Heli hints and tactics

Okey, Thing is, I'm not a hypocrit and nor am I pissed. But criticism and advisement has to be set here!

In Following topic I will try to give facts about choppers and give my personal opinions as much as possible but still keep it short. But mainly it will be about Extraction and insertion.
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Huey:
This chopper is maneuverable and fast (depending on speed), serving mainly in Muttrah city, but also on Northen Lights, Silent Eagle and Lashkar Valley for the German faction. As I said Huey is maneuverable and fast, use it wisely and it will make you a outstanding Huey pilot. Fly low and Fly fast! The Hueys are very maneuverable even during high speed, so it makes them one of the best choppers for any kind of mission.
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Lynx: Is a fast evac/insertion helicopter, DO NOT USE IT UNLESS THE MISSION REQUIRES A FAST EVAC OR INSERTION! Lynx is the fastest transport helicopter in the game, it's speed is made on high cost of it's maneuverability. Basically it means you can't do barrel rolls or evasive maneuvers or bank hard left/right (you will most likely lose control)! It is meant to go as an Arrow, fast in and fast out!
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Blackhawk As I've listened to many players, they like to fly BH low along the ground so they can use their gunners or just 'cause it looks badass, it's wrong! Blackhawk is NOT a CAS (We assume that CAS is Jets and Gunships) and it's not badass to fly along the ground and get hit from a RPG or lose your transporting troops because of a 50cal. standing on the road (It's badass if you make a successful evac or insertion). Fly the Blackhawk 150 - 200 +/- m above the ground, don't bank to hard left/right, you will probably lose control if you don't know what you are doing. Fly low only when you going for landing, 300 - 150 m from LZ depending on altitude dive slightly and carefully down so when you are 50 +/- m from the ground slide along the ground to LZ. Blackhawk AkA Flying tank! I'm sure all know why it's called so.
OBS: Doorgunners or door guns are only made for supporting/covering fire/suppressive fire during evac or insertion. It's not a gunship, so respect that please or you will end up wasted assets. Shooting from BH will give a bigger reason for enemy to shoot you down and flying low just to let the gunners have fun as most ppl do will just turn you into scrap metal!
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Following choppers I will name will be in same category!
Chinook/Merlin: Very stable and very balanced chopper, not to mention fast if used properly. Tho on cost of it's visual range from cockpit. Chinook is a extreme fast helicopter with limited view from pilots perspective. Because of it being so long and limited pilot view makes the chopper almost impossible to land on none stable surface. To be able to land you need total flat surface or hoovering 5 - 3 m of the ground. Pilots seat that is positioned high in the chopper makes it difficult to see the ground or knowing when you have a "touch down" - Highly recommended that ground units communicate with the pilot for a successful landing. CAUTION landing on none flat surface will make you flip! Have up to 1 or 2 crates, it's a heavy transport chopper not a huey or BH. Mainly used in reality for reinforcement transport and supplies. Not a Fast/Low evac/insertion helicopter, so try to avoid that if possible, unless circumstances requires the opposite. The size of this choppers and ability of their requires them to make SAFE insertions and extractions, puting them in HOT area will make them go down, no matter if shot down or pilot panicked. The bigger they are the easier to hit!
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(No Opfor choppers are mentioned because according to majority none of them crashed/wasted as much as Bluefor's)
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Hints:
Extraction (Or as some may call it "Evac") Fly low, fast and don't overreact so that you lose control of it (Don't pitch to much from side to side or up or down. Fly low (Or high depending on the choppers abilities) in the mountains/forest/city (streets). Drop zone or LZ (Landing Zone) can be deceiving.
LZ on flat surface, come in fast and low, set the heli on the ground 5 - 7 m from marker/smoke/LZ so last 5 m you will slide along the road/street/field.
LZ is a unstable surface, you should proceed in same speed and altitude (Low and Fast), and when you are 10 - 20 m from LZ point, release the speed button (common: W button) and pitch back slowly and steady. You will lose the speed gradually or fast, depending on how much you pitch back. When you are 10 m from LZ adjust your speed for a hoovering position and lower the chopper as much as possible so that ground units can easily jump in the helicopter. (This insertion is only to be made if drop zone !SAFE!)
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This kind of extraction will be most effective if Pilot and Evacuated Squad or (least) SL is on mumble. During the hoovering position SL or anyone on mumble should adjust the altitude for the pilot, make sure he doesn't touch the ground, or it can lead to devastating results. Communication is essential Soldiers!
