I can go up, and I can go down, going forwards is hard, even with the missions. How do you build up speed in a helicopter?

Once you gain some altitude you pitch forward to gain forward momentum. However, when you pitch forward the helicopter will want to loose altitude so you will need to add more collective/autothrottle to increase lift. You just need to practice to get the feel of it. Just remember you will be constantly "flying" a helicopter.

A helicopter has four basic controls, the cyclic (that's the main joystick, which controls the direction in which the rotor disk applies thrust), a collective pitch lever (that's the lever down by your side in the same place as a handbrake on a car and that applies both pitch to the rotor blades as well as the RPM, and it does those two things collectively, hence the name), then there's the tail rotor pedals (these work the same as the rudder pedals a fixed wing aircraft, but they do so by either adding to, or subtracting from the torque of the main rotor blades, so they can be used to turn either way regardless of airspeed).To fly a chopper, you basically have to apply power to the rotor blades (effectively this is the airspeed of your rotary wings), and then also apply pitch to the blades to increase their angle of attack so that you will lift off (akin to pulling back on the stick in a fixed wing aircraft). When these are sufficient, the chopper will rise off the deck (it will also turn in the opposite direction to the rotor blades the moment it lifts off unless you counter this with some pedal). Once in the air, you have to apply some of your excess lift in the direction you want to go, and that's what the cyclic (joystick) is for. Effectively this can be thought of as tilting the rotor disk in the direction you want to go, and is achieved by the rotor blades changing their pitch as they spin around in correlation to how you move the cyclic, in order to apply more of the lift the main rotors are generating into a specific lateral direction, which makes you go the way you are tilting the cyclic. Tilt it more and you will start to gain more speed.So, you throttle up, apply some pitch, and then push the stick in the direction you want to go. However, this is where it gets tricky, because when you apply some directional force, it removes some of the lift vector and uses it to apply lateral thrust, so you have to compensate for that by either applying more power or more blade pitch, and usually both, which is why there is a collective pitch lever that can also increase power as well as pitch (in a real chopper the collective pitch lever incorporates a a twist throttle in the handle, similar to the throttle on a motorcycle, in FS, it is normally just the throttle control that does both things unless you faff around with the settings of FS).But, there is also something else to consider, and that is translational lift. Translational lift is caused by the movement of a chopper in any given direction, which effectively increases the airflow over the rotor blades that are moving forwards through the air, so when a chopper starts to move, it generates more lift, which is why you often see helicopters rise to a hover, tilt slightly and pick up speed low over the ground before setting off on a flight (they are picking up translational lift). Also, you have to keep in mind that the airflow that is deflected downwards from a rotor disk can create the effect of the chopper riding on a cushion of air too, (i.e this is basically ground effect, and it varies with each chopper type, from minimal to significant, depending on which chopper it is).When it comes to landing, the thing you want to watch out for is a vortex ring, which is very dangerous. This is when you are using a lot of power but are not in translational lift and descending. Essentially, the air your rotor blades are pushing down to create lift goes into a rotor effect, pushing out and then back up and over the blades and it comes down back through the rotor disk, cancelling out much of the lift you would normally be generating. In extreme circumstances, this will stall the rotor blades and you will drop out of the sky like a stone, so the rule here is, don't descend too fast with a lot of power on and not much forward speed when coming in for a landing.Keep in mind too that performance of choppers is very dependent on the ambient temperature. In high temperatures, just as with fixed wing aircraft, they will generate less lift, since the air the engine can use is thinner and that also means the blades have less air to shift too, meaning there will be less potential lift available.Note that some of this stuff is slightly simplified in FSX, and choppers in general were 'dumbed down' a bit from how they used to be in earlier versions of FS, in order to compensate for the lack of feel you get from a PC desktop simulation. You might want to check out this website for more info on simulated helicopter flight: http://www.hovercontrol.com/Slow, small movements and corrections, and mastering simple moves first, is the key to sussing out choppers in FS. Also, make sure you remove some fuel too, learning how to fly the choppers in FS with a full fuel load will make life unnecessarily hard for you.You may also want to try using a Playstation-type controller, and assigning the two joypads to control stuff, as this is a bit more like the controls of a real chopper in a lot of respects.Hope that helps a bit - Al