Learning to fly

[Hetstaine 10852]

Chop chop chopperin' my way up and down the coast looking for some randoms to deliver to wherever they want to go. Near Orloks lighthouse i spotted a Mil so thought sweet, i will ferry someone off here and get them a free ride. I end up chasing a guy around Balota for a while trying to convince him while i am hovering above that i just want to give him a lift..Do you even want a lift brah..but with no success. So i end up over Cherno where i see a lone hatchet warrior duking it out with the zeds near the hospital. I put down in the closest field and head in gunning down a bunch while he heroically swings madly downing more.

We say gday and i feed him a bag of chernos finest which plops me back into my plaid stylin woodsman shirt and theni tell him to get to da choppa..

Coming under some small arms fire as we lift off he drills a few rounds at a guy obviously envious of two good looking sharp dressed guys in a saucy huey lifting off in a cloud of slow motion movie dust. I ask my sidekick if he can fly..he says no instantly and then asks if it is hard. I tell him it is pretty straightforward, give him a basic rundown and mention several times about using the scroll and the autosavemyasshover option. He says sweet, i will give it a go.

So we put down, where i explain to him that your first couple of landings you will want to put that baby down like a soft puff of baby polar bear fur on a duck down pillow. I shut the huey down and we bail out, he jumps in the big Russki bird and i just hang around spectating , mentioning again the autohover option at any sign of trouble. He punches it and performs a low hover on the spot for about 5 seconds and then..

As soon as he is above fifty odd feet he turned hard and plowed it into the ground as if he had a hatred for the very earth itself.

Bummer.

Weird thing is when i ran over to check the scene of death, old mate is kneeling beside the chopper with mere broken legs and shouting ' sorry! sorry! sorry! ' , I morph him and ask if he wants to have a crack at the Huey..he says ' nah..i will just chill here for a bit, i don't think the air and me mix.'

Maybe we need someone to start a helischool server ? Could be cool :)

[beastoverlord 574]

Helischool server? You mean the provided Arma 2 flight training? :P

[Hetstaine 10852]

Yeah, but there are so many that are scared to fly and may try it once and then abandon it and just not worry about helis. Would be sort of cool traing a bunch of fidgety types up.

[Chris529 380]

I have no idea how people manage to crash like this, just get off the ground, gain some height, tilt forwards a bit and off you go.

[Saethkept 134]

Nice post, Het.

I remember the days of flying around everywhere on auto hover. The days when Hueys and KA-60s would get away from me and I'd crash them into whatever terrain feature was closest. The time I found an Apache on Namalsk and took off without auto hover, and exploded a few feet up in some trees.

The best training advice I could offer, would be to find a little bird on a low pop server, or spawn one in the editor. Hop in, take off and get rid of of auto hover. To truly master flight in Arma/DayZ, you must be able to control your speed without throttle input. Nose down to loose altitude and speed, nose up to slow and gain some altitude. The way I learned was diving like a banshee on a winding road from 100 meters up, and then following the road from no higher than 10-30 meters up. Following a coastline can work just as well.

Another trick, roll slightly left or right to gain speed without diving too much. As always, low and fast is your best bet in hostile territory.

[Hetstaine 10852]

Yep , following roads down low in between the trees is some of the best fun i have had.

[OrLoK 16186]

Hello there

I adore the "comic strip" style of the post.

Wonderful. I may plagiarise the idea for the Lego thread.

Superbly framed. My ghast is flabbered.

Rgds

LoK

[OrLoK 16186]

bums, forgot to stay on topic.

I can "fly" but find anything complex or subtle outmaneuvers beyond me (ie landing on a specific spot/landing pad). Sign me up for your flight school baby.

L

[Target Practice (DayZ) 1335]

Nice idea, Hets - I know I spent HOURS in the editor learning to take off and land a Huey before I was comfortable jumping in one on a DayZ/Wasteland server where other people would be putting their lives in my hands - having someone actually teach you would be much more time-efficient.

I'm competent in the air, and can fly/land more or less wherever I need to. I do still use autohover for landings where there's a potential for things to go wrong (ie anything I could potentially collide with), because... well, why wouldn't you? As a pilot, my first duty is to keep that bird safe and working, and if auto-hover lets me do that better, then I see no shame in using it.

Having said that, auto-hover should never be used as a substitute for actually knowing how to fly the damn thing - it's a tool to help you, not a crutch to lean on, and you don't want to be relying on auto-hover if you have to take off/land quickly either under fire or without power.

[toxicsludge 406]

Hello there

I adore the "comic strip" style of the post.

Wonderful. I may plagiarise the idea for the Lego thread.

Superbly framed. My ghast is flabbered.

Rgds

LoK

Exactly what he said!

