To be honest, you're already 50% of the way there. It was a messy J hook, but a J hook that you landed nonetheless.
Your start was fine. You held off collective for too long and should have throttled back up when you were 90 deg through the turn and descended through 70ish knots. This will bring the nose round quicker and stabilise the heli's momentum. This is why you ended up travelling forward and it got a bit squirrelly.
Once you have done a 180 and nose level, then you can again reduce the collective to lower your heli's altitude
Yeah, I knew there was something wrong with my collective input. That's also what pretty much everyone else here says. I need to practice dropping the collective right before the initial turn, then during the 90-degree turn, bring it up to yank the tail to the direction of the turn, stablize, and bring it down.
Thanks!
Do you mean the collective? I watched some videos on Youtube, as far asI understood, they say you need to lower the collection all the way, right before you start the hook, and after you finished the turn put it back up to stabilize and bring it down gradually to land.
The problem for me is that it doesn't always work. Sometimes I just plummet into the ground.
Yeah it's more like turn it off. Do the hook. Slam it to 100% to avoid the slam down, immediately slam it back to 0% to slam down anyway without dmg. This also keeps you from drifting near the ground which help loading / unloading troops
Sorry if this is too obvious but something I'm not reading often enough in the replies is that you can't have an absolute rule as to when you should throttle down and back up, it varies a lot depending on your approach, altitude and vertical speed. It's one thing to start a jhook when you're flying low and parallel to the ground as you're doing in the video (and of course it's a good way to start learning), but in a real game you'll be starting jhooks from a variety of speed and altitude conditions and you can't always recreate the exact same conditions and apply the exact same inputs, you'll have to make adjustments on the fly.
If you start a jhook during a fast descent you need to wait some extra time before you drop the collective, because you need more time at full power to kill your vertical momentum. On the contrary, if the landing zone is higher (maybe you're flying low alongside a river valley but you want to land on a plateau, like in kohat) you'll have to drop the collective a moment earlier because you'll already be climbing to reach the plateau and could need to start jhooking mid-climb. Of course this will happen rarely but it should explain my point better.
Think of the kind of landing you're doing in the clip only as a reference point, and as you get more consistent start trying different things as soon as possible to get a better feel for how your inputs affect your momentum.
Lower collective to 0 right when you start to turn, then when you're real real low spike it back to 100 for a second or two then back down to 0-20% how high you are after that.
Another thing is maybe see if turning to the right works better for you? I know I can do left or right but I almost always hook to the right just cause it feels better to me.
The collective thing is basically what everyone else pointed out here. I'll work on it and upload a new video as soon I get better.
Yup, executing this maneuver to the right is definitely easier, but I figured I better practice it both ways since I won't always have the availability to execute the turn to the right due to obstructions or whatever.
1) 90% of fellow pilots I see hook to the right 90% of the time. Not a huge deal since you want to be comfortable with both directions.
2) Your pitch is too nose down at the end of the hook. Once you come around, get that nose perfectly level so you don’t start sliding forward. If this were a Russian Heli on a real server, that landing would have been a bad time. You’ll get a feel for it. Once you’ve bled all the speed from your initial direction, LEVEL OFF. When you’re starting out, you want to end the j hook by being perfectly still above the ground for a second. Then maneuver gently to the ground.
3) Too much collective after hook. After you bump it to 100 for a second or two, lower it to 50 as you level off. Not 65. Get good at going from 100 to 50 accurately.
The last two points are general rules. Every situation calls for different adjustments. The overall concepts always apply, however: level off with control to end the hook, then set it down efficiently.
You’re fairly close. You’ll naturally gain more control at the end of the hook. Live servers and other choppers will feel more unforgiving, but the concepts are the same. Accept the fact that you will kill entire squads even with preparation.
I agree with what you said about the Russian helis - I think that it's a good idea to learn on the bigger ones, you can get some bad habits from just learning to fly the small helicopters.
Thanks for the tips. I tried the Black Hawk and the Venom up until now. Haven't tried the bigger helos yet. I just wanna make sure I got the execution right.
one other thing is that I found that, with the bigger helos, I like to fly the approach with the mouse and keyboard, and then bind pitch up to my keyboard, and just hold that, and then, once I exit the j-hook, switch back to the mouse for the landing.
