Nemeth Designs EC-135 For FSX
By Andrew Herd
28 June 2008
Helicopters have been supported in Flight Simulator since the arrival of the JetRanger in FS98, but they have always been something of a minority sport, largely because Microsoft seems to have adopted a different sort of physics for the chopper flight model, the most noticeable effect of which was that they were almost impossible to fly. I'll grant that helicopters aren't the easiest of things to fly in real life, but up to and including FS2004, to take even one of the default choppers up was to risk your virtual life and sanity, while you tried to tame the result. With a lot of practice, most simmers could manage to take off and fly a route, but very few ever got the hang of landing, myself included; which was kind of frustrating, because the one thing that Flight Simulator has always begged its users to do is to land on ships and the roofs of the custom scenery.
Then FSX came along and whatever the pros and cons of it as a sim prior to Service Pack 2, I was stunned to discover that someone at Aces had taken the trouble to work over the chopper flight engine, so that the danged things were flyable. Granted, you can't fly helicopter in FS the way you can in reality, thanks to the lack of support for the specialised control system that helicopters use, but if FSX doesn't provide a totally realistic solution, at least it provides a workable one and it isn't compulsory to spend the best part of every flight upside down.
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Eurocopter has an interesting history that would take many thousands of words to describe, but the company can trace its roots back to the dawn of flight. The present company was formed by the merger of the helicopter divisions of MBB and Aerospatiale in the mid-eighties and so it can claim lineal descent from Bleriot on the one hand, through Sud Aviation, and Messerchmitt on the other, through MBB. The EC 135 is a light twin, multi-role helicopter designed for maximum cost-efficiency, thanks to the use of state-of-the-art technology, including Full Authority Digital Electronic Control (FADEC) of the engines and maximum use of composites in the airframe. There is even a choice of engine: the EC 135T2i being powered by the Turbomeca Arrius 2B2; while the EC 135P2i uses the P&W PW206B2. The EC 135 has a unique bearingless main rotor and a low noise tail rotor system, which uses unequal blade spacing to achieve phase modulation - while there is a choice of glass or analog panels. Up to seven passengers can be carried in 'corporate shuttle' configuration, five with the VIP fit, and rescue and police versions are available.
Nemeth Designs are FS helicopter specialists and the good news for FS2004 users is that if you head over to their website, they have quite a range of freeware downloads available. The EC 135 is their most recent release and given that I haven't reviewed any of ther addons in the past and that FSX choppers are rare birds, I decided to take a look. A quick check of the Pilot Shop showed that Nemeth have four helicopter addons in there, a Kamov Ka-26 and a Sikorsky S-76 for FS2004 and a CH53E and the EC 135 for FSX.
The package is a 123 Mb download and it offers both the Turbomeca and the P&W engined variants - I couldn't find a minimum system spec, but as this isn't a particularly complex sim, it should run on any system that can run FSX. I did the review on a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo with 4 GB of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX, Windows Vista SP1 and FSX SP2 and ran most of the time at 25 - 30 fps with AutoGen set at normal density. In practice, a single-core 3.0 Ghz system with a couple of gigs of RAM and a 512 Mb video card is the minimum system spec for FSX, anything less than that meaning that too many display options have to be turned off to make running FSX worthwhile. Installation wasn't a problem, other than the need to enter a key code.
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Once the installation was done, a check of the Start Menu showed a new Nemeth Designs program group, with links to a 37 page pdf manual, an uninstall icon and to a paint kit. Although it is possible to firewall and go, the manual repays a thorough read, as most of the systems in the real helicopters have been simulated and three different panels are provided, so the package has quite a lot to offer, even if the EC 135 is about as automated as a chopper can get. Just about the only real trap for the unwary is that the active and standby frequencies on the radios are the opposite way around to the way you would expect, i.e. the active frequency is 'below' the standby frequency. Apart from that, for all that the manual is fairly brief and only contains three pages of checklists, it tells you more or less everything you need to know.
The addon contains three variants of the chopper: the EC 135 P1 passenger version; the EC 135 T1 VIP; and the EC 135 T1 ambulance version. Within that selection you get three slightly different cockpits: the passenger variants have a Cockpit Display System (CDS)/analog panel; the VIP T1s have a Central Panel Display System) CPDS/ Flight Control Display System (FCDS) panel; and the T1 ambulances have a CPDS/analog fit. In practice this doesn't mean that you have to do an awful lot of thinking each time you switch version, because all the panels have more or less the same logic to them.
Loading up FSX, the three different variants have represented in a total of half a dozen liveries. If you discount the sombre blue of the German registered P&W engined passenger version, the liveries are all quite colorful, although if you click the 'details' button it always seem to bring up the first version in the list, without any accompanying text, which is a small matter, but could do with fixing. The EC 135 is a very good-looking machine and Nemeth's visual model does it justice, with oodles of detail and all the usual animations, including opening doors - there don't seem to be any instructions on how to do this in the manual, but if you click on the handles, everything opens. The only other animation worth mentioning is that the EC 135 generates a choking cloud of black smoke if you pull the mixture. The textures are all good and I couldn't spot any gaps or bleed-through worth mentioning.
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There isn't a 2D panel of any description, the addon being designed to be flown from the virtual cockpit (VC). Nemeth have provided several different camera views, which can be cycled through using the A key, including left and right hand seats, the console, the overhead, and four other views, mostly of the interior. The panel isn't at all bad, but it suffers from a problem common to a lot of black FS panels, which is that it appears a bit two dimensional - this seems to be a side-effect of the FSX lighting engine, because if you zoom in close enough there is lots of three dimensional detail there. On the other hand, parts of the VC are exceptionally well done, to look at, for example the pedestal, as you can see in the screenshot at left in the middle row. This 'good in parts' theme continues as your eye wanders around the cockpit: the gauges are best described as 'default planes plus', more than a few of the controls are just eye-candy and the half the stuff you can see in the screenshot of the pedestal isn't functional, including the radio keypad and the monitoring system, which is a shame, and it would be good to see some of this operational in a later upgrade, as it would catapult the EC 135 into a class of its own. The GPS you can see in that shot appears to be the default unit, shoehorned into a space that it does not quite fit, but as long as you aren't expecting a complete systems simulation, the overall effect is perfectly acceptable and the panel is way, way better than say the EH101 that comes with Acceleration and significantly better than the default JetRanger. I guess the best way of describing the panel is that there is enough to keep you interested, but this is not the definitive FS chopper and fans of procedural sims need not apply; the Level D 767 with an egg-beater on top, this is not.
The flight model is convincing and the EC 135 can be flown using a standard yoke and pedals, just like the Bell. I don't have much FS helicopter time, but I managed to take off and land it where I wanted it to go, as well as doing all the standard stuff like hover-taxiing. No, it isn't quite like flying a real chopper - nothing is - but it is about as good as you are going to get within the limitations of Flight Simulator. Until FS supports the cyclic/collective system used to control helicopters and someone builds the appropriate hardware, the best we will get is an approximation to what it is like to fly a chopper; but the EC 135 is good enough.
Verdict? As I said above, not the definitive chopper for FS, but the EC 135 is a good addon and it is certainly worth the money. There aren't that many civilian helicopters available as addons for FSX and this one is definitely worth a look.
Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com
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