some more scenery detail, but I can't turn it all on in cities such as New York or Chicago. I plan to get a Pentium-II motherboard in the near future.  (I now have a Pentium II 350MHz machine with a Viper770 card.  This is great for FS98 at full screen and high resolution but it's still a little underpowered for FS2000.  I plan to upgrade to a Pentium III 600MHz for FS2000)

Setting up your views

I do not like the default setup of view windows when you select the helicopter in FS98. You need to be able to see the ground under you when landing or descending. This is why they put windows in the floor of helicopters after all. Assuming that we're using full screen instead of a reduced window for frame rate, here's the way I set it up. With the mouse, move the instrument panel all the way to the bottom left and resize it as small as you can and still read it… and extend the size of the view window out to full screen. Hit the minus key once to zoom out to 50%. If you aren't sure of your magnification, you can see your current magnification listed under the View Options menu.

Next, pan down with Shift-Enter. I pan down about 8 clicks so that the horizon line is approximately ¼-screen down from the top. Next, move the instrument panel over so that the left column of small dials is off the screen. I don't use those instruments anyway. (when using a hi-res screen, it may be possible to use all of the panel) Now the horizon is where you'd expect it in Flight Simulator, but you can look down to the right of the instrument panel and see the ground below you, just like in a real helicopter. See the FS98 situation file that I have included… Heli-Meigs.STN. It is extremely important when flying the helicopter that you know if your pitch attitude is up or down… even just a tiny bit up or down… so while the aircraft is sitting on the ground, take a grease pencil (or crayon or a bit of tape or whatever you have that will mark on the screen) and put a mark on the horizon in the center of the screen. This will act like the "4-dots" axis indicator. Too bad the axis-indicator does not stay with the horizon when you pan down. I find this to be a flaw in FS, thus making it necessary to mark on your monitor. With this mark in place, you'll be able to tell if your pitch attitude is up or down… even by a little bit. Some people use the mouse-pointer to mark the horizon line. This works but I find that I need to use the mouse too often to make this practical.

The big problem with resetting your views is that if you look at a right or left view (or whatever view) and come back to the front, the pan-down might be canceled out. I've programmed my ThrustMaster joystick to automatically put the pan-down clicks back in when I select the front view.

Getting Started Flying

Hovering is very, very difficult so I suggest that you do not start with trying to learn to hover. Start by learning forward flight.

All of my flying instructions will assume that you have no wind layers set up. The presence of wind will change everything. Save that for advanced training. Some people prefer to start with 10 or 20 knots of wind to make landing easier. You can try that if you want, landing into the wind is definitely easier, but you really need to train yourself to land in no wind as soon as possible.

Take off by pulling the collective all the way up. This "hot take-off" is not good practice… but it will keep you alive when you are first trying to fly. When you take off, pitch the nose down and keep it there…. But keep the pitch up enough so that you can keep your eye on the horizon. Keep the pitch down a little. This will make you fly forward and once your forward airspeed gets up to around 30 or 40 knots, the helicopter begins to fly more like a fixed wing aircraft. If you let the pitch axis go above the horizon, your speed will start to bleed off very quickly and pretty soon you'll get yourself into a hover situation and you'll crash. KEEP the pitch down. You have to concentrate on it. The more down your pitch angle is, the faster you'll fly. Start practicing flying at high speed and then go to lower and lower speeds. Practice slowing down by pulling the pitch angle up and lowering your collective and seeing how quickly it decelerates. Learn to use your pitch angle to control your speed and your collective to control your altitude.

Nose-down fast… nose-up slow.

Learn to keep one eye on the airspeed indicator whenever you are decelerating. It's real easy to get too slow before you realize it. If you haven't yet learned to hover, getting too slow means a crash.

After you fly around a while, you'll soon want to land. This is where you get into trouble.

Landing

Your first 8 or 10 thousand landing attempts will be crashes. Keep trying. A good landing is a landing from a hover. However, it's not entirely necessary to land from a hover. At first you might want to land with forward speed. You can land with a fairly significant amount of forward speed and this is MUCH easier than landing from a hover. You have to be traveling straight… with no sideways motion… use your pedals to keep yourself traveling straight… and you just ease it down on the skids and skid to a stop. It's simple. Try doing that with less and less forward speed and see if you can get to a point where you have only a little bit of forward speed when you touch down. See the video: skid landing.vid

Hovering

Hovering is the hardest thing you can do in a helicopter. Your hands and feet have to learn to be coordinated in ways that you never thought about before. It all has to become completely automatic. If you have to think about it, it's too late.

