The community members at FGUK have been making a big push on the latest version of their Gazelle for the Flight Gear open source simulator.
This next release has been built with an aim towards visual and flight dynamics realism and it’s not designed to be a button press procedural trainer.
Although we have included a fully click able cockpit to allow for manual start-up & shut down, lights and in the French version, appropriate radio the real work has gone into the Flight Dynamics and 3D visual model
Some 10+ solid flight hours went into testing, tuning, re-testing and re-tuning the Flight Dynamics to be a close as we can achieve to the real aircraft giving a more realistic characteristic than is available in some other simulations
This includes vortex ring state, retreating blade stall, air turbulence and correct response to wing/wind gusts
The Gazelle is a fast and agile, but not a fully aerobatic chopper like the BO105. The Flight model reflects the limitations of the Gazelle rotor head in that respect. Treat it rough and expect to get bitten.
We have 2 versions, the French Aerospatiale and the British Westland. The Westland panel is designed to reflect in service Military Gazelles. The Gazelle mast sight is an option available to be selected from the menu. The French Aerospatiale version has a more civilian GA feel with some domestic instruments in the panel. Both are based on the AS341 version of the Gazelle so performance of each is near identical.
A selection of liveries is included for both variants.
Both the Gazelle versions will support Multi player passengers as a minimum on release. We are further trying to develop it with full Dual Control for 2 Pilots over Multi player which is currently in development and progressing well although may be released later as an update.
As always this is entirely FREE and open source, just as is the simulator. Check out http://www.flightgear.org and the FGUK Heli download area at: http://fguk.eu/index.php/hanger-ii/rotary-wing as well as the forums at http://fguk.eu/index.php/forum/index
Expect to see a release in the next month!