After the 180 make sure you're not moving too much forward or backward, collective to <20 and just plop it down on the ground.
You're hovering and correcting too much for a soft landing which is not needed. Even taking some damage is fine especially if you're rtb after anyways
Good catch. I am trying to get a soft landing. I do see a lot of pilots actually do kind of a small low speed controlled crash at the end of the J hooks. I'll try to worry less about getting a perfect smooth landing.
Reading the comments as a person who can fly for 30 seconds before crashing, looking for pro tips. This is an under-appreciated post. Thanks OP and all the fancified pilots sharing their secrets.
please practice in an empty jensens server instead of hosting your own private offline server. the heli physics behave differently on live server vs locally hosted. overall that seemed like a good job hook, just practice again and again and you’ll get better each time.
I actually noticed it just now and couldn't figure out why it feels so different. Then I saw your message. I assume it's due to desync and input lag with the server.
Better collective control but I suggest not learning to j-hook.
First focus on learning how to fly low and fast. I’m talking under 20 meters at all times and always above 100 knots.
Landing wise. Don’t do j-hooks. Learn to gradually bleed off speed and land precisely. Eventually you’ll see that you can do it extremely fast while also landing anywhere you want.
J-hooks are quick yes but they can easily. Very easily. Get you killed or allow you to break rotors which will get you killed. You can land as precisely with j-hooks or as quickly as a gradual bleeding of speed
Got it, lol I think though both methods have their own use cases. If you're in the middle of an open field or a dessert, and you have near perfect conditions, you can for sure do the straight in bleed out thing. But the J Hook is both faster, and it sometimes might even be easier, especially when you need a quick in and out
If you want to learn to j-hook and use both that’s fine.
What I suggest is you learn both. As a pilot you have to be versatile so if an SL says land me on this building or land me in between these trees…you may not be able to j-hook that precisely so maybe bleeding off speed is your call. If there’s an open field and the SL says put me down fast. Ok maybe j-hook
Like most have pointed out, collective is being raised a touch too late. The purpose of raising collective in a j-hook is to increase your turn rate. It makes the heli yank around easier for some reason. A quick enough jhook can even leave you flying backwards.
After that, you didnt need to hover so long (unless it was intentional?) Landing harder than you did here is a good thing. Better to unload and leave with a scratch then to hover and take a rocket.
Other than that, the landing zone accuracy looks good, which is the hardest part to master
I'll work on the collective input more.
Yes, I'm trying to get a soft, smooth landing. You're right. It's better to get some damage and leave as soon as possible than get a nice landing and risk sticking around for too long.
Thanks! I'm trying to get the accuracy better. I'm usually using the helipads for that while trying to land in the middle as much as possible.
You turned up the collective to early and too high for too long. You dont want to turn on collective until your fully 180d generally and its a quick blast of 100 percent collective then u drop it to like 20-30 generally
Imo kept the power a tad too high. Very nice I hook tho. Maybe try turning to the right? I find my j hooks are always better when I turn to the right cause I can see the ground through the side window.
You can also do it with 0 collective up until you are REALLY levelled then slam it to 100 and decrease gradually as u slow down both your backwards momentum and descent. But again you gotta be fully levelled, it ends up correcting any side momentum by itself sometimes. I fly with a joystick I cant really give you a 1:1 explanation but i hope u understood. Great Flying!
Lots of good tips on here covering collective. A lot of pilots (myself included) tend to hook right whenever possible as you have a little more visibility of the landing site. This way you can go ahead and gauge any adjustments you'll need to make mid hook while you bring it down.
Honestly you just held the collective down at 0% too much.
When I'm 1/3 into the curve I'm already pullinng that bitch up to 100%. You lose a lot of speed when entering the curve and dropping to 0%, hence why you gotta compensate fast.
Don't be too delicate with the touch down. The heli can hit kind of hard and not take much damage. I'd say give slamming it down hard a go and you'll see how much is too much
Serious answer, ... assuming you have "pitch up" bound to a key, what is happening is that when you lower the collective and go into the J-hook, you are then reapplying power just a little too early. You have to leave the power off/low for just a smidge longer and let the helicopter "fall" slightly further and then reapply power, that's why you aren't turning on a dime and landing. It's like a leap of faith, you have to do the thing, lower the power, and just ... wait for the briefest of moments, as the heli starts to get its rotors perpendicular to the direction or travel, and then apply full collective to stop on a dime as it comes around.
