Changelog

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UPDATE — v0.4.8 | 15 October 2026

v0.4.8 needs DayZ 1.30 and will not load on 1.29. Downgrading to v0.4.7 is not supported (saves made by v0.4.8 won’t load correctly on older versions). Keep a copy of your server’s storage and CZAutoz_Heli folder before you update if you might want to go back.

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✨ New features

• New Four parts fit in the helicopter’s Engine attachments, next to the battery. Details
  • Igniter Plug — the engine will not start without one. Every start wears it a little, and a worn plug sometimes fails to light the engine (you hear the starter crank and stop).
  • Hydraulic Hoses — without them the controls become very heavy and the hydraulic fluid drains away. Damaged hoses leak while the rotor turns.
  • Avionics Computer — runs the autopilot, Auto Hover, radar (on the HUD and the cockpit radar screen), terrain warning, GPS (the Pilot Panel map and the cockpit GPS screen), chin camera, the bottom-left HUD, and the radar altimeter and navigation needles on the cockpit instruments. Without it they all stay off, but the helicopter can still be flown by hand.
  • Camera Pod — on helicopters with a chin camera. Without it the camera does not work, and on six of them the camera ball disappears from the outside of the aircraft.
• New Two fluids are poured in from their cans, like fuel — hold the can at the helicopter’s refuel point with the rotor stopped and hold Pour turbine oil or Pour hydraulic fluid. One 1 L can fills a helicopter in about ten seconds, and a part-used can keeps what is left.
  • Turbine Oil — the engine will not start with none, and burns it slowly while running (a full fill lasts 4 hours of running by default). Low oil costs some engine power; running dry in flight costs a lot and wears the engine out in about five minutes.
  • Hydraulic Fluid — below a quarter the controls get heavy; empty, they are very heavy.
• New Check fluids and parts at the refuel point shows both fluid levels and the state of every fitted part.
• New Parts wear with the helicopter — hits and crashes on the engine wear the igniter plug and hoses, hits on the body wear the avionics computer and camera pod. Mend the hoses with duct tape, and the igniter plug, avionics computer and camera pod with an electronic repair kit.
• New Six new items with their own models: CZ_HeliIgniterPlug, CZ_HeliHydraulicHoses, CZ_HeliAvionicsComputer, CZ_HeliCameraPod, CZ_HeliTurbineOil and CZ_HeliHydraulicFluid. Each one is held in the hands properly. types.xml entries
• New Every part can be switched off in the new parts section of mod_config.json or the Helicopter Parts group in the Admin Panel, and parts.turbineOilHours sets how long a fill of oil lasts. Details
• New Helicopters already on your server get the parts once — the first time each saved helicopter loads after the update, any missing part is fitted for free and both fluids are full. Turn parts.fitExistingEnabled off before updating if players should find the parts themselves. Newly spawned helicopters arrive without parts (but with both fluids full), like the battery.
• New The server files include the parts — types.xml entries, prices in all three trader files, bought helicopters (Expansion Market and TraderPlus) arriving with every part fitted, and a new cfgspawnabletypes.xml so helicopters your server spawns can come with a battery and parts. Details
• Changed The Admin Panel’s Repair and Repair All also fit any missing part and fill both fluids. The Barrel Helicopter needs none of the new parts.

• New Engines can catch fire — a badly damaged engine, or one running with no turbine oil, can catch fire: flames at the engine, a fire tone for the crew and ENGINE FIRE on the damage panel. Left alone it burns the engine out in about a minute and a half, then spreads, and the helicopter is lost a few minutes later. Landing in water puts it out.
• New The fire handle — while the engine is on fire, anyone aboard can use Pull fire handle: the pilot and co-pilot hold it, and every other seat (or a player walking in the cabin) pulls it with one press. The built-in fire bottle puts the fire out and shuts the engine down. It works once; an engine repair with the repair kit (or the Admin Panel’s Repair) refills it, and FIRE BOTTLE EMPTY shows until then. Turn engine fires off with parts.engineFireEnabled.

• New Standing under a working helicopter is felt — your camera shakes near a low helicopter that is lifting, and standing up in the strongest part of a medium or heavy helicopter’s downwash makes you stumble (at most once every few seconds, with no blackout and nothing dropped). Crouch or go prone and you stay on your feet, the way real crews approach a helicopter, so pickups in a hover work as normal. The small helicopters only shake your camera. crew.downwashEffect sets it: 0 off, 1 camera shake only, 2 shake and stumble.

• New Target lock — left click on a player, AI, infected, animal or vehicle and the camera locks on and follows it; the HUD says what it has locked (LOCK PERSON, INFECTED, ANIMAL or VEHICLE) and a red box closes in round the target, so a lock always looks different from a marked point. It only locks onto what the camera can actually see, never through a wall. The pilot and co-pilot both follow it. Turn it off with crew.chinCameraLock.

• New Twelve damage panel styles — each matches the HUD style with the same number, so the top-left panel and the bottom-left HUD can share one look. crew.damagePanelStyle picks one; 0 keeps Classic, and the new 13 simply follows the HUD style of the helicopter you are in.
• New A HUD style and damage panel for each helicopter — give any helicopter its own HUD with hud.style and its own damage panel with hud.damagePanelStyle in its config file, or HUD Style (this aircraft) and Damage Panel Style (this aircraft) in the Admin Panel. 0 keeps the server’s choice for both. Details
• New OIL and HYD levels on every damage panel, and a caution line that appears only when something is wrong — for example “OIL LOW / NO HOSES / AVIONICS OUT”. The panel stays up when the avionics computer is out.
• New The health bar flashes red below 25%.
• Changed HUD size in the O menu now also sizes the damage panel and the key prompts on the left, not just the bottom-left HUD.
• Changed The Start Engine prompt says which part is stopping a start (for example “Igniter plug missing — can’t start”), and the crew get a message the moment the hydraulics, the oil or the avionics fail in flight.
• Changed On the UH-1H the engine oil pressure and temperature gauges follow the oil level.

• New Co-pilot flying is back — Transfer Flight Control (T) hands the controls between the pilot and co-pilot without anyone moving seats, and hands them back the same way. If the pilot gets out on the ground while the co-pilot is seated, the co-pilot takes over and the engine keeps running.

⚠️ DayZ 1.30 limitation — co-pilot flying: Bohemia’s DayZ only lets the pilot seat control a helicopter from the player’s own PC. The co-pilot seat can’t, so when the co-pilot flies, the helicopter is flown by the server instead. Because of this the co-pilot may not get the same smoothness and quick response as the pilot. We suggest you always fly from the main pilot seat for the smoothest, most responsive flying.

• New Pilots sit like pilots — the pilot and co-pilot hold their own helicopter’s cyclic and collective instead of a car steering wheel, with their feet placed for each cockpit, and the collective moves as they climb and descend. Where a control is out of reach, that hand rests on the leg. The hands hold their grip but can’t follow the stick and lever as they move: DayZ lets only one mod on a server add to or change the player animation graph, so we can’t animate them that way.
• New Passengers sit upright with their hands on their thighs, posed for each seat of each helicopter.
• Changed The SA342M Gazelle is a two-seater — pilot and co-pilot. Nobody fits on its slim rear bench, so its spare battery, repair kit, radio and fuel drum now sit there when fitted.
• Changed The hotbar is hidden for the pilot and co-pilot on every HUD style. The inventory screen’s own hotbar row is unchanged.

• New Real ruined tyres — a destroyed helicopter wheel is swapped for a burst, deflated model with a burst sound, and it can be swapped back for a good wheel like any other.
• Changed Retexture packs with their own wheel classes need a burst partner for each wheel on DayZ 1.30 (<wheel class>_Ruined), or a destroyed wheel can’t swap. The updated retexture example and the retexturing page show how; packs that only repaint helicopters and doors need nothing.

• New A proper taped-on GPS — the flat yellow box is now a rugged handheld GPS strapped on with duct tape, with the map in the middle of its screen.

• New Nasdara (DayZ 1.30’s new map) has its own satellite map on the cockpit GPS screens, the Pilot Panel map and the Admin Panel map, made from the game’s own satellite images like every other map.

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⚙️ Improvements

• Changed Smoother flying on DayZ 1.30 — 1.30 corrects a flying helicopter far more often than 1.29 did; each correction is now repaired straight away, so setbacks and judder are rare for the pilot, including at high speed and outside the map edge. A brief jump can still happen now and then, mostly right after the game stutters while loading the map.
• Changed Smooth for everyone riding along — passengers, players walking in the cabin and a co-pilot who isn’t at the controls no longer feel the helicopter shake or rumble as it tilts, turns or pivots, and it moves smoothly for players watching from outside. Flying from the co-pilot seat is different: see the co-pilot note under Crew and seats.
• Changed Taxiing turns tighter again — helicopter tyres are back to the grip of heavy vehicles, and the swivelling nose and tail wheels follow the aircraft instead of steering, so the pilot’s hands and the cyclic sticks no longer twist or jitter while you taxi the Ospreys.
• Changed The Ospreys’ autopilot is safer on hilly take-offs — it climbs steeper over rising ground after take-off, sees player bases, tents and tall bushes on the way, goes around over a shorter distance and can fly a steeper approach before giving up on a runway landing.
• Changed Wind changes stay in step on the server and every PC when wind physics is on.

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🔧 Fixes

• Fixed The rotor stalled, then jumped for about ten seconds after starting the engine on the ground
• Fixed A flying helicopter dragged a huge sand cloud behind it on Nasdara — DayZ 1.30 gives every vehicle a dust trail at speed, even off the ground. Helicopters no longer use it; the rotor downwash dust is unchanged.
• Fixed Parked helicopters rocked gently on their wheels — the Black Hawk, Merlin, both Chinooks, the Mi-24 and the Ospreys now sit still
• Fixed The Barrel Helicopter’s nose wheel could sink into the ground on a hard nose-first landing
• Fixed Footsteps on helicopter floors were silent on DayZ 1.30
• Fixed The MH-60L’s tape gauges sat behind the instrument face
• Fixed The Radar Display HUD (style 11) had no nacelle angle on the Ospreys, unlike every other HUD style
• Fixed The HUD’s Auto Hover / autopilot off icon showed on servers that switch both of them off
• Fixed The DayZ 1.30 horn could be used in helicopters
• Fixed Admin Panel: the key binding boxes now resize with the panel, Your Role stays translated, and a custom accent colour now also colours the tab underline

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⚠️ Known limitations

• On the AW101 Merlin and the Mi-24 the camera housing stays in place when the camera pod is taken out (the camera still stops working). This will be fixed once we’re back from holiday.
• Every seat in every helicopter now has its own sitting pose, but the right leg in each seat still needs work. A rework of the legs, knees and feet is coming in v0.4.9.

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UPDATE — v0.4.7 | 11 October 2026

Downgrading to v0.4.6 is not supported (saves made by v0.4.7 won’t load correctly on older versions). Keep a copy of your server’s storage and CZAutoz_Heli folder before you update if you might want to go back.

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✨ New features

• New The runway creator. In the admin panel, Presets → Runways → Mark new runway (aim mode) closes the panel and puts you in a free camera with on-screen steps: fly over to one end of the runway and left click, then the other end and left click again. The runway saves itself and you are put back to your character. Backspace undoes the first end (or cancels if none is marked yet) and Delete cancels. A runway must be 400 to 8000 m long, a map holds up to 40, and it is drawn green (long enough for a full aeroplane landing: about 470 m or more on the default Osprey settings, more if you raise the Ospreys’ wing stall speed; the colour only checks length, so trees or buildings before the runway can still mean a short-field landing), amber (shorter: short-field landings and short take-offs) or red (can’t be saved) while you mark it. Nothing is built in for any map, so it works on any map and airfield you mark. Runways belong to the map they were marked on, so switching maps keeps each map’s own. Details
• New Runway landings. With auto-land on, on trips of 2 km or more to a destination within about 1.2 km of a marked runway, the CV-22B or MV-22B lands on the runway like an aeroplane: it picks the end with the clearer way in, flies a short, steady path onto the centre line, comes in on the wing at about 145 knots on the default settings (a little slower on runways shorter than about 900 m), touches down and rolls out the way a pilot would — power at idle, slowing steadily so it stops with room to taxi off before the far end — then taxis clear of the runway (or stops on it if there is nowhere safe to go) and hands you the controls with the engine running. On a long trip to a runway it keeps its speed up and slows down over the last 10 km or so. It flies a curved approach down a valley when hills block the straight-in, touches down beyond trees, buildings or vehicles near the start of the runway, and goes around for one more try if the approach goes wrong before landing as a helicopter. If the pilot gets up mid-landing it still finishes. It needs room to line up — about 3.5 km of flying from a hover (nearer 3 km once it is moving at speed, up to 4 km for a valley approach), or 1.5 km if it is already flying on the wing — otherwise it lands as a helicopter. Details
• New Short-field landings on shorter runways — a slower approach with the nacelles part-way up, as slow as about 60–75 knots on the shortest strips, on as little as about 110 m of clear runway
• New Runway take-offs. With auto take-off on, engage the autopilot on the ground with the gear down within about 600 m of a marked runway, for a trip of 3 km or more: the Osprey starts the engine, picks the end it can climb away from, taxis out like a car — round trees, buildings, fences and vehicles, over roads, slabs and bushes, reversing or making a three-point turn where it has to and stopping for people, animals and vehicles — lines up at the very start of the runway, rolls at full power (a short take-off with the nacelles part-way up on a short runway, or where the climb-out past the end is steep) and climbs away, raises the gear at about 30 m and carries on to your destination. Boxed in, it hops onto the runway as a helicopter (needs auto-land) or takes off from where it is and tells you why. Blocked for 45 seconds, it hands you the controls; unable to lift off in time, it brakes to a stop and hands back

• New Arrivals and landings. Each helicopter (each paint version separately) learns from its own arrivals — types that overshoot the destination slow down earlier, types that stop neatly are allowed a quicker approach — and from how hard its auto-landings touch down
• New Tall obstacles. It remembers anything tall on each map, such as towers and tall buildings, and climbs for them early on later trips, and forgets one that has gone
• New Runways and taxi routes. The Ospreys learn each runway end — what stands along the approach and climb-out, how much runway a take-off needs, and where to aim the touchdown — and remember taxi routes that worked
• New What it learns is kept in CZAutoz_Heli\AutopilotLearning\ (autopilot_learning.json, runway_learning.json, taxi_learning.json). Details

• New A working nose camera on the CV-22B and MV-22B Ospreys, the MH-47G, the MD500, the MH-6, the Gazelle, the Merlin, the Blackhawk and the Mi-24. Press J in the pilot or co-pilot seat to look through it. The seat flying the aircraft can use it while Auto Hover, the autopilot or an auto-landing holds the aircraft, and one person uses it at a time. Details
• New Day, night vision and real thermal — U switches between DAY, NV, white hot, black hot, red hot (players’ bare skin and animals in red) and fusion (a purple world with heat in orange and yellow). Players show by their heat up to about 1.5 km away, infected and animals around where you look, and vehicles with their engine running stay warm for about 3 minutes after they stop
• New Zoom 1–40× on the mouse wheel or Page Up / Page Down, and mark a point with a left click — the camera locks onto it, and the pilot and co-pilot both see a TARGET marker with its distance until it is cleared (middle mouse or Y)
• New A camera spotlight — L in the camera shines a self-focusing searchlight up to about 1 km wherever the camera points. Everyone nearby sees it
• New The camera suffers with the aircraft — glitches, noise and drop-outs as it is damaged, and NO SIGNAL when ruined or without power. On six aircraft the camera on the outside turns with you (side to side only on the Gazelle), and others see it move

• New The gauges work in every cockpit — airspeed, altitude, climb rate and, where the aircraft has them, the artificial horizon, heading, radar altimeter and engine gauges. Gyros spin up and run down, and needles shake on a badly damaged aircraft. Details
• New A GPS screen in every helicopter, with a satellite chart of 35 maps, your position and your waypoint — or the autopilot’s destination while it is flying. Set a waypoint with G. It flickers and fills with static as it is damaged
• Changed The dashboard lights have their own switch on I — they used to come on with the landing light. They light the panel and run the GPS, gauges, radar and camera off the battery before the engine is started
• New Cockpit radar on the Merlin, the Blackhawk, the MH-47G and both Ospreys: 60° either side of the nose, 2 km by default, showing running or moving vehicles, helicopters and boats out to the full range and moving people on foot within about 60% of it (about 1.2 km by default), with a ping for each new contact
• New Radar warning (RWR) — on the five radar aircraft, the pilot and co-pilot are told when another helicopter’s radar has them, with the direction, while their own radar has power
• New Terrain warnings (TAWS) — TERRAIN, OBSTACLE, SINK RATE and PULL UP with warning tones, kept quiet near the ground, just after take-off, at low speed and while the autopilot lands

• Changed The Pilot Panel replaces the separate autopilot map (P) and settings window (O) — one window with MAP, SETTINGS and CAMERA tabs. P opens the map to set the autopilot (pilot only), the new G opens it for GPS waypoints (pilot and co-pilot) and O opens Settings. It works from any seat in a helicopter or its cabin, but no longer on foot (the Tracker Receiver still opens its own map anywhere), and all your old settings are kept. The map is a satellite picture on the 35 supported maps, showing your helicopter, the runways, your waypoint and the autopilot’s destination — never other aircraft. It no longer drags or resizes, and it remembers its zoom. The map now needs power: turn on the dashboard lights (I) or start the engine to see it, set a waypoint, or set and engage the autopilot. Details
• New New personal settings — HUD units (knots/feet or km/h/metres), HUD size and opacity, instrument vibration, and separate alert and radar volume (Normal, Low or Off)
• New Camera distance per helicopter type, from 60% to 150% of the server’s setting

• New Twelve new HUD styles — Glass Cockpit, Glass Compact, Steam Gauges, Floating Arcs, Tactical HMD, Cluster Ring, Flight Strip, Flight Card, Big Numbers, Warning Panel, Radar Display and Hybrid. The server chooses one for everyone with crew.hudStyle; 0 keeps the Classic HUD
• Changed Start/Stop Engine (HOLD) joins the cockpit action list, and Start/Stop Engine and Get out (HOLD) show a progress bar while you hold them

