Flying the Dreamfoil B407

[Marcus Becker]

I purchased a Bell 407 on FSEconomy and have been ferrying the aircraft down from Chicago. I'm going to be upfront about my rotor craft skills, I'm novice at best. I can taxi, take off, fly, and descend and land with some confidence. My question is how do I reduce the amount of left pedal pressure required while in cruise? If I don't have left pedal, I have to roll left at about 5 degrees to compensate. Is there trim somewhere I'm missing? Let me know if you need some extra information on power settings or whatever. Again, be nice. I'm new to these whirly-bird thingies.

[ChrisS]

Hi Marcus,

There are a couple of things that may help you out here.

1) The faster you go, the more authority your vertical and horizontal stabilizer will have, which will reduce the requirement for left pedal input. (Queue the Jeremy Clarkson "Pppoowwweeeeerrrr")

2) Make sure you don't have your stability set to 0%. The 407 is very tough and somewhat unrealistic at 0% stability. Try setting it somewhere between 10-20% on all three axis for the best experience.

3) There is a 'Steady Cruise' option or something similar under the stability menu. You can turn this on in long cruise which will help make the aircraft more stable, but it'll keep in squirrelly in the hover. Basically the faster you're going the more artificial stability it'll give you.

Hope this helps!

[BluesmanEP]

Hi Chris,

Are you talking about the stability in the joystick settings menu, or the stability in the 407 plugin menu?

Thanks!

[ChrisS]

Are you talking about the stability in the joystick settings menu, or the stability in the 407 plugin menu?

I'm fairly sure they're linked, but I use the stability settings in the 407 'wheel'. Shown here.

[BluesmanEP]

Got it, thanks!

[Marcus Becker]

Thanks for the ideas. I feel comfortable with the stability. The problem is that the aircraft will yaw right constantly at cruise if I'm level. What is a good TRQ % at cruise? It seems the lower it is the less yaw I notice. I can usually set a 67% TRQ and still cruise at or near 120 kts.

[Keith Smith]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but it shouldn't need any pedal in cruise. You start out with left pedal in the hover, then ease it out as you transition to forward flight.

[Marcus Becker]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but it shouldn't need any pedal in cruise. You start out with left pedal in the hover, then ease it out as you transition to forward flight.

That's what I thought. I took a screen shot to show the bank I must use to hold a heading if I'm not using left pedal.

Bell 407_3.png (1.2 MiB) Viewed 6202 times

[ChrisS]

That's what I thought. I took a screen shot to show the bank I must use to hold a heading if I'm not using left pedal.

That's about what I get too. That's my only complaint with the 407 is that they've overdone translating tendency a bit. In the real world you'd need just a touch of right pedal in fast cruise like that.