Let's talk first about ground-effect. When the helicopter gets close to the ground… say… about 10 feet or lower, it hits the "ground-effect cushion" and it behaves differently than when it is high in the air. Hovering on the ground-effect is a little easier than hovering in mid-air. It takes less power to hover on the cushion… and… when you are on the cushion, the collective also has a slightly different qualitative effect. In mid-air, if you are hovering with 90% torque, and you reduce the collective a touch, the aircraft will start sinking and continue to sink. If you are riding rather high on the ground-effect cushion at 70% torque and you reduce collective to 65%, you will sink but you'll stop sinking at a point somewhere lower on the cushion. It's like pushing the next floor down on an elevator.

It's slightly easier to hover on the cushion so take advantage of that. The JetRanger in FS98 hovers nicely on the ground cushion at between 65 and 70 percent of torque. When you lift off into a hover, watch the torque meter and establish it at 65% to 70% and then don't move it (assuming that you have a full or nearly full tank of fuel… the lower the fuel weight, the less torque needed). As long as you keep your horizontal speed down very low, you won't have to worry about your collective again. You can just air-taxi around on the cushion. But if you get too much speed, you will get more (translational) lift and you will start climbing.

When you get off the ground and start hovering, your primary task will be to keep the craft as level as possible at all times. Watch the horizon line to keep your bank angle as level as possible… watch your mark on your monitor to keep your pitch attitude as level as possible. This is your never-ending task. Once you get it level, it will not stay there by itself. The helicopter will, after a few seconds start to pitch or roll in one direction or another. You must make small corrections constantly to keep it level. Let me repeat that:

You must make small corrections to your pitch and bank constantly to keep it level

I'm amazed at the number of people who assume that the helicopter should just hang there by itself. If you want to taxi forward a bit in the hover, you only need to pitch down a tiny bit. It will not start moving forward right away. Wait for it. Be patient. If you get impatient, you'll pitch way down and then you'll start moving too fast and then very soon you're not in a hover any more.

Be very careful to avoid over-controlling. This is where I see most FS98 pilots make the biggest error in flying the JetRanger. Trying harder does not mean moving the stick more forcefully. Most of the time, you only need tiny control inputs to do what you want to do. Just nudge the joystick a little bit to make a correction. Note that there is a big lag in the time it takes your input to have any action. Wait for it. Nudge, wait… nudge, wait. Note here that all joystick axes must be perfectly calibrated. Go into slew mode to check this. If you move in any direction in slew mode without touching the controls, something is out of whack. You might need a bigger Null Zone.

People often ask me how to move about and how to stop when hovering. There isn't any steering wheel or brakes, that's for sure. Tilting the main rotor is the only control you have. Pitch it forward a little bit and you gently move in that direction. How do you stop? Pitch it back (nose up) and you stop. It's just that simple. You'll need to get level again to stay stopped, or you'll start moving backward. Learn attitude-flying. Your pitch and roll attitude is everything. People observing me fly sometimes comment that my control inputs don't seem to have anything to do with what the aircraft is doing. If I am trying to maintain a certain attitude, let's say I want to be flat in the pitch-axis but banked to the right just a little bit on the roll-axis. If at this time, the helicopter is wanting, of its own accord, to be banking way to the right, I'll be controlling back to the left in order to maintain my desired attitude of a slight right bank. So to the casual observer, it appears that the I'm controlling left to go right. You'll be fighting all over the place to maintain a certain attitude. It's not just a simple matter of "push left… go left".

When you are trying to hover, take into consideration that most control inputs will have unintended consequences. If you try to slide to the left by tilting the rotor a bit to the left, the craft (because of the vertical tail surface) will weathervane a bit and yaw to the left. You must counteract this yaw with a bit of right pedal. This type of cross-controlling is extremely common in the hovering situation. You'll find that you are cross-controlling almost continuously when trying to maintain a hover, and after a time it will become almost completely automatic. Let's say that you are in a hover and facing north. You want to swing the nose around to the south, so you hit the right pedal and start yawing around to the right. In addition to the yaw, the pedal action also causes the craft to bank/roll to the right a bit. You need to counteract this right-banking with a little left cyclic (joystick).

