Sometimes you just have to take a picture

[tango234]

All I can say is well done to Jason Rogers, the Mi-8 repaints are superb!

[miljan]

Does SBAI Mi-8 require some converting to work with p3d?

[tango234]

It does-not too much, though I have not managed to fully optimise mine yet.

There are the rotors of course, which were easy enough. I ran into trouble with the chocks and engine covers-they appeared in open space in front of the helicopters on the Mi8T models (the more recent Mi-8MT models did not have this issue). I just deleted those parts rather than spend too much time on them, though the fix is probably not too hard. The light effects under the nose also need to be sorted out.

The animations didn't work properly (for me at least) without changing the xml code. I found that the xml code that the converted NBAI AH-64 uses for its takeoff works reasonably well at least for the taxi/takeoff phases. The helicopter doesn't lean forward well using that code however, so either some different xml is needed or changing the animation transformations themselves which I really want to avoid!

[jgowing]

What are landings like? Is there any scope to avoid special afcad files?

Jon G

[tango234]

So far I have only seen landings on the helicopter runway of the basic Tbilisi/Lochini AB scenery I'm putting together. It comes in slowly, hits the runway, and is immediately at taxi speed ready for turning off when it can. I would absolutely recommend dedicated AFDs because the approach speed is incredibly slow and as such the time taken between it being given landing clearance and actually clearing the runway is very long if it is a commercial/full size runway. As such, if anything faster gets stuck behind it it will have to go around, maybe more than once.

I have not tried it yet with converted versions of the AFDs included in the SBAI packages.