Review of Aerofly

Aerofly has great graphics, but it needs a 3D graphics card to get the most out of it. My computer is a 200MHz Pentium with a Voodoo 2 graphics card. This is now fairly old hat so most new machines should handle it.

It uses you own transmitter with an interface cable that plugs into a spare serial port, I didn't have one so I replaced my external modem which used a serial port with an internal one.

It installs easily and you can be up and running pretty quickly.

The simulator assumes a separate channel for each function ( e.g. roll). This means that if you intend to us CCPM for your heli, you will have to use a separate set up for the simulator.

The actual simulation is pretty good, it is certainly good enough to learn to fly, so that you have a good chance of flying you rmodel without crashing, and it lets you move on to circuits and aerobatics.

Some things are not very precise:

The autorotation modeling still leaves you with tail rotor control, which is not the case for most helis.
During pirouettes the helicopter just goes around at a constant speed for a given tail input, my ECO starts slow and then acelerates which is what you would expect.

My only other critisism is that the control setup is not in real units. For instance the pitch setting is in % rather than degrees. This means that you cannot copy a simulator setup to a model or vice versa. Some other simulators do use real units, so would be more useful in this respect.

Different models can be modelled simply by putting things in like , rotor diameter, rotor weight e.t.c.

I comes with a small range of models, fixed wing and helicopters. You can download other models and scenary from various places on the web. You can also get a program to design your own graphics for models and scenary.

I have not used any other simulators, so I cannot compare the performance.

Go and see the Aerofly site : http://www.aerofly.de where you can download a non-interactive demo.

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