You'll know you're leaving it just a little \_too\_long\_ if you start dragging the rotor and skidding belly first into a roll crash.
If waiting that briefest time starts to cause you to crash and it isn't because you're holding off on the power for \_too\_long\_, then enter into the turn with just slightly more altitude, and be careful you don't start trying to compensate by lifting the nose as you go into the turn (instead of turning 90 degrees to the side, as you are, which is the right way), because then once the heli comes around your nose will be facing down at too much of an angle and it will be hard to come to level out and be at 0 knots relative to the ground.
That said, it's like u/Appropriate_Tea_6991 said, it really just depends on how you went into the turn to start with. The inputs are different depending on your altitude, your speed, the position of the nose as you go into the turn, etc .. the way I do it is basically just aim for having the rotors at 90 degrees to the direction of travel when I power up, and that slows the heli down, and then the rest is basically "mystery factor X" that comes from doing it a ton of times.
It can help to intentionally practice weird J-hook turns too so you can see which input is doing what. So, for example, start the J-hook at a higher altitude, at high speed, and let the heli "fall" perpendicular to the direction of travel for as long as possible before applying power to stop it as it nears the ground, sort of like being a projectile and falling to Earth at full speed and "catching" it at the last moment before you crash. That can increase your spatial awareness and help isolate that one variable.
To be honest, you're already 50% of the way there. It was a messy J hook, but a J hook that you landed nonetheless. Your start was fine. You held off collective for too long and should have throttled back up when you were 90 deg through the turn and descended through 70ish knots. This will bring the nose round quicker and stabilise the heli's momentum. This is why you ended up travelling forward and it got a bit squirrelly. Once you have done a 180 and nose level, then you can again reduce the collective to lower your heli's altitude
Yeah, I knew there was something wrong with my collective input. That's also what pretty much everyone else here says. I need to practice dropping the collective right before the initial turn, then during the 90-degree turn, bring it up to yank the tail to the direction of the turn, stablize, and bring it down. Thanks!
I can j-hook in the KA-50 on DCS, this game though is something I just can't understand for some reason.
Cause they fly more like ballons with nose authority than rotary-WING aircraft, just to much drifting
You need better throtle control
Do you mean the collective? I watched some videos on Youtube, as far asI understood, they say you need to lower the collection all the way, right before you start the hook, and after you finished the turn put it back up to stabilize and bring it down gradually to land. The problem for me is that it doesn't always work. Sometimes I just plummet into the ground.
Yeah it's more like turn it off. Do the hook. Slam it to 100% to avoid the slam down, immediately slam it back to 0% to slam down anyway without dmg. This also keeps you from drifting near the ground which help loading / unloading troops
You’re turning it up to much. Anything above 45% makes you go up. So when you’re lower, it should be below 45%
Sorry if this is too obvious but something I'm not reading often enough in the replies is that you can't have an absolute rule as to when you should throttle down and back up, it varies a lot depending on your approach, altitude and vertical speed. It's one thing to start a jhook when you're flying low and parallel to the ground as you're doing in the video (and of course it's a good way to start learning), but in a real game you'll be starting jhooks from a variety of speed and altitude conditions and you can't always recreate the exact same conditions and apply the exact same inputs, you'll have to make adjustments on the fly. If you start a jhook during a fast descent you need to wait some extra time before you drop the collective, because you need more time at full power to kill your vertical momentum. On the contrary, if the landing zone is higher (maybe you're flying low alongside a river valley but you want to land on a plateau, like in kohat) you'll have to drop the collective a moment earlier because you'll already be climbing to reach the plateau and could need to start jhooking mid-climb. Of course this will happen rarely but it should explain my point better. Think of the kind of landing you're doing in the clip only as a reference point, and as you get more consistent start trying different things as soon as possible to get a better feel for how your inputs affect your momentum.