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Insertion: This action should under no circumstances be during 20sec - 1min time. Insertion is all about speed, most weigh is on the pilots shoulders! Insertion should take during 5 - 10 sec time if it HOT (If not ignore this hint and proceed as evac). NO HOOVERING OR ADJUSTMENT IS MEANT TO BE MADE DURING THIS! Enemies are close, heavy assets are operational in the area, threatening the crew and chopper. Fly fast and fly as low as possible, 10 meters before drop zone, glide along the surface until you stop or becomes in a movement under slow speed, drop the ground units, take off in fast and low position, proceed until you are out of area or firing range of any threats (Unless you are in the streets of muttrah, then proceed along the streets until you feel safe enough to gain altitude and GTFO). (Do not take off like some do in muttrah, gain altitude over 50 m above roofs and fly it will endanger you and the asset). If insertion is planned on made on a unstable surface, make sure you look at the map before take off from main, see if you find any another surface that is better then marked as LZ, see where the enemy positioned, look at the markers on the map (enemy APC, INF, AA's), prio 1 for you during that mission as pilot is to find as safe and stable surface as possible. If there is none during the circumstances, you will be forced to do it 4 times faster then usually you do during Evac. The trick here is to fly fast and low, and release the speed button (W) and pitch slightly up (Arrow up or as it called "backward") so you can see how your nose pitching slightly up and you notice that you lose speed, make sure you lose speed !fast! but still able to have control over the chopper so you don't flip! Hoover 3 - 5 m above ground and let the inf jump out.
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Last thing, flying low and fast will probably cause huge problems from time to time, due to speed or maneuverability of the chopper. The only way to learn how to handle it, mostly on Muttrah, train your skills, make them solid, Learn the map, learn the streets and how they look - and last but not least, memorize it. AND! Don't pitch back too much when you dropping speed, other wise
You WILL "stall" the chopper in such position that it will flip backward or go reverse in a high speed, enough for you to lose control and not be able to "re-stall" due to the speed. In worse case scenario there will be a wall/building/mountain or a tree in the way. The trick here is that when you pitch back to lose speed.. under no circumstances never look at your speedometer during that, look on the ground and environment around you, you will notice how your chopper will almost get in to a total stop position in mid-air. When it does, pitch carefully and with cation forward so you end up in hoovering position. (And only then when you notice you barerly go forward or backward with the chopper in mid-air, you can look at speedometer and it will most likely will be showing speed between 10 - 20 m/h.
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This is addressed to Infantry! Squad leaders, make sure you give all the intel to a pilot that requires. For example: "Dropzone: Bravo5kp6 + crate, no intel on any enemy activity still use precaution / enemy activity (report where) in Bravo4kp3". Something like that, it will make the job easier for the pilot. Also NEVER ask for a crate during mid air or flight, request on the ground! During insertion, SL position yourself as close to side as possible to see the ground, when pilot is unable to land due to the surface you will see (Infantry) that chopper is close to the ground (3 - 7 m above ground) don't hesitate to jump, that's probably the point of it since pilot can't risk it! As infantry squad I am sure you have a medic in the squad (if you don't heck I don't even know what you are doing out there:P) he will heal you up / use field dressing. Pilots prio 1 is chopper, he's chopper is he's "squad mate" as much as the guy in your squad next to you, Prio 2 Inf.
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OBS: MAKE SURE PILOTS THAT DURING THE FLIGHTS/INSERTION/EXTRACTION THAT THE CHOPPERS SPEED IS !NOT! FASTER THEN YOUR MIND OR YOUR BRAINS ABILITY TO GATHER FACTS/INTEL (THINKING). MAKE SURE THAT YOU !PILOT! THINK ONE STEP AHEAD THEN THE CHOPPERS ACTIONS
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Personal opinion:
Well that's what I've got so far, I know people like to do other stuff with choppers then they are originally assigned for, but this is how it was back in old days, this is Old School. In my personal opinion Blackhawks are not s'pose to be used as god damn CAS ! Come on people! You love it when it shoots kills stuff, yea ?! Well what do you think when you get shot down or crash.. "God damn how unlucky" ? Do you think what the others think of you ? or when you trying to enforce people not to start a global chat about how failed that chopper was... or when you think "noob pilot wasted the chopper" think again, what was the chopper doing ? He got killed by wasting it, using BH as CAS is a waste and I mentioned why...

