Hi,I use a saitek joystick and throttle for my FS9 flying and when i fly the planes the controls work fine and the rudder is calibrated to make the plane travel in a straight line.But when I get in a helicopter and start increasing the throttle, the heli starts to rotate as if the rudder is making it turn left. This rotation continues until I rudder right and then the heli rotates in the opposite direction until I release and it goes back to the left. Eventually this spinning in uncontrollable and the heli crashes to the ground !!Have I got my system configured incorrectly for helis or are they really unflyable in FS9?Thanks

Don't worry, your system is configured correctly, that's what helicopters do if you don't control them properly, and they are a lot harder to fly than fixed wing aeroplanes, so don't get frustrated if you are not instantly brilliant at flying them - nobody is. Here's what is happening...As you lift off in your helicopter, with the landing skids no longer in contact with the ground, there is nothing to prevent the body of the helicopter turning in the opposite direction to the way the main rotor is turning. This is because what you have is an engine suspended in the air, and just as the engine turns the rotor blades one way, it will want to turn the body of the helicopter the other way. The reason it turns the rotor blades faster than the body of the chopper, is because the body of the chopper has a larger mass. So, you have to use the tail rotor to apply some thrust in order to counteract that turning force, which is what the tail rotor is for. The tail rotor only needs to be small to counteract the turning force of the main rotor because it is at the end of the tailboom, thus it acts as a lever, which multiplies the force it exerts.But what you have to do is give the tail rotor quite a bit of power to stop the the turning motion (by twisting your rudder). Doing that alters the angle of the tail rotor blades, and on some helicopters it also increases the tail rotor's RPM. When you've stopped the turning motion, you should then ease off your rudder a bit so that you are constantly applying only the correct amount of tail rotor thrust to cancel out the turning motion (or be ready for it straight away by applying some tail rotor thrust before you lift off). Whenever you apply more power to the main rotor, you'll have to adjust the tail rotor thrust to ensure you are giving it just the right amount of thrust to cancel out the turning motion. Whenever you reduce power to the main rotor, you'll have to reduce the amount of rudder correction you are making. That's also your means of turning the chopper when you want to, by adding or subtracting a little bit of 'rudder'.Unfortunately, that's one of the problems with trying to fly the helicopter using a joystick with a twist action for the rudder, since the tail rotor is effectively your rudder in a helicopter as well as being the means to keep the thing in a straight line. So with a twist joystick, you are always going to have to apply some 'rudder' to keep a chopper going straight, which is quite hard, especially when you are not used to it. It can be done and mastered with a bit of practice, but you will find that it is easier with a set of rudder pedals, because you will then have a set of controls independent of the joystick with which to control the torque. That is of course what real choppers have. But even then you will still not have it as easy as the pilot of a real helicopter does, because a real chopper has another control - the collective pitch lever.The joystick in a real chopper (called the cyclic), controls the direction in which the main rotor disc is applying its force, which is does by constantly shifting the angle of attack of the rotor blades as they spin around in a circle. Effectively, whichever direction you move the cyclic, that's the direction the chopper moves in (which is more or less how your joystick will be working in FS). Down by the pilot's side there is also a Collective Pitch Lever (which looks like a handbrake on car). As you pull that up, it increases the pitch angle of the main rotor blade, giving it more lift, as you lower it, it reduces the blade angle and the lift, so on a real chopper, you can control the rise and fall without adding more power to the main rotor. The collective pitch lever also has a twist grip throttle on its end where you hold it, which works the same way as the twist throttle on a motorcycle (except that it also has a friction lock on it that you can engage to set specific throttle settings. The Cyclic, Collective Pitch, and Tail Rotor Pedals in a real helicopter means that you have independent controls for all the power, torque and pitch settings, whereas in FS you don't have that. That's why it is harder to master in FS. But there is something you can do about it...Here's an interesting one to try: Get a 'playstation type' joypad contrroller and plug it into your PC. If you assign the left joypad thumbstick to control the throttle with up and down, and the tail rotor with left and right, and then assign the right thumbstick to control the cyclic (normal joystick) movements, you will have controls which are much more similar to a real helicopters level of control. If you do that, you'll find it much easier to fly. Even a cheap ten quid joypad control will do the job well. When you have all that under control, you will find that as you lift off in a chopper, two interesting things happen: when it is low to the ground, you don't need as much power to get it to fly, because it rides on the air bouncing up from the ground a little bit (this is called ground effect, and fixed wing aeroplanes do that too). Also, as you start moving forwards in a helicopter, the rotor blades gain more lift just like a fixed wing plane does, so that also means you can reduce the throttle a bit (this is called translational lift). That's why you often see choppers tilt forwards a lot as they lift off - it is so they can get moving forwards quickly by applying a lot of power in the direction they want to go, and once that happens, they tend to flatten off.Incidentally, the difficulties with torque is actually true of many powerful fixed wing aircraft too, such as big prop fighter planes like the Spitfire and Mustang, where the torque from the propeller, the propwash on the rudder and the gyroscopic effects of the propeller all act to make the thing turn and pitch in odd directions. In fact, on very powerful prop planes, if you apply the power to quickly and are not ready for it, the aircraft can roll so quickly in the opposite direction to the way the propeller is turning, that it can actually put one of the wings beyond the stall angle of attack, and create what is called a 'torque stall'.Hope that helps a bit.Al