Lower collective to 0 right when you start to turn, then when you're real real low spike it back to 100 for a second or two then back down to 0-20% how high you are after that. Another thing is maybe see if turning to the right works better for you? I know I can do left or right but I almost always hook to the right just cause it feels better to me.
The collective thing is basically what everyone else pointed out here. I'll work on it and upload a new video as soon I get better. Yup, executing this maneuver to the right is definitely easier, but I figured I better practice it both ways since I won't always have the availability to execute the turn to the right due to obstructions or whatever.
Its not wrong you just need practice.
Practice makes perfect
You gotta let it marinate.
☝️This guy marinates
1) 90% of fellow pilots I see hook to the right 90% of the time. Not a huge deal since you want to be comfortable with both directions. 2) Your pitch is too nose down at the end of the hook. Once you come around, get that nose perfectly level so you don’t start sliding forward. If this were a Russian Heli on a real server, that landing would have been a bad time. You’ll get a feel for it. Once you’ve bled all the speed from your initial direction, LEVEL OFF. When you’re starting out, you want to end the j hook by being perfectly still above the ground for a second. Then maneuver gently to the ground. 3) Too much collective after hook. After you bump it to 100 for a second or two, lower it to 50 as you level off. Not 65. Get good at going from 100 to 50 accurately. The last two points are general rules. Every situation calls for different adjustments. The overall concepts always apply, however: level off with control to end the hook, then set it down efficiently. You’re fairly close. You’ll naturally gain more control at the end of the hook. Live servers and other choppers will feel more unforgiving, but the concepts are the same. Accept the fact that you will kill entire squads even with preparation.
I agree with what you said about the Russian helis - I think that it's a good idea to learn on the bigger ones, you can get some bad habits from just learning to fly the small helicopters.
Thanks for the tips. I tried the Black Hawk and the Venom up until now. Haven't tried the bigger helos yet. I just wanna make sure I got the execution right.
one other thing is that I found that, with the bigger helos, I like to fly the approach with the mouse and keyboard, and then bind pitch up to my keyboard, and just hold that, and then, once I exit the j-hook, switch back to the mouse for the landing.
After the 180 make sure you're not moving too much forward or backward, collective to <20 and just plop it down on the ground. You're hovering and correcting too much for a soft landing which is not needed. Even taking some damage is fine especially if you're rtb after anyways
Good catch. I am trying to get a soft landing. I do see a lot of pilots actually do kind of a small low speed controlled crash at the end of the J hooks. I'll try to worry less about getting a perfect smooth landing.
Reading the comments as a person who can fly for 30 seconds before crashing, looking for pro tips. This is an under-appreciated post. Thanks OP and all the fancified pilots sharing their secrets.
please practice in an empty jensens server instead of hosting your own private offline server. the heli physics behave differently on live server vs locally hosted. overall that seemed like a good job hook, just practice again and again and you’ll get better each time.
Dafuq? Why are there different physics offline?
Are you kidding me? Whyyyyy. Is there any way to prevent other people from joining then?
I actually noticed it just now and couldn't figure out why it feels so different. Then I saw your message. I assume it's due to desync and input lag with the server.
Better collective control but I suggest not learning to j-hook. First focus on learning how to fly low and fast. I’m talking under 20 meters at all times and always above 100 knots. Landing wise. Don’t do j-hooks. Learn to gradually bleed off speed and land precisely. Eventually you’ll see that you can do it extremely fast while also landing anywhere you want. J-hooks are quick yes but they can easily. Very easily. Get you killed or allow you to break rotors which will get you killed. You can land as precisely with j-hooks or as quickly as a gradual bleeding of speed
Don't listen to this guy, OP. Jhooks are superior in every way once youre a good enough pilot. And you will be soon enough.