• New Helicopter tracker — hide a GPS Tracker on someone’s helicopter (an 8-second hold) and follow it on a Tracker Receiver: it reports roughly where the aircraft is every 90 seconds for about 2 hours. The crew hear static each time it transmits and are warned of an UNKNOWN TRANSMITTER ON BOARD after 10 minutes of flying, and a Signal Scanner finds it and lets them take it. Admins see and can remove trackers. Details
• New Handheld Radar — a portable 9V ground radar that shows running or moving vehicles, helicopters and boats, and people moving on foot, out to about 1.2 km, and warns you when a helicopter radar has you. Details

• New Crash explosions — a helicopter that hits something on land at 50 knots or more blows up on the spot, bigger with more fuel aboard, hurting people close by. A car can’t set off a parked one, and shooting a helicopter never makes it explode. Details
• Changed Wreck fires burn through the airframe — instead of simply dying down to embers, they now start at the fuel tank and engine, spread along the body, peak, cook off and blacken the wreck step by step before dying to embers

• New Nacelle snap — hold B and left click to swing an Osprey’s nacelles all the way forward or all the way up
• New Hand-flown rolling take-offs lift the nose for you — rolling on its wheels in aeroplane mode with the collective up, an Osprey raises its nose to about 7° as it reaches flying speed. Hold the nose down to stop it

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⚙️ Improvements

• Changed The autopilot finds a way round hills — on longer trips, when a ridge ahead would mean a big climb, it heads up to 60° to either side to go round it, then turns back towards the destination. It still climbs over trees and buildings
• Changed Smoother autopilot arrivals — each type learns how early to slow down, so it arrives steadily instead of with a fast run-in and a hard pull-up
• Changed The autopilot keeps flying when the pilot gets up, as long as someone is still aboard, and lands if auto-land is on
• Changed The Ospreys’ aeroplane cruise holds speed for longer and slows later and more firmly. A new destination behind you is reached by banking round on the wing when the new trip is long enough
• Changed The autopilot looks after the lights — it switches the navigation and dashboard lights on only when it is really dark, not by the clock, uses the landing light on the way down after dark, and switches off only the lights it switched on
• Changed Batteries last much longer — a parked helicopter with its lights on runs about 33 minutes instead of about 4, the engine carries the lights while it runs, and a flat battery is full again after about 8 minutes of running. Servers on the old defaults move to the new ones automatically; values you changed are kept
• Changed The Ospreys taxi like cars — on their wheels they have to roll to turn and cannot pivot on the spot; other helicopters still can. Reversing, Q/E steer like a car in reverse
• Changed Stronger wheel brakes on the Ospreys — holding S stops them hard from landing speed without tipping onto the nose, and slows them gently at taxi speed
• Changed The Ospreys no longer raise their landing gear by themselves after a manual take-off — the gear is the pilot’s to raise and lower, so lower it yourself for a hand-flown landing. The autopilot still raises it in the climb and lowers it for landing
• Changed The Ospreys’ power on the wing above the cruise setting is now the same on every server — where they were short of power they now reach top speed much quicker and can hold a steep climb at full power. Helicopters also now fly the same on every server
• Changed The Ospreys’ height hold on the wing no longer fights a deliberate climb or dive — in Simple mode, set the nose well up or well down and it keeps climbing or diving; let go with the nose near level and it holds the height as before
• Changed Auto Hover holds exactly where you pressed it — no settle or jump as it engages — and holds its height exactly, with a slow self-correcting trim that resets when you touch the collective
• Changed Low, fast flight keeps full power and handling close to the ground — from about 16 knots, and fully by about 29 knots, the near-ground power cut, the damped controls and the vertical damping no longer apply, so low passes and run-on landings feel like normal flight
• Changed A helicopter only switches to ground handling once all its wheels are down — one wheel touching, as on a slope or a pinnacle, keeps the flight controls live
• Changed Auto-land and the abandoned-helicopter landing — if the gear is not down it waits at 6 m, and if the gear still has not come down after 16 seconds it is lowered at once, the final let-down settles the aircraft firmly onto the ground instead of hovering just above it, and if it drifts off the landing spot on the way down it climbs back gently instead of at full power
• Changed Rotor, engine, start-up and blade-slap sounds move with the helicopter instead of trailing behind it at speed
• Changed Downwash spray on water sits under each rotor (two on the Chinooks and Ospreys) and stops for a destroyed rotor
• Changed Rotor blades snap sooner — on trees, walls, the ground or water once the rotor is above about 30% of its speed, spinning up or winding down (was 50%)
• Changed Lighter on PCs — every helicopter has simpler versions for long range, and cockpits are drawn simply at a distance
• Changed Lighter on the server — a wreck that comes to rest with nobody near it goes to sleep, even while it burns
• Changed The controls list is tidier — the mod’s keys are grouped and renamed (Pilot Panel: …, Lights: …, Nacelles: …, Chin Camera: …)
• Changed Classic HUD — the autopilot has its own blue icon and the ‘off’ icon is new art, the HUD (every style) and the damage panel hide while the inventory is open, the cockpit hint rows show the key you really have bound instead of a fixed F, and the damage panel has a dashboard-lights icon
• Changed Mod messages show the CZ Autoz icon
• Changed Inventory — new pictures for empty slots (cockpit and cabin doors, wheels, battery, storage) and new category icons on every helicopter, the chassis category on helicopters with wheels is called Landing Gear, and the extra storage slots are named Extra Storage 1–10
• Changed Shooting out a door’s window no longer destroys the whole door
• Changed The Barrel Helicopter’s cage is one colour on every variant
• Changed The Barrel Helicopter Assembly Wrench has working sounds

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🔧 Fixes

• Fixed A rare server crash on busy servers (most likely with 100+ player slots) while a helicopter was flying
• Fixed Batteries showed full in the inventory while they were really flat, and lights left on at a restart drained parked batteries — helicopters now come back from a restart with their lights off
• Fixed Switching between the pilot and co-pilot seats did not work. They swap directly again on most helicopters. On the Merlin, both Ospreys and the Mi-24 the pilot and co-pilot get out and back in to change over; the cabin and rear seats on every helicopter still swap as before
• Fixed A brief jolt or stutter while the landing gear or the rear ramp moved
• Fixed Middle collective now holds your height close to the ground — the ground cushion used to float a hovering helicopter up on its own (the Ospreys to about 17 m)
• Fixed An Osprey would not taxi forward on W at middle collective — W pressed the nose wheel into the ground instead of rolling it. At taxi speeds W now rolls it forward
• Fixed An Osprey low to the ground with its nacelles forward pushed itself back up to about 50 ft
• Fixed Navigation lights, rotor blades, the ramp and the landing gear now move at the same speed on every PC and server session, in step with their sounds
• Fixed On some servers an Osprey in a nacelles-forward rolling take-off lifted off its wheels far too early (around 15 knots) — it now stays on its wheels until about 100 knots
• Fixed Q/E kept turning a helicopter on its wheels after you let go — the nose wheel now straightens
• Fixed A slow car bumping a parked helicopter counted as a crash
• Fixed After a restart, open doors and ramps had an invisible wall, and some door parts (like the Mi-24’s lower side doors) were invisible until opened
• Fixed Getting out of the Mi-24’s rear cabin seats used the get-out animation’s direction and, in flight, left you attached to the aircraft. You are now put straight outside at that seat’s side door — on the ground beside it, or in the air falling clear
• Fixed With the crew still seated, a destroyed helicopter’s rotor and engine kept sounding — they now fade out and the blades stop
• Fixed Dashboard lights could flicker or go dark in flight
• Fixed Small model and cockpit-lighting fixes across the fleet
• Fixed The Barrel Helicopter’s second headlight; on the CH-47D, MH-47G and Barrel Helicopter the right lamp only glows with its own bulb fitted
• Fixed The CH-47D’s cabin window can be opened from inside the cabin
• Fixed Door damage looks could reset to undamaged
• Fixed The Ospreys’ rear wheels sat slightly in the ground
• Fixed An Osprey starting to taxi from a standstill could stick at a crawl however hard it was driven
• Fixed Tilting an Osprey’s nacelles with B + scroll could miss a press
• Fixed Turning the autopilot off at speed briefly pitched the nose up
• Fixed After dying inside a helicopter, the pause menu on the death screen closed as soon as it opened

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📋 Server owner notes

• Update the server and every client together. Configs are updated in place: new settings are added with their defaults and everything you changed is kept. v0.4.6 saves load normally — downgrading to v0.4.6 is not supported (saves made by v0.4.7 won’t load correctly on older versions)
• The runway creator needs the new runways.edit permission. The owner has it, and so does the default admin role — servers updating from an earlier version get it added to their existing admin role once, automatically. Add it to any custom roles that should mark runways. Runway landings need autoPilot.autoLand on, and runway take-offs autoPilot.autoTakeOff
• New files in $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\: runways.json (your marked runways, every map) and the AutopilotLearning\ folder with autopilot_learning.json (arrivals, landings, tall obstacles), runway_learning.json (each runway end) and taxi_learning.json (taxi routes). To reset one, stop the server and delete the file. Marking a runway again, or deleting it, clears what was learned about it. A file the server can’t read is started afresh, with a copy kept in Backups (and a note in the activity log if activity logging is on)
• New global settings in mod_config.json, all in the admin panel too: crew.hudStyle (0, Classic), crew.radarRangeM (2000), crew.rwrEnabled (1), crew.tawsEnabled (1), crew.chinCameraEnabled, crew.chinCameraThermal and crew.chinCameraSpotlight (all 1; turn the chin camera, its thermal modes or its spotlight off), a tracker section (trackerEnabled, pingSeconds, blurMeters, batterySeconds, warnAfterSeconds, ownerWarnings, maxPerPlayer) and a handheldRadar section (enabled, rangeM, batteryHours, detectPlayers, detectStationaryVehicles — the last one shows parked vehicles on every radar). Details
• New per-helicopter settings: damage.burn.explodeSpeed (50 knots, 0 = never) and damage.burn.explodeRadius (12 m). Battery defaults changed: battery.chargeRate 5.0 → 1.0 and battery.lightDrain 2.0 → 0.25. If you never changed them they move to the new values; values you set yourself are kept
• New keybinds: dashLights, gpsMap, nacelleSnap, camera, cameraMode, cameraZoomIn, cameraZoomOut, cameraLock and cameraSpotlight. Key lines now accept several keys (e.g. mWheelUp,kPrior), with ,, | or ; between them (spaces are ignored, so they do not separate keys). In the admin panel, click a key row and press the key you want — mouse buttons 4 and 5 and the mouse wheel work too (Backspace = default, Esc cancels). Keys pushed by the server no longer overwrite a key the player has rebound. Transfer Flight Control is no longer listed in the admin panel or in Options → Controls (it is still coming later)
• New items for your types.xml and traders: CZ_HeliTracker, CZ_HeliTrackerReceiver, CZ_HeliSignalScanner and CZ_HandheldRadar — all optional. Details
• A cleaner activity log — it keeps to what helps with grief and rule-breaking. New: CRASH_EXPLOSION, TRACKER, RUNWAY, and parts fitted or removed now show the position. No longer written: player refuels and repairs, lights, ramps, windows, landing gear, Autohover on/off, battery warnings, ruined parts falling off, sling loads restored after a restart, the autopilot’s gear, lights and arrival detail lines, and the technical start-up and recovery lines (warnings about a corrected config value or an unreadable key line are still written). A wreck reloaded after a restart is no longer logged as destroyed again. Details
• Admin panel: more on the Stats tab (engines running, on autopilot, low fuel, wrecked, uptime, in-game time, saved runways and how much script memory the mod uses), [TRACKED] helicopters with a REMOVE button, new Helicopter Tracker and Handheld Radar groups, the whitelist retry interval in a Licence (owners only) group (only staff with admins.manage can change it), Steam IDs shortened for staff without admins.manage, the helicopter map is a satellite picture on the 35 supported maps, the battery charge and light-drain rows take decimals and the Script Log and Server RPT views are removed from the Logs tab. Details
• Thermal works alongside reskin mods — for the thermal camera the mod gives the vanilla sheep, pig, female goat and chicken named texture slots, with no textures of its own, so they look exactly as before and a mod that reskins these animals, the infected or players keeps its look. Thermal only changes the picture on the camera user’s own screen and puts everything back when it closes
• A stray CZAutoz_Helipermissions_admins_config.json left in the profile folder by an old version is removed at start-up

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⚠️ Known limitations

• The Osprey runway autopilot only uses runways marked with the runway creator — no map comes with runways built in. Mark your airfields after updating
• Very short runways get a tilted approach. Below about 470 m (on the default Osprey settings with a clear way in) the Ospreys make a slower short-field landing with the nacelles part-way up rather than a full aeroplane landing
• A runway or a destination too close to the start — less than about 3.5 km of flying to line up from a hover (nearer 3 km at speed, up to 4 km for a valley approach), or 1.5 km on the wing — gets a helicopter landing beside the runway instead, and the engage message says why
• The runway autopilot is not used while carrying a sling load — the helicopter lands or takes off as a helicopter instead
• The chin camera’s target marker is not kept through a server restart, and the camera remembers its view only for your session
• The GPS and the satellite map cover 35 maps; on any other map the GPS shows its no-signal screen and the Pilot Panel uses the normal game map
• Some animals, and vehicles that cannot be retextured, show in thermal as a glow rather than a full shape (a vehicle’s over its engine and roof), and that glow does not show in black hot. A rework of all CZ Autoz vehicles, tiers and packs to make them retexturable is coming in a future update, and the chin camera will then be updated to show their heat properly

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UPDATE — v0.4.6 | 2 October 2026

• New CH-47D Chinook — 24 seats and two big rotors, the MH-47G’s lighter sister. A hold you can stand up in, a two-part rear ramp, cockpit doors for the pilot and co-pilot, and a forward airstair on the right: the upper half folds right up out of the way and the lower half drops down flat as a step. Its cockpit side windows slide open and shut, like the Black Hawk’s. It lifts 10,000 kg on two hooks and has two landing lights. Four liveries: 1st Cavalry Division, US Army, 12th Aviation Brigade and Royal Air Force. Details
• New Mi-24 Hind — a gunship with a small troop cabin, and the fastest helicopter in the pack at 335 km/h, climbing at up to 25 knots. The pilot flies from the raised rear cockpit with the gunner ahead in the nose, each with their own door; two more ride the cabin bench, taking their seats through a door on either side. It lifts 2,400 kg on one hook. Five liveries — olive and sand, Desert, Grey, Winter and Black — and every one keeps the shark mouth. It is built to the real Hind’s size, with a 17.5 m fuselage and a 17 m main rotor. Details
• New CV-22B Osprey — the tilt-rotor. It takes off, hovers and lands as a helicopter, then tilts its nacelles forward — hold B (changeable in Options → Controls as Tilt Nacelles (hold + scroll)) and roll the mouse wheel — and flies on its wing like an aeroplane at up to about 275 knots. 22 seats and a walk-in cabin, boarded up the rear ramp or through the two-part crew door on the right, whose lower half folds down into steps. It lifts 6,800 kg on the sling: a load can only be hooked on with the nacelles at least 80% of the way up, and while one hangs below, the nacelles tilt no further than about 18° forward, whoever is flying. It has a flight model of its own: a wing that stalls, a conversion from helicopter to aeroplane that has to be flown, and a lost proprotor that rolls it toward the dead side. The HUD shows the nacelle angle. Details
• New MV-22B Osprey — the Marine Corps version of the tilt-rotor, in dark green with white Marine Corps lettering. It flies, seats 22, lifts 6,800 kg and boards through its rear ramp and crew door exactly like the CV-22B, but it is heavier — the heaviest aircraft in the mod — and carries less fuel. Details

• New Helicopters float, then sink. A helicopter in the water now floats and is slowed by the water. Over about a minute and a half it floods, settles lower and sinks. Rotor blades that touch the water at speed are destroyed. An engine whose intakes go under water floods and stops. Hitting the water damages any helicopter, whichever part touches first. Before, a helicopter with its engine off was held on the surface and the rest simply sat in the water.
• New Equipment mounts in every helicopter. Each helicopter has an Equipment section in its inventory, and kit you put there is mounted on the aircraft where you can see it, flush on a cabin wall or floor: a Helicopter Fuel Drum, a first-aid kit, a crash axe (hatchet or crowbar), the Helicopter Repair Kit or Flip Wrench, a spare Helicopter Battery, a rifle rack, a sidearm or flare-gun mount and a radio. Both Chinooks take all eight; the Merlin and both Ospreys seven; the UH-1H and Black Hawk six; the MD500 two; the MH-6, Gazelle and Mi-24 a first-aid kit; and the Barrel Helicopter a fuel drum. Rifles and pistols from other mods fit too if they are built on the game’s standard rifle and pistol classes. A mounted item can be taken back from the inventory, or straight off its mount by looking at it, unless the helicopter is locked. Details
• New Five new MH-6 Little Bird paint schemes — Desert, Woodland, Winter, Police and Rescue. Each one is its own classname — CZ_MH6_Desert, CZ_MH6_Woodland, CZ_MH6_Winter, CZ_MH6_Police and CZ_MH6_Rescue — with its own settings file in HeliConfigs, so you can tune each one on its own. Details
• Fixed The lettering on the MH-6 SWAT scheme’s tail read upside down

