First post! new to the community , looking for advice

General discussion
1

Hi all!
Unsure where this question should go, but I couldn’t find the answer in the existing posts:

I have been looking forward to helis in FS2020, but it seems now it will be a while before this happens… So I am looking for an alternative for at least the next year!

What in your opinion would be the current best heli sim with great missions content (civilian and/or military) and VR capable?

Thanks in advance for your input.

Simon.

2

Hey Simon. Welcome to the forums.

I think what you may be looking for is DCS (Digital Combat Simulator). There’s plenty to do there, although it’s a bit limited in scenery. But it’s an amazing sim, with great helicopters, and you can do a lot of different missions. It’s purely military but there are some SAR servers and addons out there as well.

3

Flight sim FSX - has several helicopter tutorials

4

Thanks Sergio!

I followed your advice and tried DCS with Gazelle but got intimidated with the amount of commands around weapons. I’ll probably go back to it, but for now I am flying the Cabri G2 with Xplane, using X CPL pilot for missions. It is actually great to have goals while training & building up piloting skills. The quality of the visual environment makes me eager for helis in fs2020, but the flying sensations felt really great!

I wanted a quality exotic/sunny place to fly around. I was wondering about the Seychelles addon but the price tag made me choose Orbx’s Balearic Islands instead. Great location, I would only have hoped for more Helipads & airports: is there another exciting part of the world that you would recommend to fly, with plenty of opportunities and challenges for helis?

Also I saw there was virtual instructors around (like FSFlyingSchool) for planes, I was wondering if there was any equivalent around for Helis? It would be awesome to get feedbacks / advice as you fly!

@jreeves54: thanks for the suggestion - I may look into fsx at some point but it really feels the visuals are outdated, which for me is a key part of the immersion experience, i’m not sure it would work for me.

5

I hear you about the complexity of DCS. I use the sim mainly as a flight simulator, not so much for combat. That makes things easier for me.

There’s a lot of scenery out there that can be interesting. I am very partial to Canadian stuff from Propstrike Studio.

Monoblau also has great scenery like Ko Poda, for example. I love how he always tells some stories with his scenery. There’s a lot to do in all his work.

About a flight school system, there’s none. We do have our How to Fly Helicopters section at HeliSimmer.com and we are always here and on our Facebook Group to help you with anything you may need.

6

Thanks Sergio for recommending these sceneries, from what I can see it really is the type of environments I am after. I also had a look at your Tutorial section - very accessible content great to get started - thanks for all the work you put into this! It is awesome to be able to benefit from this freely.
I received a (long-awaited) Reverb G2 this morning (originally ordered for FS2020 when I was hoping to fly helis there soon after release) - I can’t wait to try it out with Xplane over the week-end and see how much VR brings to the flying experience.

7

The Cabri G2 has a SmartCopilot cfg. Smartcopilot is a payware plugin for X Plane that enables shared cockpit. It cost 19 bucks for a single license which should be all you need.

If you would like to do shared cockpit or multiplayer you can find me at this discord server usually. If you only use TS3 I can give you another server for that.

8

Thanks Shalomar!
I’ll have a look at this .