Firstly, congrats to the FlyInside team for making this helicopter. The Bell 47 is my favourite helicopter of all time, and it’s great to see any helicopter in MSFS well before Asobo got around to providing them. To top it off, you went with one of the contenders in a two-horse race for the most iconic helicopter in history to date (the other being the UH-1 Iroquois).
While most of the things in my wishlist are already noted by other sim pilots, in progress (floats?), or slated for work later on (paint kit), there’s one thing that just seems to be missing something, to me at least.
Now don’t get me wrong, the sounds are fantastic, as others have mentioned, the sounds of startup and shutdown, and the bite of the rotor as the aircraft turns are fantastic. There’s just one thing to my ear that seems to be missing - the whine of the engine, that wonderful midrange droning that you recognise as a Bell 47 approaches you in real life, the one that was captured so well in the TV shows of long ago, like MASH*, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and Whirlybirds, and basically went on to become the stock standard helicopter sound for a lot of TV (I can remember watching shows where they used it with footage of a JetRanger… guh).
Maybe it’s just my hearing isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t hear it in any position inside of the helicopter nor outside (sometimes I wonder if I’m hearing a JetRanger engine given the old Lycoming piston engine whine is that absent).
I put the question to those of you who’ve flown in the aircraft or been around the real thing, is that something that you only hear from a fixed point as the aircraft moves around you, or am I actually onto something?