• Changed Faster top speeds for the six aircraft that were already out before v0.4.6. MH-6 233 → 278 km/h (126 → 150 knots), MD500 233 → 282 km/h (126 → 152 knots), SA342M Gazelle 250 → 311 km/h (135 → 168 knots), MH-60L Black Hawk 256 → 294 km/h (138 → 159 knots), AW101 Merlin 241 → 309 km/h (130 → 167 knots) and MH-47G Chinook 269 → 315 km/h (145 → 170 knots). The UH-1H and the Barrel Helicopter keep theirs. A server still on the old factory flight.maxAirspeed is moved to the new one when it updates; a value you set yourself is kept. The MH-47G’s camera.distance moves from 27 to 26 the same way, to suit its rebuild at real size
• Changed On aircraft faster than 162 knots the speed needle now goes round once per 324 knots, so it no longer sticks at full scale. The number on the dial shows your real speed
• New The autopilot flies the Ospreys as aeroplanes. On a trip longer than 5 km it takes off as a helicopter, tilts the nacelles forward once it is at least 50 m up, and cruises on the wing close to full speed, about 265 knots, far faster than the 120-knot helicopter limit, flying higher while it does — about 110 m above the ground ahead, including the ground it will cross while it turns. It then slows down on a schedule to helicopter speed by about 2.5 km from the destination, brings the nacelles back up, and arrives in a hover for the normal landing. A trip of 5 km or less is flown as a helicopter, because converting and braking again would take longer than the trip itself. Pressing Auto Hover, or the landing itself, brings it back to helicopter mode, and with a load on the sling it stays a helicopter the whole way. Losing a proprotor switches the autopilot off and leaves the nacelles where they are, for the pilot to fly
• New On the wing, the Ospreys’ collective is the throttle, like the real V-22’s thrust lever. Once the nacelles are forward, the climb and descend keys move a lever that stays where you leave it, for every pilot, whatever their Collective Hold setting, and the needle on the collective dial shows where it sits. Centred is cruise power, about 246 knots. Up is full power, about 275 knots on both, just under the airspeed limit flight.maxAirspeed (288 on both). Down is idle, and it glides. Tilt the nacelles back up and the lever hands back to the normal collective. Flat out that is roughly 2.3 times its speed as a helicopter, which tops out at tiltRotor.helicopterTopSpeed (120 knots by default)
• New Simple mode holds an Osprey’s height on the wing, hands-off. In aeroplane mode, pitch (W/S) to climb or dive; let go and it levels off at the new height. The hold fades out below about 1.3 times the wing’s stall speed, so a slow aeroplane still stalls, and pulling the thrust lever back lets go of it, so you can come down on low power. Advanced mode has no height hold — you fly it
• New An Osprey on the wing stalls like an aeroplane. Below the wing’s stall speed the nose drops and a lowered wing drops further (up to a steep bank, never over onto its back), and pulling back does little until it has picked up speed again. With the nacelles forward the proprotors cannot hold its weight, so a climb straight up runs out of speed and falls away. Lower the nose and add power to recover
• New A stall horn. A pulsing cockpit horn sounds with the HUD’s STALL warning when an Osprey’s nacelles are more than about 60° forward, it is more than 3 m up and its airspeed is below 1.1 times the wing stall speed (tiltRotor.wingStallSpeed, 110 knots by default). Only the people inside hear it
• New Rolling take-offs, and nacelles that respect the ground. On the ground the nacelles tilt no further forward than the proprotors can clear it — about 53° forward of straight up on flat ground (about 37° above the horizon, NAC 38 on the HUD), and less when the aircraft is banked or nose-down. Climbing away, the limit eases and is gone about 2 m up. The HUD’s nacelle readout shows GND while the ground is limiting them. On the wheels, with the nacelles forward, the collective is a straight thrust lever: at the bottom the proprotors idle, at the top they give take-off power, with nothing in between that jumps, and the runway roll builds up steadily instead of launching you. With the nacelles at the limit, add power: the Osprey rolls and lifts off on its wing and rotor thrust together as speed builds, and raising the nose helps. Or take off straight up with the nacelles up — the pilot chooses. You can set the nacelles further forward than the ground allows before you go (the HUD shows NAC 38 > 0 GND): they hold at the limit on the ground and carry on down by themselves once you lift off
• New An Osprey’s nacelles only come back up as it slows down. Up to tiltRotor.helicopterTopSpeed (120 knots) they can go all the way up. Faster than that, the quicker it flies the further forward they stay, and the HUD’s nacelle readout shows SLOW while that is what is holding them. Slow down and they carry on. Switching on Auto Hover with the nacelles forward brings them up the same way, and a message tells the pilot they keep control until the nacelles are up
• New Proprotor clearance on the way down. Coming in to land with the nacelles forward and the landing gear down, the Osprey now tilts them up by itself in good time for the proprotors to clear the ground. It looks ahead at how fast you are sinking and at the ground ahead, and allows for pitch and bank, so the limit starts earlier on a descent than on a climb, and a short message tells the pilot when it takes over. Level off instead of landing and, about 2 seconds after you stop sinking, it lets go and the nacelles ease back to where you set them. With the gear up it never moves them: if the proprotors are heading for the ground, the HUD’s nacelle readout turns red with PROP and a message tells the pilot to climb or tilt the nacelles up
• New Rolling landings on the Ospreys. Bring the thrust lever back and let the speed bleed off; below about 1.3 times the wing stall speed the height hold fades and it sinks. Fly the approach with small pitch inputs at around 115–130 knots, and do not flare hard below about 105 knots high up, or it stalls. With the landing gear down, the nacelles come up by themselves close to the ground, so you touch down part-converted, like the real aircraft’s rolling landing, then brake with S. The gear raises itself after take-off, so lower it for the approach. How to fly it While the nacelles come up close to the ground, pitch keeps the feel it has on the wing. On the wing, pulling the thrust lever below the middle slows you hard, with the proprotors acting as an airbrake, so you can get down to landing speed. Once the wheels are down, the wing stops lifting unless the thrust lever is pushed well up, so it stays on the runway even after a fast touchdown, and S brakes; push the lever up and the wing lifts again for a rolling take-off
• New The Ospreys raise their landing gear by themselves after take-off, once they are more than 15 m up, climbing and faster than about 40 knots, and the pilot is told — unless the pilot has already raised or lowered it, or the autopilot or Auto Hover is flying. Lower it again for the landing: with the gear up, the nacelles are not tilted clear of the ground for you
• New Q/E on the Ospreys is strong and quick — control.yawStrength 1.25, control.response.yawAccelTau 0.10 and control.response.yawDecayTau 0.15 — and it keeps working with the nacelles part-way forward at low speed. In full aeroplane mode the yaw is weaker, like a rudder, so you turn by banking
• New Turning on the wing. Bank with A/D and pull S for a tighter turn — about 11° a second at 250 knots. When you roll level again the nose lines up with the way the Osprey is travelling, as a real aeroplane’s tail fin does, instead of staying a few degrees off
• New The Ospreys’ moving parts. The nacelles move smoothly for the pilot and for everyone watching, and line up with the wing in aeroplane mode. The control surfaces move too: the rudders follow Q/E, the elevator follows pitch, and the flaperons follow roll and droop down in helicopter mode, like the real V-22
• New Damage you can feel. A shot-up main rotor now loses lift, a damaged tail rotor loses pedal and its grip on the heading, and a damaged engine loses the top of its power. Nothing changes while a part is above 70% health; below that it gets steadily worse, so a pilot feels it coming and can still set down. On the Chinooks and the Ospreys, lift follows the rotor in worse shape and the pedal follows the average of the two. Five settings per helicopter decide how much, and damage.flight.scale at 0 switches it off. Details
• Fixed Running out of fuel, or losing the engine, in the air stopped the rotor in about five seconds, so there was nothing left to autorotate on. The rotor now keeps turning for autorotation.coastMinutes, as documented, and the collective only cushions the descent — pulling it costs rotor speed, as in a real autorotation
• Fixed A damaged fuel tank drained twice as fast as it should while the engine ran. Below half health the leak was counted twice; it now leaks at the normal rate
• Fixed The engine could be started on a wreck — a destroyed airframe, a dead engine, or a Chinook with its rear rotor gone — and Start Engine was even offered on a burning one. It is no longer offered there, and the start is refused
• Fixed Letting go of the Start Engine or Stop Engine key part-way through still started or stopped the engine, so flight.engineHoldTime did nothing. The hold now has to finish — it is timed from when the animation actually starts, with a small allowance — and the start’s battery charge is taken when the engine actually starts. A start also fails if the battery is taken out or the fuel runs out during the hold. The activity log’s [ENGINE_START] line is now written only when an engine really starts, the autopilot’s starts included
• Changed Stopping the engine no longer uses battery charge. Only a start takes battery.startDrain now
• Fixed Start Engine was offered while the engine was already running, and hovering low, the Stop Engine prompt could show when the stop would be refused, or the other way round. The two now agree. After a start or a stop you are also no longer shown as busy to other players’ actions
• Changed Starting or stopping the engine now plays the engine-start hand movement instead of a reach for the door
• Fixed An engine start could hang for about 12 seconds before the rotor turned if the start-up sound did not play on the pilot’s game. It now carries on after 3 seconds
• Fixed With the main rotor destroyed, or both rotors on a Chinook, the engine kept running and replayed its start-up sound. It now shuts down
• Fixed Lifting off with the keyboard came away in a jump. Close to the ground, the first part of the collective’s travel multiplied the thrust almost at once, so the aircraft left the ground in a single hop instead of climbing away. Thrust now comes in over about a third of a second, and setting down still answers instantly
• New Collective Hold (a personal setting in the O menu): the climb and descend keys move a lever that stays where you leave it, instead of springing back to the hover point. It goes back to the hover point while Auto Hover or the autopilot is flying, so Auto Hover still holds its height
• Fixed A Chinook that loses one of its two rotors now flies like it. Losing either rotor takes away about half the lift, the aircraft sinks, and it pitches toward the rotor that has gone: nose up when the rear one goes, nose down when the front one does. The stick and pedals keep only half their grip, so it can no longer be held level almost without effort. Losing the front rotor used to switch its flying off completely, and losing the rear one pitched it the wrong way
• Fixed After dropping a sling load, the pilot’s game kept ignoring the dropped load when measuring the height above the ground — when landing next to it or on it, for example
• New Mouse Flight Invert and Downwash Dust (personal settings in the O menu): flip the mouse’s up and down, or switch off the rotor dust clouds from the helicopter you are sitting in, to help your frame rate (other players’ dust always shows, so it can’t be used to see through anyone’s dust). The damage panel’s hide key is now remembered between sessions, and the panel has its own switch in the O menu too
• Changed Mouse Flight’s default sensitivity is now 0.50 instead of 0.30, for players who have never set it and after Reset in the O menu. A sensitivity you already saved is kept
• New The rotor slaps. Every aircraft now has the blade slap of a working rotor, which grows as the blades work harder — in a bank, in a descent into its own wake and on a damaged main rotor too — and drops in pitch under a heavy load, the way a real rotor droops before its governor catches up. Anyone who would rather not hear it can switch it off for themselves with Blade Slap in the O menu
• New The autopilot map tells you whether the fuel aboard reaches the place you click, worked out from your server’s own tank sizes, fuel burn and top speeds, at the speed the autopilot really cruises (85% of top speed), and allowing for a sling load or a leaking tank. On the Ospreys it allows for the aeroplane cruise on trips over 5 km, which goes roughly 2.2 times as far on the same fuel
• Fixed The autopilot could start the engine with no battery, with a ruined or flat battery, or on a wreck, and its start used no battery charge. It now follows the same rules as a start by hand, uses the same charge, and says why when it refuses
• Fixed Stopping the autopilot switched Auto Hover on even on servers with Auto Hover turned off, with the engine off, and on an aircraft that has lost a rotor, such as a Chinook with one of its two gone. There it now hands the pilot manual control and says so
• Fixed The autopilot’s turns surged and eased — turning on the spot, or swinging round onto its course after take-off, it sped up, slowed down and sped up again instead of turning smoothly like Q/E does. It now turns at a steady rate
• Fixed Setting a new destination while the autopilot was already flying to one made the turn onto the new heading jumpy and steppy. Big heading changes now turn at a steady rate
• Fixed The auto-land descent came down in steps. It is smooth now
• Fixed Taking over during an auto-land was slow to answer. Touching the controls now hands the aircraft back at once on your own screen, Mouse Flight included, and if Auto Hover is on it holds you where you are instead of carrying on down
• Fixed The autopilot counted your own sling load and crew as obstacles, so it climbed for no reason with a load on and turned down landing spots right underneath it. It ignores them now
• New On the Ospreys, auto-land waits until the nacelles are back in helicopter mode before it starts the landing approach
• Fixed Getting into an abandoned helicopter while it was landing itself left it sinking
• Fixed Auto Hover’s heading hold slowly drifted off. It now holds the heading
• Changed The chase camera keeps up with the nose. In a hard pedal turn the rear-locked 3rd-person camera trailed behind the turn — at full pedal it looked about 10–20° off to one side of where the nose was pointing. It now follows twice as tightly and leads a little with the turn, so it stays within about 5° of the nose and still settles without a swing when you straighten up
• Changed Smoother for passengers and people watching. Anyone not flying saw the helicopter move in small steps, most noticeably at speed: it lurched forward each time a position update arrived and slowed before the next. It now carries on along its path between updates, so passengers and onlookers see it glide like a car or boat does
• Fixed Fast Osprey landings caught the nose. Touching down on the wheels at around 140 kt or more could drop the nose hard enough to dig in, stopping the aircraft violently and tipping it forward. The wheel brakes now ease off above about 60 kt and the main gear has more give, so the nose comes down gently. Holding S to brake is fine; braking builds back up as you slow
• Changed Smoother handling on every helicopter. On aircraft whose weight is spread unevenly, a pitch, roll or yaw input also nudged the other two, and the helicopter corrected itself against that, which could feel jumpy. Each input now moves only its own axis
• Fixed A single-rotor helicopter that had lost its tail rotor could still use Auto Hover and the autopilot, which held it steady while it should have been spinning. A lost tail rotor now rules both out, and so does losing either rotor on a Chinook
• Fixed Simple mode’s height hold hid a lost tail rotor or a lost Chinook rotor, turning it into a gentle sink
• Fixed Over the sea, Auto Hover measured its height to the sea bed, so a helicopter hovering from the shore out to sea flew itself down into the water. Auto Hover, ground effect, the HUD altimeter, the autopilot and an abandoned helicopter’s hold and landing now measure to the water surface
• Changed A fast helicopter can dive more steeply before the descent limit steps in. The allowance grows with speed, to three times the normal limit at top speed, and it applies with the engine out too, so a fast autorotation can come down faster than autorotation.descentCap
• Changed The UH-1H, MH-6, MD500 and MH-60L now swing the right way when the collective is raised in Advanced mode, and spin the right way when the tail rotor is lost. Their rotors turn the opposite way to the Mi-24’s and the Gazelle’s
• Fixed Flying backwards fast turned the helicopter the wrong way. Turn co-ordination, which swings the nose round in a banked turn, now only works when flying forwards
• Fixed An engine failure gave the aircraft a sudden bump
• Fixed The autopilot with a sling load. It now allows for the load hanging below when clearing obstacles, lowers the load to the ground and releases it before landing, and never flies an Osprey on the wing with a load on
• Fixed Auto-land could touch down with the gear still up. It now lowers the gear and holds at 6 m until the gear is down. An abandoned helicopter landing itself does the same, and sets a slung load down and releases it first
• Fixed The autopilot engaged on a wreck or with a dead rotor, and a helicopter disabled while the autopilot was flying kept its trip, with the old destination still engaged once it was repaired. Being disabled now cancels the autopilot and auto-land
• Fixed Auto-land picked landing spots on steep slopes, and spots too tight for a long helicopter’s tail rotor or for both of a Chinook’s rotors. It now wants ground no steeper than about 13°, with room for the whole aircraft, tail rotor or both rotors included
• Changed Nearly out of fuel with auto-land on, the autopilot lands where it is instead of flying on to a destination more than 1 km away
• Fixed A load could be hooked to a helicopter flying past instead of hovering, and a vehicle could be hooked with someone driving it. A helicopter that had lost its main rotor (either rotor on a Chinook) could still pick up a load, and a load stayed hooked after its helicopter lost its main rotor or its engine. Losing either now drops the load, and so does someone getting into the load’s driver’s seat
• Fixed The refuelling station could not reach the bigger helicopters parked beside it
• Changed Translational lift arrives at a realistic speed. The extra lift a helicopter gets as it moves off the hover (aerodynamics.etlSpeed) now comes in at 24–35 knots depending on the aircraft, instead of 34–58, and moving sideways now counts as well as forwards and backwards. Vortex ring state fades out by that same speed, so a normal approach at 35–40 knots can no longer run into it, and at 30 knots only the largest aircraft can still feel a trace of it. A server still on the old factory value gets the new one; a value you set yourself is kept
• Changed The MH-6 and MD500 climb harder (flight.liftMultiplier 3.10 and 2.90), so the Little Bird out-climbs the Huey as it should. A server still on the old factory value gets the new one; a value you set yourself is kept
• Changed The big helicopters roll more like big aircraft. control.bankStrength is now 1.35 on the Merlin and 1.20 on the MH-47G (the new CH-47D starts at 1.25 and the Ospreys at 1.05). Pedal turns are unchanged. A server still on the old factory value gets the new one; a value you set yourself is kept
• Changed Losing the tail rotor now depends on the aircraft. The light helicopters spin fastest (MH-6 and MD500 150°/s, Barrel Helicopter 170°/s), the Black Hawk and Mi-24 100°/s and the Merlin 90°/s, and the MH-6, MD500 and Barrel Helicopter also sink a little faster (tailRotorFailure.descentRate 3.0, was 2.5). A server still on the old factory values gets the new ones; values you set yourself are kept
• New An Osprey with its engines out comes down much faster than a helicopter. A V-22 has small, heavily loaded proprotors and cannot autorotate like one. On the wing it still glides while it keeps its speed
• Changed A pilot who moves to the co-pilot seat in flight gets Auto Hover when autoHoverOnExit is on, so the aircraft holds itself while nobody is at the controls
• Fixed Auto Hover could sink into a roof or the trees. Some ways of engaging it (stopping the autopilot, an abandoned helicopter’s hold, a hover left with nobody aboard) took the height above the roof or treetops below as the height to hold above the ground
• Fixed Auto-land’s approach came in too low over forest and buildings. It now keeps its 20 m margin above the ground, and adds the length of the sling rope when a load is hanging
• Fixed Stopping the autopilot from the map gave a small jolt on your own screen before the helicopter settled
• Fixed Fast flights dropped light slung loads as “snagged” above about 165 knots, and a load’s own wheels or passengers could count as an obstacle it hit
• Fixed A slung load could be pulled along under the sea. Over water the rope treated the sea bed as the ground. A load lowered to the water now stops at the surface, and dragging it through the water faster than about 15 knots drops it, as dragging it along the ground does
• Fixed A car could be hooked under a crewless helicopter left hovering, and then hung there without the rope ever pulling it
• Changed An engine failure or an empty tank in flight switches Auto Hover and the autopilot off and tells the pilot to autorotate, instead of letting them hold the collective while the rotor runs down. Auto Hover can’t be switched back on until the engine runs again, and stopping the engine yourself in a low hover now switches off the autopilot and auto-land as well as Auto Hover
• Fixed The Chinooks could lose all control for a few seconds on a quick left-to-right pedal reversal. A safety check threw away the whole turning force of a heavy airframe instead of limiting it. It is now limited to the normal maximum, so every helicopter keeps full control
• Fixed Six helicopters could fly well past their top speed in level flight at full power with the nose right down (the MH-47G reached 237 knots). Past top speed the drag now climbs steeply, so every helicopter tops out at its flight.maxAirspeed
• Fixed The autopilot could overshoot its destination on the fastest helicopters, arriving at the landing spot still moving. It now slows down in time on every helicopter
• Fixed Most helicopters climbed 50–90% faster than their flight.maxVerticalSpeed. The climb now stops at the limit
• Changed The MH-60L climbs at up to 22 knots (was 18), its real maximum climb rate, now that the climb limit is firm. A server that kept the old default gets the new one; a value you changed is kept

