PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Bell 430 vs A109S
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Old 19th Jan 2011, 00:54
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Shawn Coyle
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Philadelphia PA
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There is only one sim for the Bell 430 - at Flight Safety in Fort Worth. You would want to make sure that it faithfully duplicates the performance in the flight manual.
The way to check if the sim is representative is to take the flight manual and find some realistic scenario in terms of weight, pressure altitude and OAT where it shows the helicopter can just make the profile shown. Then try that in the sim - if the sim shows no performance problem (i.e. lots of power margin or lots of climb at the limiting conditions) then you can form your own opinions as to the relevance of the sim. Try it for roof top heliports, or ground level helipads, not just runways.
Since Bell has stopped production of the 430, I doubt there is any interest in putting a training mode switch into the machine to let you do real OEI / CAT A training.
What about the new Agusta machine that's halfway between the A109 and the AW139???
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