The Aerofly FS 2 R22 helicopter comes standard with two modes. You can fly with no assistance by clicking in the 'Expert' checkbox located at the bottom of the selection screen, or if you are new to flying helicopters you can leave the box unchecked. By doing so you will receive enough assistance to provide you with more stable flight control.

Unchecked box - Suitable more for novice helicopter pilots. This mode will provide you a more stable flight assisted by an artificial flight controller.

Checked box - Suitable more for advanced pilots that want a more realistic flight experience. The use of rudder pedals or a rudder control is highly recommended to use this mode.

For the novice

Flying the R22 helicopter is fairly easy. If you are a novice, follow these basic steps to get off the ground and begin enjoying what it feels like to be a helicopter pilot.

Note: These instructions are based on the novice mode (expert box unchecked).

To get you up and flying, there are two basic controls that you need to learn; Collective and Cyclic.

Collective - Basically provides Altitude and lift. Lifting this upward will increase lift and get you up in the air. As you increase the collective your nose will tend to point downward so you will need to make small adjustments to your cyclic to compensate for this tendency. Same goes for lowering your collective where your nose will tend to rise.

Cyclic - Mostly provides attitude and pitch control. Your cyclic handles similar to an aircraft yoke in many ways, and is your primary control of the R22.

Here are some basics on using the cyclic:

• Pushing forward - lowers the nose of the helicopter allowing for you to move forward
• Pulling back - Raises the nose of the helicopter allowing for you to go backwards
• Left and Right Sways and tilts the helicopter allowing for you to turn left or right

Using both of these controls together will get you up in the air and flying.

In novice mode you will have assistance providing you with tail stability but you may still need to use rudder control to keep you flying straight with any changes that you make with your collective, especially when lifting off.

Basic Lesson

So now that you know the basic controls used in flying the R22 helicopter, let's get you off the ground following this basic novice tutorial.

• Begin by selecting the R22 helicopter in the main aircraft menu and choose your location. You can choose any normal parking or runway location or choose any new helipad location. In this tutorial we chose the beautiful helipad location at Fort Jefferson (South Florida DLC)

Now lets lift off and enter into a hover

• Slowly pull your collective up towards you. Make sure that you apply some right rudder to stop the lift-off turning tendency. The more collective you add the higher you will go, so lets get to around 500 feet and lower the collective slowly until you stop gaining altitude. Look at your vertical speed gauge, when the needle is centered at 0 you are hovering

• Use a combination of small rudder adjustments, cyclic adjustments to maintain your direction and position.
• Congratulations you are hovering!

Note - As many helicopter pilots become more comfortable with control, they also tend to use visual guides that are available to them. One of the guides is to look at the horizon and compare your attitude with it, and another unique visual guide is to look at the Yaw String in front of you.

• You will know that you are hovering if the yaw string shows no movement and is pointing downward.

Lets now fly forward from your hover.

• To fly forward simply push forward on the cyclic, your nose will lower. Whenever you make changes to the cyclic you should also make slight adjustments to the collective to maintain level flight. So flying forward will bleed some airspeed causing you to lost altitude to you need to compensate with more collective.