• New Taxiing. Every helicopter on wheels — the MH-60L, AW101 Merlin, MH-47G, CH-47D, Mi-24, both Ospreys and the Barrel Helicopter — can now be driven along the ground. With the rotor at flying speed and the wheels down, W rolls it forward (up to about 14 knots), S rolls it back (about 5 knots), and Q/E turns it on the spot, smoothly, with the nose wheel swinging round to follow the turn. With no input the parking brake holds it, and a helicopter that is already rolling slows gently by itself. Details
• New Rolling landings on every helicopter with wheels. S lifts the nose right down to touchdown, and at rolling speed the nose can’t be pushed down into the runway, so a nose-low touchdown or W on the roll-out won’t dig it in
• New Wheel brakes. S while rolling forward, or W while rolling back, brakes the wheels. The brakes only bite once the wheels have been on the ground for about a second, so a flare cannot lock them
• Fixed Q/E could not turn a helicopter on the spot on the ground, because the brakes stayed locked, and after a rolling landing there was no way to brake
• Fixed On its wheels, the cyclic tipped the airframe over onto its gear. It now waits until you raise the collective to lift off
• Changed Wheels roll when a helicopter moves on the ground, and stay still when it is parked with the engine off and nobody aboard. The Merlin’s and MH-47G’s wheels never turned before, and the Black Hawk’s and Barrel Helicopter’s roll again without spinning on their own while parked
• Fixed A helicopter on wheels that touched down fast with the engine off stopped dead, as if it had hit a wall. With the gear down it now rolls out on its wheels; with the gear up it slides to a stop on its belly, slowing by no more than about half a g. Parked, it still holds on a slope

• Fixed Helicopters lost rotors to ordinary bumps. A knock now only counts as a rotor strike if it is actually inside that rotor’s disc
• Fixed A ramp resting on the ground, a gentle nudge or rolling over a kerb counted as a crash. A hard impact now needs a real jolt, the same for light and heavy aircraft, and heavy aircraft are no longer several times more fragile than light ones: hull damage in a crash now scales fairly with weight
• Fixed Rolling and sliding landings chipped damage off at every moment of the slide
• Fixed A glitch in the physics, on a restart or a spawn, could wreck the hull
• Fixed Switching a rotor damage zone off in the settings let rotor contacts wipe out the body instead
• Fixed A helicopter parked in shallow water drowned its engine — in water between about 1 and 2 m deep the smaller helicopters’ engines died within seconds. Engines now drown at the same depth as the rest of the aircraft, and with damage.zones.engine at 0 the engine never drowns
• Fixed The damaged look of a helicopter body flickered between damaged and clean, and the lit nav-light lenses, landing-light lenses and dashboard could blink off for a moment, most of all while the pilot was pressing keys. They now stay as they should. Doors and wheels show exactly the same damage stages the game itself uses for them, so the two can no longer disagree
• Fixed A damaged Barrel Helicopter’s cage, bolts and nails stayed looking new. They now wear with the rest of it, and the loose parts and a part-built frame show their wear too
• Fixed After a restart, a rotor that was already out of action (3–15% health) was reported destroyed all over again, with a false line in the log and the rotor-snap sound. It now comes back from a restart as it was
• Changed The damage panel shows a destroyed or sheared rotor in red
• Fixed A damaged door or wheel could show its worn look on the wrong part for players who joined after the damage, and a ruined part beyond the first ten attachments was never dropped. Both now follow the part itself
• Changed The helicopter HUD and damage panel now hide with the rest of the game’s HUD — when you hide the HUD, open a menu or are knocked out
• Fixed The server log said a window was opened when it was closed, and the other way round
• Fixed The helicopter mod no longer changes cars. With it installed, every car’s 3rd-person camera orbited the driver’s seat instead of the car, and Switch Seats in cars moved to the interact key with a 14 m reach. Cars now keep the game’s own camera and Switch Seats; helicopters keep theirs
• Fixed A dead or sheared rotor could still kill a player who touched it
• Fixed The tail rotor killed players standing on the far side of the tail boom. Only the tail rotor’s own disc counts now, on every helicopter, including the MH-60L’s tilted tail rotor
• Fixed A rotor that was shot out, but not sheared off, could no longer be hit, and changed after a restart
• Fixed Shots at a turning rotor were judged against blades frozen where they were parked, and could still hit where a sheared-off rotor had been. The rotor’s hit area now turns with the blades and goes when the rotor is lost
• Fixed Rotor strikes did no damage while the rotor was slowing down
• Changed A holed fuel tank leaks more slowly. At its worst it used to empty the tank in about 20 seconds; it now takes about three minutes, which leaves time to get down
• Fixed Hits on the cargo doors of the UH-1H, Black Hawk and Merlin never passed their share of damage on to the fuel tank. They do now
• Changed A single-rotor helicopter with a dead tail rotor cannot be started, the same as the twin-rotor aircraft with a rotor gone
• Fixed The MH-47G’s rotors reached further than their blades, so the rear rotor could strike, or hurt someone, about a metre outside the disc you see
• Fixed Repairing a destroyed wreck brought a sheared rotor back — the blades reappeared and the snap sound played again while the rotor was still broken
• Fixed A wreck kept burning after it sank, and could catch fire on the sea
• Fixed Repairs were refused on a helicopter floating on the sea
• Fixed A destroyed helicopter hid the blades of a rotor that had only been shot out, not broken off
• Fixed Crew in the big helicopters were hurt far more by a firm landing than crew in the small ones
• Fixed Gazelle slung loads now hang from a hook under the belly, not from the ground under the helicopter
• Fixed A helicopter parked with its gear up on a roof, a pier or a bridge slowly sank into it
• Fixed Righting an overturned helicopter under water left it standing on the sea bed

• Fixed An abandoned helicopter never actually landed. It would sink a little, climb again, creep backwards or hover on the spot for good, because its nose never turned towards the landing spot, so a spot to the side or behind could not be reached. It now turns, flies to the spot and lets down on it, picks another spot if it cannot make progress, and does all of this with Auto Hover switched off too — before, an abandoned helicopter on a server without Auto Hover froze in the sky
• Changed An abandoned helicopter now lands itself after 20 seconds instead of 120 (autoPilot.abandonedLandingDelay). A server still on the old 120 is moved to 20 when it updates; a value you set yourself is kept
• Fixed A pilot knocked out or killed in the seat kept flying the helicopter with their last control positions — a climb or turn held at that moment carried on. The controls now go neutral
• Fixed Parked helicopters could tip over when a player walked up to them — an MH-6 parked in a raised hangar tipped nose-down into the floor. A helicopter that is pushed, or parked on a moving ship, still moves as it should
• Fixed A part-built Barrel Helicopter lost its parts in a server restart. Only the undercarriage came back — the other parts, the battery and the bulbs were gone — and the Airframe Assembly Wrench then did nothing. Every fitted part now comes back where it was. A frame that already lost parts is put right at the next restart: the parts that are gone stay gone, but the build carries on from the first missing part
• Fixed Stripping a Barrel Helicopter to a frame and building it back up filled the tank and repaired the hull and the fuel tank. The frame now keeps the fuel and that wear, so the aircraft comes back as it was. A frame cut fresh from a drum still builds an aircraft with a full tank
• Fixed No repair prompt for a helicopter parked on a helipad, an Editor object or a base floor. The repair kit measured the height above the bare terrain, so anything standing on a built surface — the tall Chinooks first — counted as in the air. It now measures from what the aircraft is actually standing on. The same fix stops the landing gear being raised while standing on a raised platform, or floating on the water, with the rotors turning, and lets the ground crew unhook a sling load set down on one or on the water
• Fixed At night, the lights the autopilot switched on could stay on after it landed, draining the battery. The landing light it turned on now goes off when it has finished, and the nav lights go off too if nobody is in a seat when it finishes. It also no longer switches the nav lights off at dawn
• Fixed Taking the battery out now switches the nav lights off as well as the landing light
• Fixed With nobody nearby, a parked helicopter’s lights drained the battery, and a damaged tank leaked, 60–120 times slower than set. A helicopter left with its navigation lights on also never drained at all once it settled. Both now run at the proper rates — battery.lightDrain for the lights — and a parked aircraft with its nav lights on stays awake until they go off or the battery runs flat
• Fixed Barrel Helicopter: its parts could be taken off while it was locked or running, and a quick double action could duplicate parts. Parts moved between the frame and the helicopter are now moved, not copied
• Fixed Barrel Helicopter: a part-built frame no longer offers Dismantle to players who didn’t build it. Anyone could see the prompt and hold the wrench for the whole time, only for nothing to happen. It now shows only to the builder, as Strip already did on the finished aircraft (unless barrelHeli.stripOwnerOnly is off)
• Fixed Barrel Helicopter build hints no longer pop up over menus, and they show less often
• Fixed Barrel Helicopter: cutting, assembling or stripping on a floor, roof or base now places it on that surface, instead of dropping it to the ground underneath, where it could end up inside the building
• Changed Barrel Helicopter: a barrel with liquid in it can’t be cut — empty it first, so nothing is lost
• Fixed A helicopter that was flying when the server restarted came back sunk into the ground, or into the roof or floor it was put down on. It now comes back standing on its gear
• Fixed A vehicle on a sling when the server restarted came back hanging in mid-air and fell. It is now set down on the surface directly below where it was, or beside the helicopter if it was hanging under one, so the helicopter isn’t set down on top of it

• Fixed Other players saw people walking in the back of a helicopter in the wrong place — frozen in the sky with no aircraft near them, or hundreds of metres from where they had landed. Walking about in a flying helicopter was never shared with anyone else’s game; now everyone sees a cabin walker riding along with the aircraft, the same as a seated passenger
• Changed Changing seats is instant instead of DayZ’s car seat-slide. In the Black Hawk the slide could leave you sitting outside the aircraft, because DayZ’s car slide always goes the same way whichever seat you pick. Switch Seats works between seats you sit in and leave the same way, mostly those along the same wall of a cabin. The pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, and seats across the cabin, are changed by getting out and in, because the game throws a player out of the seat on those swaps. The Mi-24’s two cockpits, and the two sides of the MH-6’s outside benches, are never offered to each other
• Fixed The interact key could still throw you out of a flying helicopter while you were looking at a seat someone else was sitting in. Holding it a moment too long there counted as Get Out. In the air it now never takes you out while you are looking at another seat, taken or free; to get out, look away from the seats first
• Fixed Switch Seats no longer offers a cockpit seat that is being kept for a pilot who is walking about in the cabin
• New Helicopter Flip Wrench (CZ_HelicopterFlipWrench). Hold its action beside a helicopter lying on its side and it stands back on its gear — on the same rules as the pilot’s X-key flip, so never through a roof and never under an overhang. Four uses to a wrench, and it won’t right a destroyed wreck. It works whatever groundFlipRecovery is set to, so leave it out of your loot and traders if crashes on your server should be final. Details
• Fixed The pilot’s X-key flip did nothing on a tall aircraft lying upside down, such as the Ospreys and the Chinooks: it measured the height from the middle of the aircraft, which sits high off the ground when it is on its back. It now measures from the lowest part of the aircraft, and so does the Flip Wrench.
• Fixed Passengers sat leaning back through the seat behind them. The sitting pose leans back about a quarter of a metre, and several seats sat far closer than that to their backrest, so the upper body disappeared into the bulkhead. The Black Hawk’s rear bench, the Merlin, the UH-1H, the Gazelle and the MD500 now seat people forward on their cushions
• Changed Higher first-person seats in the Black Hawk (pilot) and the MH-47G, so you see out over the instrument panel
• Fixed A crash that left the helicopter on its side trapped anyone walking in the cabin — they hung sideways beside the aircraft and could not move until they relogged. They are now set down on their feet once it comes to rest, and Move to Cabin is not offered while it lies on its side
• Fixed Players walking in the MH-47G’s troop cabin could not sit in the cabin seats
• Fixed The hold-F stand-up in the MH-47G’s walk-in cabin was hidden in flight while you looked at a free seat
• Fixed In the Merlin, half the cabin seats opened and closed the door on the far side of the cabin. Each seat now works the door on its own side
• Fixed The co-pilot’s collective gauge stayed in the middle while Auto Hover was flying. It now shows where the lever is
• Fixed Extra cargo modules could be worn down, with no way for players to repair them. A module now takes no damage at all, and any module already showing damage is put back to Pristine the next time the server starts. What is stored inside is not touched
• Fixed Players outside could open and close the windows of a locked helicopter
• Fixed L switched your headtorch or helmet light as well as the helicopter’s landing light
• Fixed Crew who walked in up the ramp could not take a free cockpit seat without going round to its door
• Fixed H also sounded a silent car horn that drew zombies. Helicopters no longer have one; H opens the damage panel
• Fixed The cockpit levers and the co-pilot’s stick did not move on the UH-1H, MH-6, MH-60L and Merlin, and the co-pilot’s stick on the MH-47G.
• Fixed Standing on any vehicle made a player impossible to run over. Once they had stood on a car roof, a truck bed or a helicopter ramp, no vehicle could hurt them by hitting them until they took some other damage. This affected every vehicle on the server, not just helicopters
• Fixed Climbing near a parked helicopter was easier on everything around it, not just the helicopter, so walls and ledges next to it could be climbed that normally can’t
• Changed Parts can’t be taken off a helicopter while its engine is running or while it is locked — the battery, doors and wheels could be pulled off a running helicopter, even by passengers in flight. A ruined part still falls off as before
• Fixed Players standing in a locked walk-in cabin could be trapped with no way out through the ramp, the doors or a seat
• Fixed A player standing on a helicopter or walking in its cabin could be thrown across the map when it was removed, whether it was put in a garage, covered with CarCover, deleted by an admin or cleaned up by the server. They are now left standing where they were
• Fixed Crew in their seats could take barrels, doors and wheels into their hands, and someone walking in the cabin with one could take it back into a cockpit seat
• Fixed The MH-47G’s pilot got out into the door frame, and both MH-47G pilots dropped about a metre on the way out
• Changed Rotor logs name the rotor properly on the Chinooks — front/left and rear/right instead of main and tail, the same as on the Ospreys
• Fixed Gazelle: a rear passenger could be shut in while the front door on their side stayed closed. From inside, the rear passengers can always open their own door now. From outside, the front door on that side still has to be opened first
• Changed Getting in and out near a turning rotor is safe. The rotor can’t kill a player who is climbing in, getting out, moving between the cockpit and the cabin, or walking off the ramp. They are protected for a few seconds after stepping off (about 7 seconds by default, longer with a higher flight.spoolDownTime), and when the engine has been stopped on the ground, until the rotor has wound down. Anyone just standing nearby is not protected
• Changed An automatic engine shutdown winds the rotor down like a normal stop, instead of stopping it dead. That covers the pilot getting out on the ground, the last person leaving the cabin and an abandoned helicopter setting itself down
• Fixed Getting out of some cabin seats stepped the player into a wall. The two middle seats of the Black Hawk’s rear bench now step toward the middle of the cabin, and the Merlin’s second seat from the front on the right-hand side steps back along the wall into the cabin. Every MH-47G troop seat now steps out the same way, forward along its own wall