Secondly.. Pilots don't be afraid to waste your crates, unless there is only one chopper. if you drop of a guy on a surface you can't afford to land, give him a helping hand, drop a crate, let him patch up him self - you have other choppers available for suppliant. You chose to drop him of on the specific high, so help him out Use the Merlin and Chinooks only for reinforcement or supplies. Avoid to use them for HOT extractions. They are meant to transport troops in a safe way. Because of what I've mentioned in that sentence about Merlin and chinooks you need a SAFE, total SAFE LZ because of the time the landing procedure requires.

And last but not least, I gave hints, tricks and what I personally think.

NO PERSONAL ATTACKS WAS MEANT, DID NOT MEAN ANY OFFENSE AND ONLY TRYING TO MAKE IT WORK BETTER AND GIVE AN ADVISE THAT'S ALL

I know I can be no better then any other person when it comes to crashing the chopper, wasting it in some way or commenting on how they failed, I try to restrain myself, but it's hard when people doing something they clearly have no clue about. I hope this will help a bit some how.
Please do comment, give feedback or personal opinions. Topic Open for criticism, thoughts, share experience or advisement!

/CC out.

"Basically it means you can't do barrel rolls"

Now thats most important thing to know that you cant do barrellrols.

Good guide for new pilots, keep them coming.

I have one good tip I found somewhere:

Basic Flying Rules: “Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.”

Thanks a lot, found it quite helpful.

Is it suitable to fly with keyboard and mouse? What's your opinion?

So far as I know rob, I've been playing as pilot back in the old days without joystick. Using keyboard to fly and adjust hoovering position in air with help of mouse, or if I need a precise land, I use the mouse. But be aware to never use your mouse when you are aware of enemy jets, gunships, AA's in the area !!!

But there is another way to master the ability to fly with the mouse, needs aaalooooooooot of practice, increase mouse sensitivity in chopper setting to be able to control the helicopter with the mouse.

Mouse / Keyboard... Couldnt fly a Chopper any other way. Sensitivity 7 - YAW 5 - Everyone to there own tho.

1 hours Practise and you will Be rewarded with your pilot License.

i use keyboard only, i grew up on the old novalogics with it so just kinda sits right

however i play hawx 2with a proper flight stick and the diffrence is amazing

(all be it arcade jets vs real life helis)

Very nice guide. To me most of this seem like pretty common sense but we still see people do these mistakes over and over again. I'm just getting into piloting myself and have already gained great skill at landing/taking off (not enough to fly on public server though). I think the most important part of insertion is to find a safe spot near where the inf need to go. Listen to where they want to go but if you have intel that it's hot tell them or land somewhere else where it IS safe. For extraction squad leaders need to learn to use signal smoke and pilots need to look for such smoke. Way to many time I call in a chopper and drop smoke and they land tens of meters away even though it is a perfectly fine LZ. Don't take this personally any of you NWA pilots it's almost always the pubbers that do it.

From my view its best to use the old fashion keyboard+mouse , i tried joystick as well but just couldnt get used to it , cos i was familiar the keyboard+mouse combo more than joystick ,
Yes u can fly much more smoother with joystick but its hard to hover with it .
Mouse makes u land and hover much easier than joystick . So i prefer the good ol' one .

