just a short story of my Helicopter flying in the sim - what I was doing was pick a city sorta at random - then go potter about & find all kinds of amazing things

well I have a friend who was a professor @ a university in Jakarta for 10 years & he gave me the address of his house & the uni he taught at - well what a heap of fun using google maps, little nav map etc & locating a landmark to start with & acually finding both places & taking screen shots of them - he recognised both the street & the uni - that toook me about 2 nights of work

I have another friend who did a voyage to the UK from Oz & when he stopped off in Cape Town he walked about & found a very nice park - that was fun finding as well - next he said they had 2 refueling stops up the west coast of Africa - the first was Luderitz (never heard of it before) - so I went to the airstrip (about 5nm out of town) with live Wx - followed the road into town (very bumpy ride & 40+ Celsius) found the dock & downtown - now here is why I just love 2024 - I found an 'Easter Egg' @ the dock - just a fun discovery

Anyhow up to Walvis Bay (knew about that from my Navy days) did the same - took screen shots for him - now this is where 2024 sometimes makes you ponder the universe etc - flew back to the airstrip taxied to the hard standing & what should be parked there? a Navion equipped with Ski gear!! in the middle of a bloody great desert!!

As I said just great fun exploring all those cities you very rarely see

On 1/25/2026 at 7:59 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

Whatever keeps you trying is what you should do!

The biggest challenge in flying helos is to realize that over-controlling is the source of most problems. 

When hovering, your movements on the stick should be measured in millimeters or eighths of an inch at most.

this is mostly caused by the extremely short gaming control sticks most of us have, whereas most IRL helo control (cyclic) sticks are quite long  

conversely, rudder pedal inputs can be quite large when hovering or esp during speed changes. 

a huge help for this is to significantly increase your Extremity Dead Zone for both Cyclic axes in Control settings:

once in the Cyclic Lat/Long, go to Tweak Action Curve,

set both Sensitivities to 0

Set Extremity Dead Zone to around 0.2. this can be adjusted higher to make it easier while you learn, so experiment!

As with most other addons, youll find that you want to fine tune this on a per addon basis  

Also VERY important to set and use the SET Helicopter Force Trim Release Button control. It allows you to trim out stick deflection forces so you can let your spring-centered joystick sit at center.

AND to complement it, also set the Rotor Trim Reset to instantly undo the above (it WILL save you sooner or later 😉)

Further, many of the helos support the standard trim controls, but only use them to fine tune once you’ve set using Force Trim above.

Finally, helos will, to a much greater degree than fixed wing, need more or less constant re-trimming on all 3 axes any time any setting is adjusted. It sounds exhausting at first, but it becomes second nature  

When I was first starting out, I quickly got frustrated.

My breakthrough came after setting aside about 30 mins to do nothing more than hover taxi around an airfield.

SMALL movements, and stay AHEAD of the controls (helos have significant momentum).

🤙

 

Many thanks for all that advice and tips. I was going to try adjusting my control sensitivities so I will start with your recommendations. I have a TM16000 and I have seen people say the centering spring is too strong. There is a mod to reduce that but I haven't done it yet. 

I have seen some recommended training exercises for learning helicopters so I will try those after I have adjusted my response curves and see if it is any easier. The main problem is finding spare time to do it.