• Fixed Settings kept resetting. One value out of range — for example a maximum altitude set below the height where lift starts to fade — made the server throw away that helicopter’s whole settings file and write the factory defaults over it, on Save and again at every restart. Now only the value at fault is corrected (in that example the height where lift starts to fade is moved back under your maximum altitude, which is kept), the file is backed up first, and the server log, and on a Save the admin panel too, say which value was changed and why
• Fixed Saving in the admin panel changed values you had not touched. Every row was sent on Save, and each slider pulled its value into its own range and steps — the Black Hawk’s, Merlin’s and MH-47G’s fuel burn all became 600 L/h, and fuel.maxCapacity and sling.maxKg were rounded to 25 L and 100 kg steps. Rows you do not touch now go back exactly as they were, and fuel burn goes up to 3,000 L/h
• Fixed Saves could go missing on a busy server, while the panel already showed them as saved. They are now sent reliably and in order, and the panel’s status line confirms each one: saved by the server, or why it was not. The rows you changed stay highlighted until the server has confirmed them, so a save that did not land can simply be pressed again. Save now sends only the rows you changed, so an admin panel left open cannot put back a value someone else has changed since. Every other admin panel command is now sent reliably too
• Fixed A settings file the server cannot read is never overwritten any more. It is copied into Backups as .unreadable.json, the log says so, the admin panel’s Heli Cfg tab shows a warning, and that helicopter runs on its factory values until you fix the file or press Save there. The same goes for mod_config.json: the server runs on the default settings until it is fixed, the file is left as it is, and the admin panel’s Mod Cfg tab shows a warning. Pressing Save there replaces the file with the values shown. A mod_config.json from before v0.4.4 that cannot be read is kept and reported too, instead of being quietly replaced
• Fixed A mod_config.json that broke while the server was running reset every setting to its default when an admin reloaded the settings or changed the admin list. The server now keeps the settings it was running on and reports the broken file
• Fixed A typo in permissions_admins_config.json now gives a clear error in the server log
• New More backups. Whenever the server rewrites mod_config.json as it starts or reloads its settings, the text it had before is kept in Backups as mod_config.previous.json. When a helicopter’s settings file is backed up more than once on the same day, the first copy of the day is kept instead of being overwritten, and a later backup with different contents is kept alongside it with the time in front of its name, so a second Reset on the same day loses nothing
• Fixed A setting missing from a helicopter’s file got a generic value instead of that aircraft’s own default, for example after a line was deleted by hand, or for a setting added by an update. It now gets the aircraft’s own value
• Changed Hand edits to a helicopter’s settings file take effect on Reload in the admin panel’s Tools tab, or at a restart, as documented. A freshly spawned helicopter no longer picks them up on its own, which left new and old helicopters of one type on different values
• Fixed crew.seatedCargoAccess only reached helicopters restored after a restart once someone saved the Mod Cfg in the admin panel. It now applies to them at startup
• Fixed Someone who had walked in any helicopter’s cabin could be immune to every turning rotor. Only the cabin of the helicopter the rotor belongs to protects you now
• Changed The Chinooks’ settings files no longer have a tailRotorFailure section, because they have no tail rotor. Losing one of their two rotors now always sinks and pitches them at a fixed 120° a second and 2.5 m/s², the values that section held by default; any values you had set there no longer apply. The first start with this version removes the section from existing Chinook files, backs the old file up, and keeps every other value
• Changed Admin panel rows are named for the aircraft. The two rotor damage-zone rows read Main and Tail Rotor on the single-rotor helicopters, Front and Rear Rotor on the Chinooks, and Left and Right Rotor on the Ospreys. On the Chinooks and Ospreys the Damage in Flight row for a lost tail reads Yaw Control Lost. Anti-Torque Coupling is now Single-Rotor Anti-Torque, as the twin-rotor aircraft ignore it, and the pedal keys read Left Pedal and Right Pedal. The Tail Rotor Failure rows say they are for single-rotor helicopters only, and the Osprey’s top-speed rows say which one is for aeroplane mode
• Fixed The admin panel could Delete or Teleport to the wrong helicopter. When the list refreshed, the selection could jump to another aircraft; it now stays on the same helicopter
• Fixed Teleport in the admin panel put you on the ground under the helicopter. For a helicopter on a roof, a helipad, a pier or a ship’s deck you arrived inside or under the structure, and for one floating on the water, on the sea bed. You now arrive on the surface it stands on, or on the water
• Changed Delete, Delete Empty and Reset in the admin panel need a second click within 3 seconds, and Reset first backs up that helicopter’s settings file into Backups as *_Config.before_reset.json
• Fixed After Reset, the admin panel kept showing the old values, so the next Save put them all back. The page now reloads the factory values as soon as the reset is done
• Changed Delete and Delete Empty leave alone any helicopter with someone aboard, seated or walking in the cabin. The admin panel tells you why, and the activity log records it
• Fixed Deleted helicopters stayed in the admin panel’s list until you pressed Refresh. The list now updates by itself
• Fixed Unsaved edits in the admin panel were lost when you switched tabs
• Fixed Choosing Our Mods or Cars as the admin panel’s default tab was ignored, and the panel still opened on Helicopters. It now opens where you chose (Cars needs a CZ Autoz car mod on the server)
• New The aircraft picker on the admin panel’s per-helicopter settings page shows each aircraft’s type — single rotor, tandem or tilt-rotor
• Fixed Custom role names now show in the Admins tab
• Changed Role names and admin IDs can’t contain spaces or any of | ~ , < > ;. Such a name could scramble the Admins tab. The server refuses it, tells you in the admin panel and notes it in the activity log; use one word, for example seniormod. Roles already in permissions_admins_config.json are not touched
• Fixed A role with an empty permission list got every menu but had every button refused. It now gets no permissions at all
• Changed The admin panel only shows the buttons your role can use. Teleport, Repair, Refuel, Delete, the Tools buttons and Save, Reset and Save All are hidden from staff whose role doesn’t allow them, instead of showing and then being refused
• Fixed Values saved from the admin panel are now checked against the panel’s ranges on the server too
• Fixed Helicopters spawned from a saved preset now arrive at the preset’s saved position
• Changed Adding or removing admins, or saving the Mod Cfg, no longer resends every helicopter’s settings to every player
• Fixed Moving from one server to another carried the last server’s helicopter settings and admin menu over
• Fixed More values that cannot work are caught and reported. A control.response time of 0 or less, aerodynamics.envelopeThreshold outside 0.5–0.99, aerodynamics.envelopeDragScale or aerodynamics.etlSpeed of 0 or less, any autorotation value of 0 or less, and a negative damage.burn.radius or aerodynamics.groundEffectAlt are now each replaced with that helicopter’s own default and named in the server log, like every other value the server puts right
• Fixed repair.kitUses at 0 now means repair kits never wear out, and the admin panel allows 0. It used to be raised to 1 when the file was read. repair.rotorRepairTime and repair.zoneRepairTime are still raised to at least 1
• Fixed A repair kit could sometimes get one more use than repair.kitUses, through a rounding slip
• Fixed A repair kit that brought the hull back to full also fully repaired a ruined battery. Only a full repair from outside the kit, such as an admin tool, does that now
• Fixed sling.maxKg at 0 keeps sling loading switched off for that helicopter. The server used to put the aircraft’s normal limit back on every restart. Now only a file with no maxKg line at all is given it
• Fixed fuel.burnLPH at 0 means a helicopter uses no fuel, and the admin panel allows 0. It used to count as a broken value and reset the whole settings file
• Fixed damage.burn.radius at 0 means a burning wreck does no fire damage around it, and the admin panel allows 0
• Fixed A burning wreck’s fire damage stayed where it first caught fire. It now moves with the wreck if it slides or rolls
• Fixed A helicopter first disabled by damage and later destroyed outright never burned, and never wrote its DESTROYED line to the activity log. Disabled means the body, engine and chassis are all ruined: it can still be repaired and it does not burn. Both now happen when it is destroyed
• Fixed aerodynamics.groundEffectAlt keeps small values, and 0 effectively switches ground effect off, which the admin panel now allows. Anything under 1 m used to become 10 m without a word
• Fixed rotor.bladeShear at 0 still let tree, building and ground strikes wreck the rotor — its health went to zero, it just did not show as snapped off. At 0, strikes now do the blades no harm
• Fixed A turning rotor could miss people standing near its tips on the bigger aircraft. The strike check now reaches the whole blade on every helicopter, both Chinooks’ rotors included
• Fixed flight.spoolDownTime was ignored. A rotor winding down took spoolUpTime, or the length of the shutdown sound. It now uses spoolDownTime when that is set
• Fixed A flight.flightMode that is neither Simple nor Advanced is now reported in the server log, and the server runs Simple. Capital letters do not matter
• Fixed Setting a key back to default, or leaving it blank, now puts the shipped key back for players whose key the server had changed
• Fixed A one-letter key name — W instead of kW, for example — is now named in the activity log. It used to be skipped without a word. Server key defaults now take keyboard and mouse keys only, not gamepad ones
• Fixed sling.respectLocks and repair.detachRuinedParts now reach players’ games. Players kept the defaults, so for example Attach Sling stayed hidden on locked vehicles even with respectLocks switched off
• Fixed Cargo module changes saved in the admin panel now apply to helicopters already in the world, and so do hand edits picked up by Tools → Reload. A module holding items is still never removed or resized
• New autoShutdownOnExitGroundOnly, in both simple and advanced. Set it to 0 and, with autoShutdownOnExit on, the engine is cut wherever the pilot leaves it — in mid-air too, so a dead pilot means a lost helicopter. While the aircraft is off the ground, the engine is not cut if anyone else is still aboard, seated or walking in the cabin; the pilot who got out does not count. 1, the default, only cuts it close to the ground, as before. Details
• Changed autoShutdownOnExit also shuts the engine off when the last person aboard gets out, from any seat. Before, a pilot who moved to the co-pilot seat and got out from there left the engine running
• Fixed The refuel reach on foot follows the helicopter’s fuel.refuelDistance straight away
• Changed fuel.refuelDistance has a floor of 2 m. Anything lower counts as 2, and the admin panel no longer goes below it
• New A CHANGED button beside each config search shows only the rows your server has moved off the factory value
• Fixed Small negative values in the admin panel were saved as positive. Single-Rotor Anti-Torque, Blowback and Wreck Fire Height Offset can go below zero, but a value between 0 and −1 lost its minus sign when the panel sent it
• Fixed After six failed licence checks in one session, every later retry waited the full whitelistRetryMinutes (15 minutes by default), even with good checks in between. Retries now start again from 15 seconds after each good check
• Fixed A licence check that never got an answer could stop the server checking again until a restart. It is now dropped after 2 minutes and tried again, and the whitelist log says so
• Changed The admin panel’s helicopter list, with every aircraft’s position and pilot, is now sent only to admins whose role is allowed to view it, and the Admins tab’s list of online players and their Steam IDs only to admins who can manage admins
• Changed The admin panel opens faster. Its lists of helicopter types are now built once, instead of looking through every vehicle type in the game each time
• Fixed The admin panel’s Stats counted a helicopter floating on the sea as airborne, counted a body left in a seat as someone aboard, and missed players walking in a cabin. Occupied now means anyone alive aboard
• Fixed The admin panel’s preview model reset every time its list refreshed. It now keeps your rotation and zoom
• Fixed In the admin panel, Engine Hold Time only went in whole seconds from 1. It now runs from 0.1 to 10 in steps of 0.1, matching the file
• Fixed Pressing Save in the admin panel before a helicopter’s settings had finished loading could save the wrong values over it. It now asks you to press Save again in a moment
• New A warning in the server log on the first start after the update, and to each admin who joins before the next restart, on servers upgrading from before v0.4.2: helicopters already sitting in a virtual garage come out damaged once and want repairing
• Fixed Button labels were cut off in German and other languages, and the Toggle Mouse Flight key, the Refuel at Fuel Station and Unhook Sling Load prompts and a Barrel Helicopter build hint were English in every language. They are translated now, and so are the Tilt Nacelles control, and the admin panel’s messages while a Save or Reset is on its way to the server
• Fixed The damage panel was small and squashed on 16:9 screens. It was sized as a share of the screen width, so it came out up to twice as wide on an ultrawide as on a normal monitor. It is now the same shape on every screen and grows with the resolution. The admin server-FPS readout and the admin panel’s pop-ups had the same fault and are fixed too
• Fixed The repair actions and the damage panel name the Chinooks’ rotors properly. The kit now offers Repair Front Rotor and Repair Rear Rotor, and the panel reads FROT and RROT, where the MH-47G said main and tail. The single-rotor helicopters keep Main and Tail (MROT and TROT), and the Ospreys’ two proprotors are Left and Right (LROT and RROT)
• Changed The admin panel’s per-helicopter page is regrouped: Control Response (the six response times, in pairs), Damage Zones, Damage in Flight, Crash & Collision, Wreck Fire, Fuel and Battery. Tail Rotor Failure is hidden for the Chinooks and the Ospreys, which have no tail rotor, the fuel and battery rows have proper names, and Crash Speed Threshold is now Crash Impact Threshold
• Changed The admin panel’s Mod Config page: Cargo Modules shows one row per aircraft, with the count and size together, in fleet order; the Tilt Nacelles key (Key: Tilt Nacelles (hold + scroll)) can be set there; and Ground Flip Recovery now comes after the wind settings
• New Cargo module settings for the new aircraft: cargoModules.ch47d, cargoModules.mi24, cargoModules.cv22b and cargoModules.mv22b — each Osprey has its own
• New Four tilt-rotor settings for the Ospreys, in a new tiltRotor section: how fast the nacelles turn, the top speed with them straight up, the wing’s stall speed, and how well the proprotors keep pulling as speed builds. Only the two Osprey files carry the section — and, having no tail rotor, they have no tailRotorFailure section — and the admin panel shows it under Tilt-Rotor for them alone. Details
• Changed flight.maxAirspeed can now be set up to 300 knots — it used to stop at 200
• New Players are told when the server is not licensed. Before, the engine on an unregistered server simply never started, with nothing to say why. Anyone aboard a helicopter on such a server now sees a watermark — the CZ Autoz logo, Helicopter flight locked, and where the owner registers the server. It shows only when the licence server has said the server is not licensed: never on a licensed server, and not while the check is still running or the licence server cannot be reached. A server whose clock is more than an hour out also has flight locked, without the watermark: the whitelist log says to fix the clock

• Fixed One “not licensed” answer on the half-hourly licence re-check stopped every helicopter engine on the server. A server that was already verified now checks twice more before flight features switch off
• Fixed A helicopter could be stuck too heavy to lift until the next restart if the settings were reloaded while the licence check was failing
• Fixed Admins without owner rights could remove or downgrade other full-rights staff. Only an owner can now change admins or roles that have full or admin-management rights
• Fixed Spawning a helicopter from the admin panel over water put it on the sea bed. The spawn is refused, with a message in the panel
• Fixed A preset name with ~ or | in it broke the preset list and couldn’t be deleted. Those characters are refused now
• Fixed Esc on the admin panel’s “no permission” box closed the whole panel. It now closes just the box, and the same goes for the text-entry and change-role boxes. The panel also no longer keeps hold of its text boxes from every earlier opening
• Fixed The server FPS box stayed frozen on other admins’ screens after one admin switched it off
• Fixed Several admin panel hints were wrong — the preferences path, “applies on next spawn” (saves apply straight away, and the hints now say so in every language), and the refuel and repair percentages, which are entered as fractions (0.10 = 10%)
• Changed The whitelist log shows how long the server took to check the licence’s signature, so a slow server can be spotted
• Fixed Save All Variants in the admin panel pulled hand-edited values back into the slider range without saying so. Rows you didn’t touch now keep the value from the file exactly as it is, and any value the server does bring into the panel’s range is listed in the save message
• Fixed A settings file that couldn’t be read on the update boot missed the new default values for good. The update now waits and runs on the first restart after the file is fixed
• Changed The server FPS switch in the admin panel now needs the Helicopters tab permission, where the switch lives, and the FPS readout now goes only to admins with that permission
• Fixed With the CarCover mod, covering and uncovering a helicopter filled an empty tank, deleted the extra cargo modules and everything in them, and let anyone strip a covered Barrel Helicopter. The fuel level, the modules and their contents, and the Barrel Helicopter’s owner are now all kept. Servers without CarCover are unaffected
• Fixed Players who joined as a new character, or reconnected quickly, never received the server’s helicopter settings (flight mode, cabin mode, Auto Hover, keybinds, logging), so their game flew on the defaults until they relogged. Every join now gets them, and a player’s game that is missing a helicopter’s settings asks the server again
• Fixed The admin panel said nothing when the server refused something, so it looked as if nothing happened. It now tells you when an admin ID or role name is refused, when an admin was added with a lower role than you picked because only an owner can grant it, and when a role only an owner may change is left alone
• Fixed Saving settings to a read-only file reported “Saved” although nothing was written. The server now checks it can write the file first, for helicopter settings and for mod_config.json, and the panel says NOT saved, and why, when it can’t
• Changed The debug and physics logs are gone. They were only ever for our own testing. The debugLog and physicsLog settings drop out of mod_config.json the next time the server starts, with every other value kept, and the admin panel no longer shows them. The activity log is unchanged. The mod is also a little lighter on the server and on players’ games

• Changed Performance and reliability improvements. Less work each time a helicopter spawns, and on every frame the HUD draws. Nothing to configure
• Fixed The helicopter HUD left copies of itself behind every time you changed server. The damage panel, the cockpit key hints and the admin FPS readout were never cleared when you left a server, so every join added another set, and a panel that was on screen as you left could stay over the main menu. They are cleared when you leave now
• Changed Timers no longer depend on how long the game has been open. The flight, autopilot, camera, HUD, licence-check and admin-panel timers now run on the mission clock instead of a count of seconds since the game started, which grows coarser the longer the game stays open
• Changed Parked and flying helicopters do less work on every frame. A parked helicopter with its engine and lights off and nobody near it stops its per-frame work on players’ machines until something changes, players’ games do fewer ground checks while a rotor coasts down, and rotor-wash dust and spray are no longer drawn for helicopters more than about 1.2 km away
• Changed Less network traffic from flying helicopters. Control updates go only to players within 1.5 km, and the low-fuel beep no longer sends an update on every beep
• Fixed Other players saw no collective movement and heard no change in engine load while Auto Hover climbed or descended. They now see and hear the same as the pilot

• Fixed Sound loops ticked or stumbled where they repeat. The MD500 and MH-6 rotor ticked once a loop, the UH-1H warning ticked on every repeat, the Black Hawk’s engine could tick, and the rotor loops of the Black Hawk, Gazelle and Chinook stumbled by part of a beat once per loop. Every sound in the fleet was measured, and each loop now joins without a trace. The click at the very start of the UH-1H’s start-up sound is gone too
• Changed The Merlin has an engine sound of its own, and a new rotor sound to go with it, beating at the real AW101’s rate. It used to share the Black Hawk’s engine sound
• Fixed The MH-47G is quieter, and you can hear it start up. Its engine and rotor were much louder than the rest of the fleet and now sit level with it. Its start-up sound is new: the old one crept up slowly, like a helicopter flying in, and the new one runs through a real start-up — the auxiliary unit, the igniters and each engine lighting in turn — and reaches its working sound within two seconds
• Fixed The crash sound stopped dead at the end instead of fading out
• Fixed The crash sound never played when a crash destroyed the helicopter. It now plays, and plays again on a later crash once the helicopter has been repaired and started up again
• Fixed The sounds of a light knock against the airframe and of a rotor breaking were often missed, or cut off after a split second, for everyone else. They now play in full
• Fixed A Chinook that loses one of its two rotors keeps the sound of the one still turning. The rotor noise used to cut out with the front rotor, and Stop Engine on a Chinook with its front rotor gone now winds the rear rotor down instead of stopping it dead
• Fixed The rotor wind-down sound was silent when a rotor was destroyed
• Fixed A helicopter with a destroyed rotor played the rotor wind-down sound every time someone came near it, and when the rotor of a parked helicopter was shot out. It now plays only for a rotor that was actually turning
• Fixed An autorotating rotor showed slow, solid blades instead of a blur, and players arriving during an autorotation heard no rotor
• Fixed Sitting in first person in any vehicle muffled every other helicopter’s sound
• Fixed A breaking rotor made a car’s crash noise. It now makes a rotor-snap sound on every helicopter, the Barrel Helicopter included
• Fixed Fitting or taking out a landing-light bulb did not change the light until something else did. The MH-47G has a right landing light now, in a bulb slot of its own: fit it a second headlight bulb, as MH-47Gs already on your server come up with it empty
• Fixed Players who joined late saw a slung load’s hook gear folded away
• Fixed The autopilot switched the lights on with a flat or missing battery
• Fixed When a helicopter lost its main rotor, other players’ rotor sound could cut out instead of winding down, and after an autorotation it stopped dead on touchdown
• Fixed When a failed licence check switched flight features off, a running helicopter’s rotor and engine kept sounding, and its dust and smoke kept going. They stop now
• Fixed Gear and ramp sounds for the crew played from the middle of the helicopter
• Fixed Walking on a helicopter sounded like walking on grass or dirt. Footsteps inside every cabin, and on top of any helicopter, now sound like metal