First of, what I posted here is not a secretly awesome stunts or great tricks to make you extraordinary pilot Made this post just like you said too many players make too many common mistakes. Secondly there is pilots out there who is VERY skilled and have the balls to take you to a HOT LZ, what happens to your inf sqd after drop of ain't his problem Another thing about signal smokes might be you pop to late so it barely spreads out or pilots have to high speed to land in time, which they need to check this thread or learn a bit more how to land

Bear in mind when popping smoke that occasionaly a pilot cannot see the smoke if it was popped beyond his draw distance.

Popping smoke late minimizes ur chances of alerting the enemy to your position and also ensures the pilot sees it.

can i also add a bit of CAS heli stuff that i have learnt from my limited experience:

unguided missiles and diving very rarely works with the normal attack choppers (ie not kiowa or the CAS huey) and normally results in the Cobra, Apache, Havoc, etc being shot down by said APC, Tank, Fob, Infantry, etc

As i said, i know very little when it comes to CAS as i very rarely fly, this is just from me being on the reciving end, normally the tank's 50cal, where shooting down a CAS chopper is relatively easy (even easier with an APC and a reverse incline to park on) or from being a SL and calling in CAS only to watch the chopper get destroyed and the objective still standing.

Also do not forget about laser guided missiles, sometimes it is not possible for the infantry to lase what they want shooting so taking time to come over a target high up allows the gunner to get a laser guided down and destroy said APC, tank, FOB, etc.

also on an aside note, infantry SL's do not forget that you can use your target designator to communicate with other infantry SL's to confirm a target building etc or to point out targets/threats which would be otherwise difficult to see (all we need now is for the dev's to start allowing tanks to 'see' infantry's lases - as they can in real life, and to be able to lase targets for air assests - it has a bloomin great laser which works out the distance so why can't the SL designate)

Nice guide helps alot

Got talking to a guy from 19 Sqd RAF, they fly hawk conversion training. Asked about CAS and how they get the pilots eyes on to target.

Yes they use lazer designators, apparantly the ones modelled in PR are relatively old. However, they also use a unit of measure that would be familier to both the guys on the ground and the man in the air.

They first of all fix a centre as reference, a minaret for example as it stands out from the surounding buildings. From that they determin a unit of measure, e.g, see large flat green building. Roger, that is unit of measure.

Target compound is due north of centre (minaret), three buildings length from it. confirm compound with low wall and blue vehicle. Afirm.

Your target is multiple infantry that compound, request canon fire to supress.

Simples.

good point bang, we had a go at this when i was in cadets (we were affiliated to the Army Air Corps) and went to visit them and used their DCCT (Dismounted Close Combat Trainer - basically big PC game which they can model warfare with, as well as target training, e.g. to learn the marksmanship principals. We used them to call in artillery (when we went to visit 7PARA in colchester) and using weapon systems safely (you can hook up modified versions of any of the army's weapons and blast away at a projector with enemies - makes PR more realistic lol, and meant we got to play with gimpy's), anyway, at the Army Air Corps Base (i think it was Wattisham but i could be wrong), we got to call in a an apache which was simulated by 1 guy flying in a virtual cockpit and one of the cadets 'gunning' both wearing like 270 degree view computer screen / helmet things.

Anyway, we used near enough the same method above, first determining a prominant center of axis that is easily identifiable to both parties, then determining a measure of distance, then identifying friendly forces (this is helpful as the enemy could be inbetween two sets of friendlies), then identifying the enemy, once thats done its just a matter of completing the fire control order, GRIT - Group, Range, Indication (which are all done), leaving Type of Fire, anyway was good fun until one of our cadets accidentaly killed a bunch of civillians in a truck rather than the mortar team.

The abodes great, if your all running top end rigs, if you got crap graphics and Piss poor draw distance, but that's just me being negative.

very nice guide

but in my opinion, as an 'advanced' pilot , blackhawk s can be used as close air support. in kokan im used to fly low to avoid techys to see me from far away , this makes your landing/dropping faster as you dont need to climb or lose altitude. and when i have no trans to do, i ussually do some recon with the blackhawk. due to the fact the blackhawk can take 3 rpgs (if lucky) i also use it for cas. but dont try this at home, if your team has got no trans anymore its your fault !


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