By the way, this rolling induced by yawing is not realistic. I've had many discussions with helicopter experts about this and the conclusion is that this is the one major flaw in the FS98 helicopter model. When yawing in a hover, it's not difficult to counteract this rolling with opposite cyclic. I sometimes even pre-bank a bit in the opposite direction when doing a tail-turn (yawing in hover). The worst example of this tendency is yawing induced by the tail-surface when flying backward. Naturally, the vertical tail surfaces on the helicopter will make the craft want to weathervane around and point in the direction of travel (just like a fixed-wing aircraft tail). This is normal behavior for the helicopter. However, in FS98, along with the weathervane-yawing, comes the unrealistic rolling. The helicopter should simply turn around level on its center of gravity, but the FS98 model will turn and lunge violently on the roll axis also. This can be fatal when close to the ground. This makes backwards flying extremely difficult… but it's not impossible. (This roll-with-yaw flaw is fixed in FS2000)  I've included a video of a reverse take-off to demonstrate. See reverse-takeoff.vid. It's difficult, so you must be very diligent on the pedals to keep the tail steady… heavy pressure will be needed… and some roll input on the cyclic will be needed also. Consider this a very advanced maneuver. In the early stages of your training, simply try to avoid flying backwards. Always hover on a surface with lots of fine texture so you can easily tell if you are moving backwards. If you sense you are moving backwards, immediately point the nose down and apply some collective to stop the rearward movement. The Meigs tarmac area is not good for hovering. The texture is too coarse. Try hovering practice on the Meigs runway, or at another airport… or even better, on top deck of the USS Carl Vinson. 

Occasionally, you will get yourself into a situation where you've got way too much bank in one direction and the cyclic fails you in this situation. You move the stick as hard as you can in the opposite direction but it's not enough to right the craft. At this point, add some opposite pedal and see how quickly the craft rights itself. It will yaw too, but it'll get you out of that fatal bank. This is, I assume, taking advantage of the unrealistic roll/yaw coupling… so be warned, this technique may fail you if and when the flight model is improved.

Don't be afraid to use your pedals! You will be working the pedals almost continually when hovering. Many effects will come into play which will try to turn your heading in some direction other than what you intend. Weathervaning, torque or whatever will constantly affect your yaw position. You must continually work the pedals to keep your nose pointed where you want it pointed.

When you are able to hover a bit, you'll want to start doing proper take-offs instead of the full-collective hot take-offs you probably have been doing. Lift off the ground into a ground-effect hover and then turn to the direction you want to go. Pitch the nose down and pick up some forward speed. As your speed increases, so will your lift. You will start to rise with no extra collective applied. (see the FS98 recorded video I have included called takeoff.vid)

As you get better, start doing all of your flying without putting the torque meter in the red or even in the yellow. At first this will seem impossible but when you start flying this way, your flying will start to look more professional and less desperate.

As I said before, a good landing is a soft descent from a hover rather than just plopping it down from full altitude, or skidding it in with excess forward speed. When you are making your approach to a landing site, come down and establish a ground-effect hover near where you actually want to land but just back from it. When you get established in the hover and you're feeling pretty stable, gently ease your way forward toward your intended landing site… then gradually and gently let it down as you get very close to it. It's best to land with the skids perfectly, flat… but it's difficult.. and if you have to choose between hitting the front of the skids or the back of the skids… it's much better to touch the front first. So as you get real close to touching (this is much more difficult to judge in a sim than in the real world) ease the nose down just a bit so that you'll touch the skids front-first. It's also better to have a little forward speed rather than backward speed so pitching down at the moment of impact is doubly safe.

When you hear the sound of the skids touching, it's tempting to slam the collective down to "lock" the craft onto the ground. However, this is dangerous and if you have some bank angle when you slam it down, you can easily tip the helicopter over. When you hear the touch, just keep easing the collective down very slowly until you have bottomed it out and then you should find that you are safely down. I recommend that you watch every single landing (or landing attempt) in Instant Replay - Spot View. This will teach you a lot about what you are actually doing as opposed to what you thought you were doing. "I was 10 feet off the ground at that point?? I thought I was 2 feet off the ground!" See the FS98 recorded video that I have included called landing.vid.

Also check out vinson underdeck.vid . This is my "show-off" video. Flying inside the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is a great place to practice. It's a confined space so there's no slop allowed. If you get into trouble, you can't just go up a few hundred feet and try it again. I think I learned more flying inside that carrier than anywhere else. The around the tower.vid demonstrates yaw control by flying around the Meigs control tower while keeping the nose pointed at the tower. See no pedals.vid for an example of flying the helicopter without using the pedals at all.

Included with this package are three oil rigs with helipads! They are great to land the helicopter on. Special thanks to Manfred Moldenhauer (100117.1465@compuserve.com) of Germany for these. Just put the BGL files in your Scenery directory. They are located in the Gulf of Mexico, the Cook Inlet of Alaska, and the North Sea between Norway and the Shetland Islands. To reach them, just locate yourself at Galliano, Louisiana and fly south toward the 444 NDB on the rig… or fly west from Anchorage, Alaska toward the same NDB… or west from Bergen, Norway till you pick up the 444 NDB. The frame rate is MUCH smoother in the Gulf of Mexico. When you need a real challenge, fly to the oil rig in the dead of night in heavy weather with very low visibility!

© 1997 Rick Lee http://www.rickleephoto.com

Former sysop, CompuServe's FSFORUM and MSN's Flight Simulator Forum.

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