• New The MD500 has nav lights. It had none before: its model had no nav-light lenses and no light points, so switching the nav lights on showed nothing. It now has red, green and white lenses and a red beacon that light up with them
• Changed The MH-47G is now built to its real size. It was about 15% too big; it is now in scale with the CH-47D, the same airframe, with right-sized wheels too
• Fixed Bullets met bare collision across large parts of every aircraft, so a hit there was judged by DayZ’s default instead of the aircraft’s own armour. Every surface now carries plating. On the MD500, MH-6, Gazelle, Barrel Helicopter and Black Hawk the armour was rebuilt to suit the aircraft, as it is on the four new aircraft. The UH-1H, Merlin and MH-47G had their bare parts covered with the plating they already used (3 mm on the UH-1H, 7 mm on the Merlin and MH-47G) and get the rest of the rework later
• Changed Armour matches each aircraft. The MD500, MH-6, Gazelle and Barrel Helicopter have a thin skin, the military helicopters a heavier one, and on the rebuilt aircraft the engine bay is better protected than the skin around it (the UH-1H, Merlin and MH-47G still use one plate all over). The pilots of the Black Hawk and CH-47D sit in armoured seats, the MH-6’s in lighter ones, and the Mi-24’s crew in an armoured cockpit tub. What stops a bullet
• Fixed Shots at a window often hit hidden metal instead of the glass, so the glass never broke and the bullet stopped short of the cabin. On the MD500, MH-6, Gazelle, Barrel Helicopter and Black Hawk, as on the four new aircraft, windows on the airframe and on the doors now break when they are hit and let the bullet carry on inside
• Fixed Cockpits emptied out or floated when seen from further away, including from your own chase camera. Every aircraft now keeps its full cockpit and cabin detail at every distance
• Fixed A door, ramp or window left open lost its collision after a server restart, so players and bullets passed through it. Open parts are set up again when the helicopter loads
• Fixed Hidden armour filled parts of the crew spaces on most helicopters — around the pilots’ feet and pedals, at elbows and hips, and under some cabin floors and walls — so a shot there met metal the real aircraft does not have. On the MD500, MH-6, Gazelle, Barrel Helicopter and Black Hawk, as on the four new aircraft, every seat now sits in open space, clear of the armour around it
• Fixed Landing-light lenses, nav lights, beacons, rotor hubs and engine fans were painted in the livery. On the Black Hawk, Merlin, MH-47G, MH-6, Gazelle and UH-1H these parts took the body paint of whatever scheme the aircraft wore, so the Black Hawk’s red and green nav lights and its landing-light lens, and the Merlin’s red beacon, showed body paint instead. They keep their own finish now, and a custom livery no longer paints over them. The Gazelle’s landing-light lens has also lost the stretched strip of body paint it showed and is clear again. Nothing in your texture lists changes, but check any custom skin that painted those areas
• Fixed Parts of the MH-47G were lit wrongly. Its engine pods, cabin, seats and wheels could show a hard light and dark split down the middle
• Fixed A few surfaces were missing their detail textures: the Gazelle’s paint, the Black Hawk’s wheels, the Black Hawk, UH-1H and Merlin cabins, the helicopter battery and a panel in the MH-6 cockpit. The Gazelle now has the same paint sheen as the rest of the fleet
• Fixed Fitted cargo doors were walk-through on the UH-1H, Black Hawk and Merlin. They are solid now and swing with the door; a removed door leaves an open doorway
• Fixed The Gazelle had an invisible bulge of solid space beside its fuselage
• Fixed The SA342M Gazelle fell apart at a distance — its tail boom disappeared entirely. It keeps its shape now
• Changed Helicopters look better from a distance and through a scope. Each aircraft keeps much more of its shape at range instead of dropping to rough far-away models. A helicopter far away costs a little more to draw
• Fixed Ruined Black Hawk doors looked undamaged in the Australian Army, United Nations, Navy and Fire Rescue schemes
• Fixed Empty wheel slots on the Merlin and MH-47G showed a dot instead of a wheel
• Fixed The Gazelle’s collective lever never moved
• Fixed Engine-damage smoke on the MH-6 and the Barrel Helicopter came from the middle of the aircraft instead of the engine
• Fixed The UH-1H’s landing light had no lens. It has one now, and it lights up with the light
• Fixed The MD500’s and Gazelle’s rotors twitched while turning slowly
• Fixed The spinning-rotor blur on the MH-6 and the Barrel Helicopter turned dark in sunlight

• Fixed The example FBX files were mirror images of the aircraft: they looked right in Blender and Substance Painter, but in game the pilot’s door sat on the wrong side and lettering read backwards. All rebuilt the right way round, with the CH-47D, the Mi-24, both Ospreys and every fitted wheel added — download the new example pack
• New Free alternatives to Substance Painter on the retexturing page
• Fixed Your own MH-6 skins, made from the old example pack, showed the standard paint. The MH-6’s texture list was cut from 14 entries to the 7 its model actually has in an earlier update, so the body paint now goes in the first and third entries, but the example pack’s MH-6 block still had the old 14-entry list. The example is corrected. If you made MH-6 skins of your own from an older copy, swap each one’s texture list for the 7-entry list in the new example and repack. Our own MH-6 schemes, the five new ones included, are not affected, and every other aircraft’s list is unchanged

• Fixed Trader-bought Black Hawks, Merlins and MH-47Gs arrived short of wheels — each wheel was listed once instead of once per wheel. The TraderPlus and Expansion presets now fit every wheel, and the Barrel Helicopter and the MH-47G get both of their landing-light bulbs
• Fixed Blue, green and yellow Barrel Helicopter parts and wheels had no types.xml entry, so the server did not track them like the red ones. They are in the server files now, set not to spawn as loot
• New The CH-47D, the Mi-24, both Ospreys and the five new MH-6 schemes in every server file — types, events, spawn positions and all three trader systems — and the Flip Wrench in types and all three trader systems. Merge the new entries from the updated bundle into your own files

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UPDATE — v0.4.5 | 8 September 2026

• Fixed The sideways shove when tilting on or near the ground. It was worst on the wheeled airframes — skids gripped against it while wheels rolled with it — because the lift split into a tilt-following share that was not capped at the lift actually available. Level, the two halves cancelled; tilted, the difference leaked out sideways
• Fixed The low-level shudder when skimming terrain, and the near-ground smoothing now survives a server correction instead of being undone by it
• Fixed Releasing the collective near the ground no longer “catches” the aircraft with a sudden tug — the ground cushion fades in over a fraction of a second rather than arriving in one step
• Fixed Sling loads now pull on the pilot’s own machine exactly as they do on the server, so carrying cargo stops drawing a correction every frame
• Fixed The autopilot rides through server corrections instead of popping — its internal state is carried through a rewind the same way manual flight’s already was
• Fixed Sliding landings kept catching an invisible wall. A helicopter with someone in the seat and the engine running is being flown, not parked, so its wheels no longer grab the brake as you slow — slide a combat landing in and it keeps sliding. A parked or shut-down aircraft still holds its ground on a slope
• Fixed Wind gave a faint jitter close to the ground. On servers that run wind, its force followed the raw height where the rest of the flight model uses a smoothed one, so it wobbled on tiny position noise near the ground; it now reads the same smoothed height as everything else
• Changed The undercarriage legs settle at a believable speed on every airframe

• Fixed Parked aircraft slowly sank into the terrain and through player-built floors. The parking freeze was cancelling the ground’s own push-back every frame while gravity kept adding a downward step; the sideways hold is unchanged, and only the upward correction is let through now
• Fixed Climbing into a parked helicopter was a coin flip. Helicopter cabins are tight right behind the doorway, so the game’s climb test kept refusing the landing; beside our helicopters the jump now retries with a test fitted to aircraft doorways. Your own machine also keeps a nearby parked aircraft solid instead of letting its copy fall asleep
• Fixed Wheels visibly spinning on a parked, engine-off helicopter. The Barrel and Black Hawk were the only two whose wheels could free-spin; they now sit still like the rest of the fleet, with no phantom hop as they settle
• Fixed Flip recovery [X] respects bases. It stands the aircraft on whatever is actually supporting it — base roofs and floors included — and refuses when there is no room instead of dropping it through into the structure below

• Fixed Black instrument panels. The gauges now show at all times instead of sitting black, and no longer flicker when a door opens or closes
• Note Moving needles are a deliberate no. A helicopter panel carries far more dials than a car dashboard, and animating every needle on every aircraft through a whole flight is genuinely heavy on the DayZ engine. We are choosing your frames over spinning needles

• Changed All four MD500 liveries rebuilt to line up 1:1 with the model — panel lines, rivet rows and weathering that follow the real airframe, doors included since they share the body sheet
• Added A real paint scheme for the default Civilian — white over charcoal with a crimson trim line and its own registration; it had shipped on a blank placeholder since day one
• Fixed Ghost lettering embossed in the shared normal map, which showed through every repaint — custom retextures included. The fuel filler stays where it was
• Added An MD500 painting template and UV guide in the retexture example pack

• Changed Parked and idle helicopters cost far less every frame. A helicopter sitting still was re-writing its cyclic, collective and rotor-spool animations every single frame on every nearby machine; those writes are now skipped whenever nothing has actually moved. It adds up on a server running a whole fleet
• Changed Trimmed redundant per-step work in the flight model (a duplicated exponential, a re-allocated ground probe) and the noisiest developer-only logging

• Changed Helicopters use far less of DayZ’s network-sync allowance — per-aircraft settings now arrive once when a player joins instead of syncing forever, leaving more headroom for your other mods
• Fixed Stripping a barrel helicopter sets down anyone standing on it first
• Fixed Barrel wheel colour variants now show their colours
• Changed The barrel’s battery is now the one you actually fit — it used to be moulded into the engine bay and showed even with no battery installed; the fitted HelicopterBattery now appears in the bay on both the finished aircraft and the build frame
• Fixed Debug-spawning a built Barrel Helicopter now fits both headlights, not one
• Fixed The loose barrel cockpit part shed its floating glass and oversized collision box — three stray lenses (the cage torch and the two wing lights) sat detached in the part, stretching its invisible collision box to twice the part’s real width; each lens is back on its own light and the box is back to size
• Changed The licence log points at both places to whitelist — the bot in #ip-whitelisting on our Discord, and managing it yourself at czautoz.co.uk

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UPDATE — v0.4.4 | 6 September 2026

• Added An aircraft players build themselves, piece by piece. Full write-up on the Barrel Helicopter page. Cut open a barrel and you are left with exactly that — a bare cut drum, nothing else. Every other part of the aircraft is a separate item that bolts into its own slot: cage, left and right wings, tail boom, tail fin, cockpit, engine bay, main rotor, tail rotor, undercarriage, and all four wheels. Fourteen slots. Bolting a part into its slot only fits it; it appears on the frame — collision and all — once the Airframe Assembly Wrench has built it, and the wrench takes parts back down in reverse order. The build has two tools of its own: a Barrel Cutting Torch opens the drum, and the wrench does every step after that. The torch burns gas, so it needs a charged canister on it, and its flame is visible to everyone while it cuts
• Added A frame only takes parts in its own colour, and a strip hands them back in that colour, so a blue helicopter cannot be finished with red parts. Coloured parts come from cutting a coloured barrel or stripping a coloured aircraft — only the red ones spawn in loot
• Added The barrel you cut decides the colour you end up with. A red, blue, green or yellow barrel gives a red, blue, green or yellow helicopter — CZ_BarrelHeli is the red one, the other three have their own classnames, and each names its own colour in the inventory and at a trader — so traders and admins can hand out a specific one. The frame wears that colour from the first cut, and comes back in the aircraft’s colour when one is stripped
• Added Collision follows the build. A bare drum collides only as a drum — nothing to walk into where the tail will be, nothing to stop a bullet beside it. Each part brings its own collision with it, and the frame lifts itself onto its skids and then onto its wheels as they go on
• Added The frame’s slots open one stage at a time. A bare frame offers only the undercarriage slot; building each part opens the next in the order that keeps every part on something — cage, cockpit, engine bay, tail boom, tail fin, wings, rotors — with the wheel slots opening once the undercarriage is built and the battery and bulb slots with the engine bay. Nothing can be fitted ahead of its support, and a part cannot be dismantled while the next one sits on it. It takes the battery and the landing-light bulb too, so a finished aircraft is born with both fitted
• Added Every empty slot on the frame shows the part that belongs in it. Open a part-built frame and each slot it is still waiting on carries a small picture of that piece, so you can see at a glance what is missing rather than working it out from a list. The wheel slots show a wheel, the way a car’s do
• Added It can be taken back apart, returning every part at the wear it had. A part-built frame is a proper world object with a helicopter’s lifetime, so an unfinished build survives a logout and a restart. A bare frame is still a barrel, so it can be picked up, carried and set back down, and it lies on whatever slope you put it on rather than sinking a corner into a bank. A part held in the hands can be attached straight from the cursor
• Added Only the player who built it can strip it, and a locked helicopter cannot be stripped at all. Owners who would rather anyone could dismantle one can switch the ownership rule off. The strip option hides itself from players who cannot use it rather than failing at the end
• Added It rolls on four sprung wheels. A nose wheel, two mains and a tail wheel, on three axles, each with real suspension. The legs move with them: the nose leg swings on its pin and squeezes its coil spring, the main legs telescope, and the tail leg pivots on its upper arm with the shock sliding into its tube. The gear settles as the aircraft takes its weight and extends again as it lifts, rather than snapping between two positions. The wheels are ordinary attachments, so they can be knocked off, repaired and replaced like a car’s
• Added Flies like something welded together in a field — its own flight tuning, its own start-up, shut-down, engine and rotor sounds, its own cargo capacity setting, homemade dials and lights, and a full set of damage states. Its rotor is a fraction of the size of the fleet’s, so its downwash is thrown from an emitter scaled to match rather than the full-size ring every other airframe uses
• Fixed It sits on its wheels. It rested a few inches clear of the ground, its tyres never quite touching. Three collision blocks were left inside the airframe from before the wheels became separate attachments, and they were reaching lower than the tyres, so the aircraft was standing on those instead. They are gone, and its weight is back on its wheels and springs where it belongs
• Fixed The wheels no longer turn on their own. A parked barrel helicopter with the engine off and nobody aboard sat there with its wheels spinning. The model was being told to turn them at the same time as the engine was, and the two fought
• Fixed The suspension moves at a believable speed. The legs snapped up and down as the aircraft settled instead of taking up the load. They are damped now, the travel is a little shorter, and a parked aircraft no longer draws its legs at full droop
• Fixed Assembling one no longer shoves the builder aside. The finished aircraft used to be created facing north on the spot the frame stood, then turned to the frame’s heading, then dropped onto the ground — three poses in the same instant, each a full-size aircraft appearing inside arm’s reach, so the player was pushed and spun out of the way and then put back. It arrives once now, in the pose it keeps
• Note Where the parts come from. The thirteen part classnames and the two tools are the only items in the server files set to spawn in loot (Industrial). They are the route to the aircraft, so if your traders sell them instead, set those entries to nominal=0. Prices are pre-set in all three trader files

• Changed The autopilot now flies using the same controls a pilot does. It used to shove the aircraft around from the outside, which fought the flight model and had the server constantly correcting it. It now works the cyclic, the pedals and the collective on your own machine, exactly as a pair of hands would, so it turns and climbs like someone is sitting in the seat
• Fixed Turns and climbs are continuous instead of stepped. The owner walks the heading and altitude targets at its own pace rather than jumping to each server update, and starts turning from the first moment of a pivot instead of waiting for the server’s copy of the heading to catch up
• Fixed The server’s lagging heading copy can no longer brake the owner’s own turn mid-pivot
• Fixed The nose finishes swinging onto the bearing before the aircraft banks, instead of leaning sideways through the turn
• Fixed Arriving at cruise height no longer bounces — the virtual pilot’s collective hand has a speed limit now, like a real one
• Fixed The cruise height reaches your own machine straight away, rather than only when the server happened to correct you
• Fixed The autopilot asks each airframe for its own top speed rather than assuming three quarters of it
• Fixed Auto-land settles onto its skids and hands the controls straight back instead of hovering out a timer
• Fixed Cancelling with the controls gives plain manual flight back — no surprise hand-over to Auto Hover
• Fixed The autopilot’s lights and gear decide once instead of overruling the pilot every half second
• Fixed The collective lever in the cockpit moves again. It sat still no matter what the pilot did with the collective
• Fixed Rotor droop and engine load now reach everyone outside the aircraft, not just the pilot
• Changed Terrain look-ahead runs five times a second instead of forty, and the obstacle scan stops rebuilding its lists every pass

• Added Owners can set the default keys their players start with. A player who has rebound a key keeps their own choice — the defaults only apply to players who have never changed that key, so nobody’s setup is overwritten
• Fixed A bad key name in the config is put back to the stock key and logged for the owner, instead of leaving the action unbound

• Added Every helicopter, door, wheel and item now names and describes itself in all 26 languages the mod ships. Previously only the action prompts were translated, so inventory names and descriptions stayed English on a German, Russian or Chinese client. Aircraft designations stay in the original everywhere — an AW101 Merlin is an AW101 Merlin in every language

• Changed Navigation lights now draw on the battery like the spotlight does. They were free, which is not what the settings or the documentation described. It is still one flat rate while any light is on — the spotlight and the navigation lights together cost no more than one of them alone
• Fixed The engine no longer drains the battery behind your settings. DayZ’s own car battery drain was running on top of ours, in flight as well as parked, and it kept running even with battery.lightDrain set to 0 — which is why owners who switched the light drain off still watched batteries go down. battery.chargeRate, battery.lightDrain and battery.startDrain are now the only three things in the game that move a helicopter battery, and setting all three to 0 really does freeze it