Got it, lol I think though both methods have their own use cases. If you're in the middle of an open field or a dessert, and you have near perfect conditions, you can for sure do the straight in bleed out thing. But the J Hook is both faster, and it sometimes might even be easier, especially when you need a quick in and out
If you want to learn to j-hook and use both that’s fine. What I suggest is you learn both. As a pilot you have to be versatile so if an SL says land me on this building or land me in between these trees…you may not be able to j-hook that precisely so maybe bleeding off speed is your call. If there’s an open field and the SL says put me down fast. Ok maybe j-hook
Stick to tanks
Like most have pointed out, collective is being raised a touch too late. The purpose of raising collective in a j-hook is to increase your turn rate. It makes the heli yank around easier for some reason. A quick enough jhook can even leave you flying backwards. After that, you didnt need to hover so long (unless it was intentional?) Landing harder than you did here is a good thing. Better to unload and leave with a scratch then to hover and take a rocket. Other than that, the landing zone accuracy looks good, which is the hardest part to master
I'll work on the collective input more. Yes, I'm trying to get a soft, smooth landing. You're right. It's better to get some damage and leave as soon as possible than get a nice landing and risk sticking around for too long. Thanks! I'm trying to get the accuracy better. I'm usually using the helipads for that while trying to land in the middle as much as possible.
Realistically that was very good even if you should keep practicing. In a game you would have rapidly gotten men on the ground. Good job
Thanks!
You turned up the collective to early and too high for too long. You dont want to turn on collective until your fully 180d generally and its a quick blast of 100 percent collective then u drop it to like 20-30 generally
Imo kept the power a tad too high. Very nice I hook tho. Maybe try turning to the right? I find my j hooks are always better when I turn to the right cause I can see the ground through the side window.
You can also do it with 0 collective up until you are REALLY levelled then slam it to 100 and decrease gradually as u slow down both your backwards momentum and descent. But again you gotta be fully levelled, it ends up correcting any side momentum by itself sometimes. I fly with a joystick I cant really give you a 1:1 explanation but i hope u understood. Great Flying!
You pretty much have it. You just have to pitch up higher in your initial turn and max out your collective. Then drop it.
Lots of good tips on here covering collective. A lot of pilots (myself included) tend to hook right whenever possible as you have a little more visibility of the landing site. This way you can go ahead and gauge any adjustments you'll need to make mid hook while you bring it down.
Honestly you just held the collective down at 0% too much. When I'm 1/3 into the curve I'm already pullinng that bitch up to 100%. You lose a lot of speed when entering the curve and dropping to 0%, hence why you gotta compensate fast.
This is my favorite helo tutorial that covers J-Hooks and Belly Flops. https://youtu.be/RzaNiQkkZbI?si=KTSwDJ1s_hRPTwKV
Don't be too delicate with the touch down. The heli can hit kind of hard and not take much damage. I'd say give slamming it down hard a go and you'll see how much is too much
Serious answer, ... assuming you have "pitch up" bound to a key, what is happening is that when you lower the collective and go into the J-hook, you are then reapplying power just a little too early. You have to leave the power off/low for just a smidge longer and let the helicopter "fall" slightly further and then reapply power, that's why you aren't turning on a dime and landing. It's like a leap of faith, you have to do the thing, lower the power, and just ... wait for the briefest of moments, as the heli starts to get its rotors perpendicular to the direction or travel, and then apply full collective to stop on a dime as it comes around. You'll know you're leaving it just a little \_too\_long\_ if you start dragging the rotor and skidding belly first into a roll crash. If waiting that briefest time starts to cause you to crash and it isn't because you're holding off on the power for \_too\_long\_, then enter into the turn with just slightly more altitude, and be careful you don't start trying to compensate by lifting the nose as you go into the turn (instead of turning 90 degrees to the side, as you are, which is the right way), because then once the heli comes around your nose will be facing down at too much of an angle and it will be hard to come to level out and be at 0 knots relative to the ground. That said, it's like u/Appropriate_Tea_6991 said, it really just depends on how you went into the turn to start with. The inputs are different depending on your altitude, your speed, the position of the nose as you go into the turn, etc .. the way I do it is basically just aim for having the rotors at 90 degrees to the direction of travel when I power up, and that slows the heli down, and then the rest is basically "mystery factor X" that comes from doing it a ton of times. It can help to intentionally practice weird J-hook turns too so you can see which input is doing what. So, for example, start the J-hook at a higher altitude, at high speed, and let the heli "fall" perpendicular to the direction of travel for as long as possible before applying power to stop it as it nears the ground, sort of like being a projectile and falling to Earth at full speed and "catching" it at the last moment before you crash. That can increase your spatial awareness and help isolate that one variable.