[SoulShaper2 243]

TMW actually have a flight programme with 3 different Tiers to help people get started with flying to emergency landings, you dont have to be a TMW member to take the pilot trainings either, just thought i'd throw my 2 cents in.

http://tmwdayz.com/

[G000gle 200]

<'gooogle translator'>

Can you give me ride please?

I am at my base in Tulga.

:)

[magicoi 1]

Loving the story board! Have some beans!

Am I right in recalling the SA will have flight mechanics based on TOH??

Edited May 29, 2013 by magicoi

[Target Practice (DayZ) 1335]

Loving the story board! Have some beans!

Am I right in recalling the SA will have flight mechanics based on TOH??

I'm not sure if it's been confirmed by the team or not yet, but I think that the general consensus of opinion seems to be that yes, it'll likely be a simplified version of ToH. The SA engine is apparently a heavily modified version of the ToH engine, so it's unlikely that they won't take some of the awesome flight mechanics with them. :)

[Cap'n (DayZ) 1827]

I can fly the biplane pretty well, but I can only just handle the Huey. I've crashed once before, and after that I practiced a bit and got better. Nothing impressive, but I won't kill anybody. Oh, and why implement advanced flight mechanics when you plan to remove all the vehicles?

[CartridgeMaker 5]

This was very funny. Like your idea of a heli school.

[slim_dusty 2]

Hahaha reminds me of my first flight.

I was walking around up north looking for camps (as you do) when I stumbled across a mini bird having never flown before and being told there is a flight training in AMRM II I was like no worries quick training then I’ll be good to go. So off I log and fire up normal ARMA only to find there is only one chopper available (might have went to the wrong training) some large slow moving civ chopper. Anyway come hell or high water I was going to learn to fly and figured there cant be much difference in choppers (thanks bf3) so I jump in this chopper take off after a successful take off (thanks auto hover) and a few not so successful landings I was able to cruse around in this beast for a good 15 min. Thinking I was some sort of top gun decided it was time how hard could the mini bird be so I logged back in to Dayz approached the mini bird and fired it up. Takeoff was all good (thanks again auto hover) I was in good spirits disabled auto hover and that’s were it all went wrong I nudged the joystick forward just the slightest and watched in horror as the mini bird I was in flipped nozed dive and planted into the ground all in the matter of seconds. Have never seen a chopper since that day and have never been back to training.

Fun fact I’m due to fly one IRL come Monday

[Hetstaine 10852]

Rule One for first flight in Dayz - Height. Lots of it.

[Jonsse 69]

Hilarious, a roughly similar incident happened with my squad when we found our first working helicopter and tried to fly it next to a gas tank to refuel it. It promptly crashed not 1 minute from takeoff in to nearby trees.

---------------------------------------

I've found the default controls to be extremely unintuitive. You can fly with them no problem, but landing without auto-hover is dreadfully difficult.

My controls:

Mouse-Y: Nose down/Nose up

Mouse-X: Roll

W/S: Throttle

Q/E: Rudder

A/D: Turn

Then only downside to this is that looking around with the mouse becomes slightly more difficult since you have to get out of mouse look to control the heli. I've crashed a few helis when mouselook gets toggled by accident, have since removed that option. Would be awesome if you could turn your head in the heli and it would stay at that direction. Since if you want to land without auto-hover as I prefer to do, 3rd person is almost mandatory. You can't see anything from the default look direction.

[beatSTV 631]

beautiful post het beans for you

[terrorizer33 131]

Got my trusty Thrustmaster joystick to fly about.. Been flying a lot in ARMA2 before I even realised there was something called DayZ. Dont use the auto hover option, like some1 else mentioned, you should learn to fly without using it, but according to most of my teammates it's a usefull option if you dont fly with a stick.

Beans for OP :) Lovely story and pics!

[BioHazard050 49]

Im a fairly good pilot, nothing spectacular though (but i have mastered a method of turning a huey or lil bird around 180 degress on its ass in 7 seconds...Mi17 though...not so much. :/ )

[Sutinen 635]

I can fly, but I'm bad at landings. I can get it to land gently, but it's not stable when I land it. Usually it goes fine, but some half-broken parts might show up.

[Target Practice (DayZ) 1335]

Got my trusty Thrustmaster joystick to fly about.. Been flying a lot in ARMA2 before I even realised there was something called DayZ. Dont use the auto hover option, like some1 else mentioned, you should learn to fly without using it, but according to most of my teammates it's a usefull option if you dont fly with a stick.

Beans for OP :) Lovely story and pics!

Yeah, cannot overstate how much better flying with a stick is - even a cheapo-deluxe like the one I got off Amazon for £12 - having a thumb throttle so I can go from full throttle to engines dead in a split second is just crazy useful, not to mention that it makes precision flying a lot easier too.

[Felixthefriendlycat 92]

Knowing SA will use the flight model from Take on helicopters there will be loads of these threads in the future. Cant wait!

Really nice screenshottography btw, beans for you.

Edited May 30, 2013 by Felixthefriendlycat