• Fixed The hop and shudder when tilting on or near the ground. Moving the cyclic while sat on the ground, or skimming just above it, lightened the aircraft to near its own weight, so it unloaded its gear, hopped a foot or two and dropped again when the stick centred. The lift the cyclic hands back — which is what lets a low hover still be steered with the collective centred — now fades in with the clearance under the airframe’s lowest point: gone while the wheels or skids carry the weight, back in full a body-height up. Every airframe was affected
• Fixed The parking brake no longer disagrees between your machine and the server. The pilot’s own client held a third of the brake on at speed while the server held none, so the two sides argued about how firmly a landed aircraft was pinned
• Fixed The engine and rotor sounded identical for a whole flight. Both loops only took their pitch and volume from what the aircraft was doing during start-up; once running, every airframe played one fixed note at one fixed level until shutdown. They now follow the collective, speed and bank the whole time, so pulling power is heard as the rotor digging in
• Fixed A wheeled airframe knows it has left the ground once no wheel has touched for a second, instead of waiting to be five metres up for three seconds
• Fixed Cabin and cargo seats offer Switch Seats. Looking at the seat next to you in the back of any helicopter gave you no prompt at all — only the two front seats ever did, so a passenger could never move across. Every seat in the fleet offers it now, and it is still the same interact key
• Added Merlin passengers can change seats across the cabin. Switch Seats had been turned off on the whole aircraft since it arrived, because the Merlin is the one helicopter whose pilot sits on the right, so the cockpit swap animation is baked facing the wrong way and slid the player out through the hull. The sixteen cabin seats use the ordinary left and right passenger animations and were never affected, so they are now open: look at a free cabin seat and press the interact key. The two cockpit seats stay out of it, and its cockpit still opens straight into the cabin, so you reach them on foot

• Fixed Every door and wheel in the fleet is now carried properly with two hands, instead of being held one-handed like a small item. All 104 of them
• Fixed Headlight lenses light up. The glass of the front spotlight never changed to its lit look when the light came on, on any aircraft. It does now. It is most obvious on the Barrel Helicopter, whose lenses have a lamp of their own painted on; on the older aircraft that glass is part of the body paint, so the difference is subtle. A second bulb fitted while the light was already switched on also left that side dark until the light was turned off and on again; it lights straight away now
• Fixed The helicopter battery clicks going in and coming out, the way a car battery does. Fitting one or taking one out used to make no sound at all
• Fixed The dashboard lights up on every aircraft, not just the ones whose front spotlight happened to work
• Fixed Dials and lamps no longer come up blank white. It happened at random, to whichever aircraft loaded at an unlucky moment, and a restart cleared it
• Fixed Helicopters no longer carry coolant or brake fluid. Both came down from the car the helicopter is built on and neither means anything on an aircraft, so their capacities are now zero and they can no longer leak, warn or be asked for during a repair
• Fixed The car fuel-tank rules no longer apply to helicopters. Underneath every helicopter DayZ was running its own car fuel-tank check every second: a damaged tank slowly drained fuel with no leak effect and no setting to stop it (on top of the mod’s own leak from 50% down), and a ruined tank forced the engine to ruined again every second, so an engine repair never held until the tank was repaired. Fuel leaks are now the mod’s alone, and the engine stays repaired
• Fixed The Barrel Helicopter and MH-6 no longer drown their engine in a puddle. DayZ decides an engine has drowned by checking one spot on the vehicle, and neither of these two had that spot set, so it fell back to wheel height and a shallow-water landing damaged the engine. It sits on the engine itself now
• Fixed Worn and ruined tyres now look it on the Merlin and Chinook. Their wheels stayed looking factory-fresh whatever condition they were in, and a custom retexture never showed on them either
• Fixed The Merlin’s headlight and dashboard light up properly. Three pieces of its artwork were being loaded from another helicopter’s folder, where they had never existed, so its headlight had no lit look and its dials stayed dark at night. All three come from the Merlin’s own artwork now

• Note Fifteen new loot entries. The barrel helicopter’s parts and its two tools are the only new items that spawn in loot. Merge the new types.xml entries from the server files bundle, or set them to nominal=0 and sell the parts through your trader instead
• Note Eight new vehicle classnames — CZ_BarrelHeli (red) plus _Blue, _Green and _Yellow, and the part-built CZ_BarrelHeli_Frame (red) with the same three colour variants. All eight are in the updated server files’ types.xml for persistence — none of them spawn as loot. The four aircraft are also priced in all three trader files; the frames are not sold, so add them yourself if you want players to buy one
• Changed mod_config.json is laid out in sections you can actually find things in. The old 24-key features grab-bag is gone: flight, simple, advanced, crew, rotor, autoPilot, sling, barrelHeli, repair, refuel and cargoModules (one block per aircraft with modules and cellsPerModule), and the logging keys lose their prefix. Your existing file is read, backed up as mod_config.pre-0.4.4-layout.json in a Backups folder inside your profile’s CZAutoz_Heli folder, and rewritten in the new layout with every value kept. The Admin Panel’s Mod Cfg tab uses the same sections in the same order
• Added Save To All Variants on the Heli Cfg tab. Tune one Merlin and one click writes the same values to every livery of that aircraft — no more repeating it four times
• Note Seven Barrel Helicopter settings in their own barrelHeli block. cutTime, buildTime and assembleTime set how long the cut, each part build and the sign-off take; torchUses and wrenchUses set how many jobs a torch or wrench lasts; allowStrip and stripOwnerOnly control stripping. All in the Admin Panel, and all documented in Global settings
• Changed Better frame rate around helicopters. For the whole time a player was looking at an aircraft, the mod kept asking itself over and over which lock and trader mods the server has. That answer cannot change while the server is running, so it is worked out once now. Helicopters also send less over the network than they used to
• Fixed Helicopters could fail to appear on a heavily modded server. DayZ limits how much information one vehicle is allowed to keep in step with the players around it, and every vehicle mod on your server draws on that same allowance. We were taking far more of it than we needed to, so a server running plenty of other vehicle mods could run out: the log filled with errors and the helicopters never turned up. We take a good deal less now, which leaves room for the rest of what you run. Nothing about how the aircraft fly or behave has changed
• Note A frame spawned by an admin already knows its colour. The frame’s classname decides the aircraft it assembles into, so spawning CZ_BarrelHeli_Frame_Blue and building it out gives a blue helicopter
• Note Navigation lights now cost battery. If your server relied on them being free, lower battery.lightDrain or raise battery.chargeRate to suit

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HOTFIX — v0.4.3 | 2 September 2026

• Fixed Typing in chat no longer presses helicopter keys. The helicopter’s keys were read straight from the keyboard, so an o typed into a chat message opened the client settings window over the chat box and could leave both stuck on screen — and the same applied to P, K, X, T, H and even the flight controls while seated. Every helicopter key now stands down while any text box has keyboard focus, whichever chat mod provides it
• Fixed The settings window, autopilot map and admin panel no longer open on top of another menu (inventory, pause, chat) — pressing their key toggles only their own window

• Fixed Dr Jones Trader, TraderX and the TraderPlus Garage can take helicopters back. All three record who is allowed to sell or park a vehicle at the moment its engine starts — a hook a car fires and a helicopter’s engine never did, so no one could ever sell a helicopter back (“not owned by player”). Starting a helicopter’s engine now records the pilot for each of them. TraderPlus selling (the receipt system) and the Expansion Market work differently and were never affected
• Fixed MuchCarKey no longer deletes helicopters that are in use. Its unused-vehicle cleanup refreshes a vehicle’s “last used” time only on a car engine start, lock, unlock or key assignment — so a helicopter flown every day but never re-locked looked abandoned and was removed at the configured lifetime. Flying a helicopter now counts as using it
• Fixed MuchCarKey’s key-to-start rule applies to helicopters. On servers with CanStartWithoutKey off, starting a keyed helicopter now needs its key — in hand or in inventory, as the server has it configured, master keys included — exactly as a car does. The cockpit start and the autopilot’s ground start both refuse with a clear notice
• Fixed AutolockVehicles no longer locks a helicopter under its pilot. It arms a lock timer at spawn and when an owner disconnects, and cancels it when a car’s engine starts; a helicopter’s engine start now cancels it too

• Fixed A locked helicopter stays locked whatever the mod load order. Some lock mods (Dr Jones Trader, TraderPlus CarLock) enforce their lock through the car door actions, and when they were loaded before the helicopters the helicopter’s own door handling ran first and never consulted them — so a locked helicopter’s exterior doors and ramp could be opened from outside. Getting in, the exterior doors and the ramp now honour MuchCarKey, TraderPlus CarLock, Dr Jones Trader and Expansion locks directly, in any load order

• Fixed Climbing aboard a parked helicopter. A parked helicopter stops simulating a fraction of a second after the last person leaves it, and the only things that woke it were a door, a light, the engine, someone aboard or a physical shove — a player simply walking up to it did not count. The engine’s climb check needs a live aircraft to grab, so the Merlin’s side-door climb spots were unusable until something else disturbed the helicopter. A player within reach — half the airframe’s length plus arm’s reach, so it covers the Chinook as well as the MD500 — now keeps a parked helicopter awake and wakes a sleeping one, and it goes back to sleep once they leave

• Note No-vehicle-damage mods must load before the helicopters. COCAs_NoVehicleDamageMOD and the 2019 NoVehicleDamage switch damage off by replacing the car’s contact and physics callbacks without passing them on; loaded after the helicopters, they silence the helicopter’s rotor collision, wake-on-contact and the rotor/tilt updates other players receive. Put them earlier in -mod= — see Common Issues
• Note Vehicle3PP: its whitelist matches by inheritance, so adding CZAutoz_Helicopter_Base enables third-person in every helicopter at once

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UPDATE — v0.4.2 | 1 September 2026

• Added Press P in the pilot seat to open the destination map — drag the header to move it, drag the corner to resize, and it remembers your size and position. Click a destination, press ENGAGE, and the helicopter flies itself there; ESC closes it
• Added It flies like a pilot, per aircraft. Nose-first with bank-to-turn, cruising at a speed derived from that helicopter’s own configured maximum airspeed, turning at a rate matched to its tail authority, never pushing into its speed envelope — and sling loads slow it down exactly as they would a human pilot
• Added Terrain and obstacle aware, and it cruises level. It reads the ground more than a kilometre ahead along the route and picks an altitude that clears the highest of it, with extra margin over scanned obstacles — trees, buildings, rocks and vehicles on the flight path raise the cruise line before they are reached. It then holds that altitude rather than following the ground beneath it, so a run of hills is crossed in level flight: it climbs only when the ground ahead genuinely needs more height, and gives height back only once well clear — and while it cruises, the altitude readout shows the altitude it is holding. Engaged low, it climbs straight up onto its safety line before moving off
• Added You are always in command. Touching any flight control cancels the autopilot instantly; STOP in the map or the Autohover key cancel it too. On arrival it hands to an Autohover hold, and landing stays manual unless your server has auto-land switched on
• Added Fully independent from Autohover. Engaging the autopilot never flips your hover state — they are two separate systems that only meet at the arrival hand-off
• Added It flies the aircraft, not just the stick. While the autopilot is in control it works the systems a pilot would: navigation lights follow the clock, on after dusk and off at dawn; the landing lamp lights a night approach and goes out once down; and retractable landing gear — the Merlin is the only airframe with it — is raised for the cruise and lowered for the arrival. Take the controls back and they are yours again
• Added A proper helicopter marker icon now marks aircraft on the admin tracker and the autopilot map, and the autopilot destination is shown as a clear red X
• Added The hold indicator knows the autopilot. The cockpit’s hold light used to watch Auto Hover alone; it now lights for the autopilot too, tinted amber so a glance tells you which of the two is flying
• Added Optional auto-land — autoPilot.autoLand, OFF by default. With it on, the autopilot also lands at the destination where safe: verified clear ground only, using the same site check as the abandoned-landing system. About a kilometre out it starts sizing up the ground around the point you picked, so in the normal case the site is chosen while still inbound and the arrival is one continuous approach — a straight descending line to the pad, slowing on final, settling level and touching down positively, engine left running. No safe ground nearby? It holds hover and tells you to land manually — and the map’s corner note tells you whether your server lands for you or leaves it manual
• Added Optional auto take-off — autoPilot.autoTakeOff, OFF by default. With it on, the autopilot owns the whole departure: engaged on the pad it starts the engine if it is off, holds the aircraft on its wheels until the rotor reaches full flying speed, lifts off and climbs onto its safety line before setting off. With it off, engaging from the ground is refused with a notice — the aircraft must already be airborne with the engine running. Shown in the Admin Panel as Auto Pilot Takes Off From Ground
• Added Master switch — autoPilot.enabled, ON by default. Turns the whole autopilot off for everyone; in the Admin Panel as Auto Pilot (map destination)

• Added Seat switching now works on helicopters, the same way it does in a car. Look at an empty seat and press the interact key to move into it, with the normal slide animation. Until now the only route into the pilot seat was the co-pilot control transfer, which only the person already flying can start — so if the pilot disconnected or was killed with someone else aboard, nobody could take over and the aircraft was lost
• Added It can never take the controls off a living pilot. Vanilla’s rule that you cannot move into an occupied seat still applies, so handing over while both cockpit seats are filled still goes through the co-pilot control transfer. The pilot at the controls also cannot drop back to a cargo seat while airborne
• Added Looking at a seat in flight can never throw you out. Changing seat is a press of the interact key and climbing out is a hold of that same key — so the exit stands down while you are looking at a free seat in the air, and a press held a moment too long cannot eject you from a flying helicopter. On the ground everything behaves exactly as before
• Note Not available on the Merlin. Its seat-change animation is built facing the wrong way for that airframe and carries you out through the fuselage, and an animation’s direction cannot be changed from script. Nothing is lost: the Merlin’s cockpit exit walks straight into the cabin, so you can step out, walk to another seat and get back in

• Added Press O anywhere to open your personal helicopter settings (rebindable). Mouse Flight on/off, Mouse Flight sensitivity and Keyboard Cyclic Strength — which softens W/A/S/D and Q/E stick deflection for gentler keyboard flying. Every value is stored in your own profile on your PC, applies instantly, and never touches the server or other players. ESC or CLOSE dismisses it

• Fixed Transit is real flight — nose-first, banking into turns, at per-aircraft speeds — instead of the fixed-nose sideways slide
• Fixed It lands close by, not far away. The clear-ground search now covers its full pattern honestly under load and picks the nearest verified-safe spot — no more drifting off in one direction to some distant field
• Added Water awareness. The landing site keeps a full rotor-clearance margin from the waterline, and the shore-crossing behaviour only engages when the helicopter is genuinely abandoned over water
• Fixed A single committed final descent — no more seesaw hovering over the pad — with the sink rate scaled to the aircraft
• Fixed A pilot killed at the controls no longer leaves the helicopter holding its hover until the tanks run dry. A body left in the seat counted as crew, so an aircraft with a dead pilot was never treated as abandoned. Only someone who could actually take the aircraft counts now — an unconscious pilot still does, since they may wake
• Fixed The abandonment delay is always honoured, and an abandoned helicopter still settles into its unattended sleep. If an aircraft reached the ground with its engine already dead part-way through an automatic landing — running itself out of fuel while searching for a spot, or losing a rotor — it stayed flagged as landing for the rest of that server session. The next time it was left alone it began landing immediately with the configured delay skipped, and it could never settle into the unattended hover freeze. Losing a rotor also left the autopilot armed, so a repaired aircraft would resume flying itself to a stale destination
• Fixed A disconnecting pilot no longer leaves a helicopter flying until it crashes. The unattended-aircraft logic only ran once something was already holding the helicopter, so a pilot who logged out while hand-flying left it carrying its last velocity across the map until it hit terrain — while one left on Auto Hover landed correctly. An aircraft left airborne with nobody aboard now takes the hold itself and then lands after the delay. Engine-off and shot-down helicopters still fall as before
• Fixed Clean handover when the delay elapses. Pilot leftovers — an active autopilot, stale hover targets, the open map — are cleared, and a helicopter abandoned mid-autopilot now completes its flight and then lands itself

• Fixed Sitting in a landed helicopter no longer rubber-bands. With the engine off and a pilot aboard, the stationary aircraft could visibly jolt every second or two — the pilot’s own game kept nudging the resting airframe, losing its ground contact for a few frames, and the server kept snapping it back. The at-rest hold now leaves a settled helicopter completely alone and corrects it only when it genuinely drifts, and the wheel-brake application is now identical on both sides of the connection down to its ramp-up timing
• Added No lifting off before full rotor blur. On the ground, flight controls stay inert until the blades reach full speed — the choppy partial-spool take-off regime is gone entirely. Engine-off autorotation control is untouched
• Fixed Near-ground jumpiness while tilting over uneven terrain — the ground-effect altitude smoothing had a hard boundary that stepped the forces low over rough ground; it is now continuous, and cliff-edge response is smoother with it
• Improved Smoother framerate while flying. The client re-read the config texture arrays and re-applied damage materials to the hull and every attachment twice a second on any helicopter being flown — pristine ones included — and re-applied them again on every network sync of a damaged aircraft, which during hard manoeuvring is many times a second. That constant churn was felt as hitching at low level under heavy input. A pristine helicopter now costs nothing, and a damaged one is throttled while still reacting instantly when its damage level actually changes
• Fixed Skid helicopters settle onto the ground instead of juddering. At touchdown the park brake jumped straight to full the instant the collective dropped, locking the ground colliders while the aircraft still carried motion — wheeled airframes absorb that, skid airframes judder, which matches the reported difference between them exactly. The brake now eases on over about three quarters of a second and releases quickly, so touchdowns settle rather than snatch. Full holding force and parking behaviour are unchanged
• Fixed Landing on a ship deck or a player-built floor now counts as being on the ground. Several rules that should only apply on the ground were testing for natural terrain alone: rotor blur could be held back, and the cockpit prompts that stand down in flight — Stop Engine among them — behaved as though a landed aircraft were still airborne
• Fixed Warm engine restarts are in sync. Restarting mid spin-down — for example right after an abandoned self-landing — no longer visibly slows the blades, and the start-up sound now tracks the real spool instead of finishing early

• Updated The helicopter retexture example pack has been rebuilt and re-released. The Substance Painter models now carry real materials, so each aircraft opens as proper texture sets instead of one merged sheet — the Huey correctly shows two (body and tail boom) with each of its doors painting into both. UVs are oriented the way Substance and Blender expect while sampling exactly the pixels the game samples, face normals point outwards instead of rendering the shells inside-out, and the models carry the game’s own vertex normals so they look smooth rather than faceted. The geometry is untouched full-detail LOD 0, and UV positions are identical to before, so existing paint work still lines up — but re-import the models if you have an older copy

