Not to toot my own horn, but <toooot>!

http://www.simhq.com/_air14/air_514a.html

Nice review, man.

I just purchased ToH last night and basically had just enough time to map my controls and do some free flight. Funny thing is, I thought there was something seriously wrong with my G940. I had a massive dead zone in the center of the stick. Turns out that was a default setting in the games options. Once I turned the dead zone down to 0% I had a much easier time.

The flight model is so quirky it actually makes it much more of a challenge to keep the bird in the air. Left pedal all the time, buggy feeling ground effect and some surprising applications of torque makes things feel kinda hairy sometimes. The pinnacle landing got me a little frustrated I have to admit. I'm doing donuts around this thing thinking, "You're telling me I can land on a moving frigate at night with poor visibility in Black Shark, but I can't land a Little Bird on a massive stationary pad in ToH. You gotta be kidding!"

Thanks, Jaximus!

Left pedal input with power applied is actually accurate: use trim to trim in the required pedal input for a given torque setting. Be cautious comparing the Black Shark and the light helo too closely: the Black Shark has a lot more inertia, coaxial rotors, and an autopilot helping out which makes for a much more stable feel than the light helos.

I hope I didn't come across as too harsh in my critique of the physics models: they are MUCH better than Arma2 and I'm very pleased with the direction BIS is headed. I admit my expectations are very high, but I still enjoy flying this sim!

Right, but once you reach the point of effective translational lift your rotors don't exert as much torque on the on the airframe and your tail rotor becomes more efficient, requiring right pedal to compensate. In ToH no matter my airspeed I only ever have to apply left pedal.

And you're absolutely right about the KA-50. As long as you know its systems it practically flies itself.

Thanks for the detailed review.

BS kindled an interest in helicopters (previously non-existent), but it seems like everything else is a long way behind, and the review confirmed my doubts on ToH, at least in its current state.

Meanwhile, I bought BS2 this week and will continue to explode and die from the helicopter dynamics you've listed on p. 4

BTW, what are you throwing out of the window at 1.57 in the first video?

This is just my opinion...

While BIS did make the flight model more realistic compared to ARMA2, the flight model of the helos in TOH is too quirky for my taste, to include the light helo. I've flown an ex-military OH-6 before, and it was a lot more stable than the TOH light helo when in expert mode. Admittedly, it is magnitudes easier to fly helos at low speeds when you have that seat-of-the-pants feeling in real life from the inertial forces on your body, so that my lend some accuracy to TOH's difficulty.

Even so, it's still an interesting game to fly, I just keep it on Beginner mode with as many of the other "cheats"/helpers disabled.

Advertisements for the SimHQ review..

No..it was some sort of leaflet dropping mission..

Last time I checked, the demo was still version 1.02, which had quite horrible flight dynamics. Did or will they upgrade the demo?

1.02 does not have the physics package updates.

Beta patches are available from the Take On Helicopters forums and I just saw that a 1.04 release candidate patch is now available.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

Ok. found a post from Dwarden suggesting in 12/2011 that there might be an update to the demo with version 1.04

see

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?129404-Updated-Demo-or-Demo-patch