HORNET BAY
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#FLIGHT MODEL — 2 ENTRIES

Steady rotors: helicopters hold their level now c93570d

FIXFLIGHT MODEL NAVY 701 in steady level cruise over the Pacific, rotor disc blurred

Sharp eyes again: after the vertical climb, helicopters used to porpoise their way along the route — easing up and down between waypoints that each carried a slightly different altitude, with a hover-wobble layered on top. Fixed from three directions:

  1. One altitude, held. The cruise is flown at a single flight level — waypoint heights no longer tug the airframe up and down. Descent is saved for the final leg and the landing, exactly as it should be.
  2. The wobble stays in the hover. The little sinusoidal bob now only plays during the landing settle — the climb and the cruise are rock steady. Measured in flight: less than half a metre of spread across an entire circuit.
  3. K-MAN gets more sky. His police orbit over the city sat one metre above the tallest hill’s ground clearance, so the terrain floor kept kicking him upward. The orbit moves to 420 metres — comfortably over everything San Francisco can grow.

Straight up, then level: the helicopter book gets rewritten 715f0f9

FEATUREFLIGHT MODEL NAVY 701, the cruiser's SH-60 Seahawk, levelling at cruise altitude after a vertical climb off the aft deck — USS Gettysburg steaming below

Two flight-model matters settled this push, both spotted by pilots watching the traffic instead of flying it:

  1. Helicopters now fly like helicopters. The old model popped a few feet off the pad and then climbed while it travelled, rotor disc tilted like it was impatient to be somewhere. Not any more: NAVY 701, the shuttle birds and K-MAN now lift vertically to their cruise altitude — tracking the deck beneath them as they rise — level off, fly the leg at that altitude, and only descend when it’s time to land, gliding down toward the spot on the final leg. Watch the cruiser’s Seahawk on a circuit and you’ll see the whole profile: straight up, level across, slide down, settle.
  2. Everyone rolls into the turn now. An audit of every AI pilot in the bay — airliners, bandits, the air wing, the helicopters — found several rolling away from their turns, banked left while heading right. The sign convention is now proven, documented and fixed in all four steering classes: a right turn banks right, everywhere. The pattern over the carrier finally looks like a pattern, not a coin rolling on its edge.