• Fixed Players who fall out of a flying helicopter can no longer be dragged along beneath it. A passenger who slipped off a bench or deck mid-flight could stay invisibly tethered to the aircraft — hanging weightless below the hull, carried through every turn — until something finally let go. The cabin link now verifies the player is actually inside the aircraft before holding them, so anyone outside it falls free instantly; it also releases anyone already stuck
• Fixed Jumping from a moving helicopter no longer drags the jumper through the sky. Passengers bailing out of a flying aircraft could hang outside the hull for many seconds, carried wherever the pilot flew, before finally dropping (reported on the Little Bird and Blackhawk — the cause covered every helicopter). Leaving the pilot or co-pilot seat of a moving aircraft now detaches instantly, carrying the aircraft’s momentum. Passengers in the back are untouched — they still just stand up and walk the cabin as before — and landed or hovering exits keep the normal climb-out. Getting out never injures you by itself, though a jump from height is still a fall
• Improved Autopilot and abandoned landings descend like a pilot. The final descent was a crawl from any height; it now comes down briskly high up — scaled to each helicopter and always below the vortex-ring-state threshold — and flares to the same gentle touchdown below eight metres
• Fixed The abandoned landing settles onto its skids with a firm, positive touchdown. On sloped ground the aircraft could finish its automatic landing frozen slightly above the grass; the at-rest hold now waits for real ground contact before pinning anything, and the last stretch is flown down positively so the skids actually touch instead of the aircraft hanging just above the surface
• Fixed Walking into the cabin can no longer strand you outside the aircraft. If the client happened to rebuild the helicopter’s network entity in the moment you moved to the cabin — spawning or removing vehicles nearby is enough to trigger it — the parent link briefly reported your position as thousands of metres away, which read as having fallen out. The cabin session was then ended and restored several times a second: still aboard on the server, jittering in mid-air on your own screen, until it eventually recovered on its own. The check that decides you have left the aircraft now has to agree with the aircraft’s real position before it acts, and a cabin reference lost to a rebuild is recovered from the link rather than ending the session
• Fixed Cabin mode no longer counts as abandoning the aircraft. A sole pilot walking back into the cabin (or a passenger riding the deck) now counts as crew, so the hover-freeze, abandoned countdown and auto-landing all stay off while anyone is aboard
• Fixed Engine-off on a raised base floor no longer strands the rotor in a silent windmill. The height probe can now see every player-built surface (including mesh floors that swallow raycasts), and physical ground contact overrides the airborne logic — the rotor spools down normally and the aircraft goes to sleep
• Fixed Helicopters parked on player-built structures no longer end up inside the base after a server restart (reported on the Gazelle and Blackhawk — the cause was airframe-independent, so the fix covers every helicopter). On boot the server rebuilds bases over several seconds, and both gravity and the v0.3.6 mid-air restart recovery could act before a roof’s collision existed: the helicopter fell through it, or the recovery probe missed the roof, judged the aircraft mid-air and “recovered” it to the ground inside the base. A boot-restored helicopter is now held weightless at its saved position until the world around it has finished building, its parked state is saved with it so an aircraft that was at rest can never be relocated by the recovery at all, and the recovery’s support checks now recognise player-built surfaces
• Fixed Rotor downwash dust no longer floats in mid-air beneath elevated platforms. Hovering over or landing on a raised player-built floor could leave the dust cloud hanging at ground level far below the deck; the effect now stays off whenever the surface beneath the rotor is a structure raised above the terrain
• Fixed detachRuinedParts works, properly. With the setting on, ruined doors and wheels now actually fall off — breaking away right where they hang and falling with real physics, tumbling until they settle, instead of teleporting to a drop point. A dropped door also keeps its wrecked look on the ground. Scoped so batteries and cargo modules can never be shed
• Fixed Cross-mod compatibility: engine prompts on other mods’ vehicles. Our engine start/stop prompt overrides re-implemented the whole condition instead of deferring to the chain, which silently suppressed other mods’ engine actions — DayZ Expansion helicopters lost their hold-to-stop-engine prompt. The overrides now only hide the prompts on CZ helicopters and hand everything else back untouched
• Fixed MH6 and MD500 rotor blur looked blocky at full spin — the harsh solid petals are softened into faint smooth blur streaks on main and tail rotors
• Added The Admin Panel and both maps — the helicopter tracker and the autopilot map — are movable and resizable, and each remembers where every player put it

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UPDATE — v0.4.1 | 27 August 2026

• Added Five damage stages on the hull and tail of every variant and livery. Pristine, worn, damaged, badly damaged and ruined each have their own look. The livery’s panel lines and detail — including lettering embossed into the surface — survive the early stages, so your paint stays recognisable until the airframe is genuinely beaten up, and only then do dents take over
• Added A destroyed helicopter now looks destroyed. Scorched brown-black paint, blistered metal and a sooty, non-reflective finish — and the burnt look is reserved for actual destruction, so scorched paint always means dead, never merely damaged
• Added Doors and wheels wear their own damage. Each part tracks its own condition and shows its own damage and ruined looks independently of the airframe
• Fixed The damage you see is always the damage that exists. Condition is decided on the server and applied on every client — flying in from a distance, reloading, opening a door or repairing all show the correct state immediately
• Added Community retextures inherit the whole system automatically. A retexture override keeps its own paint and picks up all five stages with no extra work — and an author who ships their own damage materials alongside their livery overrides ours per stage

• Fixed Bullets passed straight through the Chinook. Its fire geometry has been rebuilt from the proven walkable shell — bullets now collide everywhere, the windows are real glass rather than armour, and rounds route into the correct damage zones. Smaller bullet-transparent patches found on every other airframe were closed in the same pass
• Fixed One bullet to the engine could destroy the whole helicopter. The engine zone’s critical-hit chance was set to 100%, so any round that reached it was instantly fatal. It now matches vanilla cars at 0.1% — engine hits do normal engine damage, with the same rare golden-BB vanilla has
• Fixed Hit components near the rotor mast bypassed the damage zones entirely, sending their damage straight to the airframe’s global health. Every hit component on every airframe is now mapped into a proper damage zone
• Added Per-blade rotor collision. Stationary rotors were an invisible solid disc; bullets now pass between the blades and only strike the blades themselves

• Fixed Destroyed helicopters revived themselves. A heli shot to zero could bounce back to 40% health the moment someone climbed in, because the write-off protection ran before the destroyed flag was set. Wrecks now stay wrecks — the protection only rescues an airframe whose hull and engine are genuinely intact
• Fixed Shooting the hull ruined all four doors at once. The door zones were absorbing hull damage at ten times the vanilla rate; they now take the same 10% share a vanilla car door does. Shooting a door directly still ruins that door
• Fixed Repair now actually clears the aftermath. Fire, engine smoke and the fuel-leak spray all stop the moment a repair lands — from the repair kit, the garage or the admin panel — instead of smoking forever
• Fixed A leaking fuel tank on an unmanned helicopter now drains. Previously the leak effect played forever without ever losing fuel while nobody was aboard; the tank now empties and the leak ends on its own
• Added Ruined wheels look ruined, the same way vanilla handles it

• Added A locked vehicle refuses the hook. Before attaching, the sling asks whichever lock mod your server runs — MuchCarKey, Trader, TraderPlus and Expansion are all understood — so a helicopter can no longer lift a car straight around its lock. Reported by PalladiumZ1
• Info Toggleable per server with the new Sling: Respect Vehicle Locks setting, in the config file and live in the admin panel

• Added Refuel All joins Repair All in the tools tab — every helicopter on the map, one click
• Fixed Repair and Repair All now restore everything. They previously healed only the airframe’s overall health, leaving ruined doors and wheels, a damaged battery and low internal zones untouched — which is why some smoking, fuel-leaking helicopters could never be fixed. Repair now restores every damage zone and every attached part
• Changed Auto Shutdown On Exit is now set per flight model, Simple and Advanced each getting their own value alongside its Auto Hover On Exit counterpart. Existing configs migrate automatically — both models inherit your current setting

• Fixed Vehicle recovery and flip mods no longer desync parked helicopters. Helis now follow a recovery mod’s teleport, and rescued airframes are no longer handed back at 1% health where other mods read them as wrecks
• Added Abandoned helicopters land themselves. A heli left hovering with nobody aboard descends and sets down on safe ground after a configurable delay, instead of hanging in the air burning fuel until it is lost forever
• Fixed Getting out on a rooftop or rig now behaves correctly. Exit checks measure height above the structure you are standing on rather than the terrain far below it
• Fixed Fully repairing the hull also restores the battery
• Changed The flight HUD sits slightly further left so it clears the hotbar on smaller resolutions

• Fixed UV maps normalised on every airframe. Retextures made in Substance Painter or any 2D editor now map cleanly, with the per-airframe layouts our own liveries use
• Fixed The example FBX files no longer import mirrored. Faces appeared reversed in Blender and Substance Painter; the exported geometry now matches the shipped models exactly, UVs included
• Fixed White rotor discs. The rotor blur textures were missing materials on some airframes; every blur now has a proper one

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UPDATE — v0.4.0 | 23 August 2026

• Fixed Using the Chinook’s rear ramp could crash the server and every client on it. Three independent faults stacked into a single symptom. First, 25 of the Chinook’s 27 seat reference points were absent from the model — the script asked the engine for points that did not exist. Second, the call we used to rebuild the ramp’s collision after a restart was corrupting memory rather than raising a script error, which is why the failure appeared inside the Windows allocator with no script log to point at it. Third, a ramp caught mid-travel by a server restart was restored to that exact position with its target set to match, so nothing would ever move it again. All three are fixed. Every airframe in the fleet has since had its seat wiring audited end to end — crew proxies, skeleton bones, boarding positions and seat reference points, across every level of detail — and all seven now verify clean
• Fixed A ramp can no longer be left stuck half open. The ramp takes fifteen seconds to open and twelve to close, and a restart landing inside that window captured it mid-swing. Persistence now records the position the ramp was commanded to reach rather than the position it happened to be passing through, so a restart during travel simply completes the movement. Helicopters already saved in a half-open state are repaired automatically on the next restart

• Added Every helicopter now ships five visual levels of detail instead of one. Until now each airframe carried a single full-detail mesh that the engine drew at every range, so a distant helicopter cost exactly as much to render as one filling your screen — and a server with several in view paid that cost for all of them. Each aircraft now has four progressively simplified meshes behind the original, which is left completely untouched, so close-up appearance is identical. All 66 attachment models — doors, wheels, rotor blades and hubs, skids, seats and cabin interiors — received the same treatment. At the furthest level the fleet draws 16.2x fewer triangles: UH-1H 20.7x, Merlin 18.5x, Chinook 17.9x, Black Hawk 17.4x, MD500 16.0x, MH6 13.6x and Gazelle 13.3x. The gain is largest where it matters most — busy airfields, and any server running several helicopters within sight of each other

• Fixed The jolt when rolling through level with A and D is gone. Heavier airframes hitched as the cyclic crossed centre — worst on the Chinook, present on the Merlin, and absent on the light helicopters. The control smoothing chose between two time constants with a hard switch, and a second switch halved the rate the moment the stick reversed. Because the smoothing is a spring that carries velocity, changing its rate mid-motion discontinuously altered the path it was solving for — and the size of the kick scaled with the airframe’s own smoothing values, which is exactly why it tracked aircraft weight. Both transitions now ease across a short band. Pitch and yaw carried the identical construct and received the same fix; every steady-state response is numerically unchanged

• Added The size of each helicopter’s extra cargo modules is now yours to choose. A single container is capped at 1000 slots, which is why up to ten modules can be fitted — but each module was a fixed 1000 regardless of the aircraft it was bolted to, so a Gazelle jumped from 250 straight to 1250 with no step in between. Module size is now configurable per airframe from 100 to 1000 in increments of 100, and combines with the existing module count for whatever total your server wants. Set it in extraModules.<heli>_size or live from the admin panel, where it appears beside the module count
• Info Existing servers are unaffected until they choose otherwise — every aircraft defaults to 1000, the size it already had. A module containing items is never resized and never removed: it is left exactly as it is and the change applies once it has been emptied, so a configuration change can never destroy stored gear

• Fixed A ramp left open through a server restart is no longer an invisible wall. After a restart the ramp appeared open but its collision was still closed: the doorway was blocked and the ramp itself could not be stood on until you closed and reopened it. Re-applying a saved animation position on restore never rebuilt the collision, because writing a value the engine already holds starts no animation at all. Ramps, landing gear and cabin doors restored from persistence now rebuild their collision properly on the server and on every client
• Fixed The ramp and landing gear no longer freeze part-way while crew are aboard
• Fixed Opening or closing the ramp from the pilot seat no longer judders the whole helicopter. v0.3.6 fixed this for parked, unmanned helicopters; the same smoothing and settle damping now also run on the machine of the pilot who is sitting in it
• Fixed Phantom door sounds after a restart. A parked helicopter would play its own pilot and co-pilot door sounds when nobody had touched them, and changing camera angle brought them back. The collision rebuild that runs after a restart was raising the engine’s animation event for the cabin doors as a side effect; the doors no longer take part in that rebuild, as their collision comes from their own models

• Fixed A flipped helicopter no longer stays the wrong way up for everyone else. Overturned helicopters were being put to sleep along with parked ones, and a sleeping body stops replicating its pose — so however the wreck was righted, other players continued to see it inverted until they relogged
• Fixed A helicopter hovering close to a hillside is no longer mistaken for a parked one. Proximity to terrain was being treated as evidence of rest, which could put a flying aircraft to sleep
• Fixed Flip and push mods work on parked helicopters again. DayZ 1.29 puts idle vehicle bodies to sleep, and our park handling treated every wake as a stray force — it zeroed the velocity each frame and put the body straight back to sleep, so a flip wrench, Push-a-Car or a shove from another vehicle was cancelled before it could take effect. A parked helicopter now hands itself back to the physics engine when something genuinely pushes it, keeps that momentum rather than discarding it, and the new pose reaches every client immediately

• Fixed The altimeter no longer steps as you fly over uneven ground. The HUD sampled the terrain height five times a second and used the result raw, while your own altitude updated every frame — so the needle glided between samples and then snapped. At speed over undulating ground the reading could jump eighteen feet in a single frame. The terrain reference is now smoothed rather than the altitude itself, so response to your own climb and descent stays immediate

• Fixed The downloadable server-file bundles now cover the whole fleet. The helicopter bundle had drifted out of date: the entire MH-47G Chinook was missing, as were the four Black Hawk liveries added since it was last built — Australian Army, Fire Rescue, Navy and United Nations. Forty-eight classnames have been added across types.xml, events.xml, cfgeventspawns.xml and all three trader formats, and every entry has been verified against the shipped configs
• Fixed The fuel drum was listed only under its deprecated classname. Both CZ_HeliDrum and the legacy CZAutoz_HeliDrum now ship, so existing setups continue to work while new ones use the current name

• Fixed The MH6’s tail now retextures along with the rest of the body. Anyone repainting the airframe found the tail stayed on its original scheme while everything else took the new one, which made a custom livery unusable without hand-patching it. An earlier attempt to correct this did not fully take; the tail now follows the body texture as the other airframes do

• Changed The Our Mods panel now reflects the real fleet — seven aircraft in twenty-nine variants — and mentions the Chinook and sling loading

• Fixed Zombies could ruin helicopters on servers running a global “vehicle damage off” mod — every other vehicle on the server was protected and ours were not. Our helicopters re-enabled the engine’s damage switch for themselves at spawn, after every config reload, and again after the licence check, silently overriding whatever another mod had set. We now track ownership of that switch and only ever re-enable damage if we were the one who turned it off, so a server-wide damage-off mod (Survival Tweaks and similar) now applies to our helicopters exactly like every other vehicle. If you would rather keep third-party mods out of it, setting all six dmgZone* toggles to 0 for an airframe disables its damage through our own config as before
• Fixed Repairing a helicopter through CFTools no longer mounts every extra cargo module. Admin repair tools complete a vehicle by filling any empty attachment slot they can find, which force-mounted all ten cargo modules regardless of your extra_modules_* configuration — and nothing pruned them until the next restart. Modules attached by any external tool are now reconciled against your configuration within about a second. Modules with items inside them are never removed
• Fixed Vehicle recovery mods now move the helicopter for everyone. Recovering a parked helicopter applied on the server only: players kept seeing it at its old position, collided with an invisible hull at the recovery point, and only saw the truth after relogging. Parked helicopters now follow an external teleport instantly on every client. Recovery in flight was already working and is unchanged
• Fixed Flip and push mods work on parked helicopters again. DayZ 1.29 puts idle vehicle bodies to sleep, and our park handling treated every wake as a stray force — it zeroed the velocity each frame and put the body straight back to sleep, so a flip wrench, Push-a-Car or a shove from another vehicle was cancelled before it could take effect. A rotation-only change also never reached other players even when it did land, leaving a flipped helicopter upside-down on their screen until they relogged. A parked helicopter now hands itself back to the physics engine when something genuinely pushes it, keeps that momentum rather than discarding it, and the new pose reaches every client immediately

• Fixed Free look always-on works for everyone again. v0.3.9’s Mouse Flight suppressed forced free look for any player who had ever pressed U — in every seat, including passengers, and permanently, because the choice is saved to your DayZ profile. The suppression now applies only to the crew member actually holding the controls, which is the only seat where the mouse feeds the cyclic. Passengers and non-flying crew get always-on exactly as the server intends
• Changed Mouse Flight has moved from U to K. Community Online Tools binds U to god mode, so an admin toggling Mouse Flight was silently toggling god mode at the same time. K is unused in vanilla and by the common admin tools. Like every key in this mod it stays rebindable from the control settings, and the on-screen confirmation no longer names a specific letter so it remains correct if you rebind it
• Fixed Mouse Flight now toggles on every press. The toggle was de-duplicating input purely with a half-second window, which also discarded any genuine second press inside that window — hence needing two or three attempts to catch. It now detects the key’s rising edge the same way the auto-hover toggle always has, so one press is exactly one change no matter how many times the input repeats internally
• Added Mouse Flight now confirms on screen when you toggle it, so an accidental press can no longer change your camera behaviour silently and permanently
• Fixed The free look key now carries the same repeat-press protection as every other control in the mod

• Fixed Sliding “combat” landings no longer repeat the impact sound over every undulation in the grass
• Fixed The same bumps were also damaging the hull at full crash rates, silently, on every sliding landing. Contacts are now classified by their closing speed along the contact surface rather than raw impulse: a graze while sliding counts as light wear, while genuine crashes — hard vertical impacts, and striking objects or terrain head-on — are completely unchanged

• Changed Every page on this site was re-checked line-by-line against the shipped code. A number of published instructions turned out to be wrong, and the most important one was on four separate pages: the docs stated that any control input disengages Autohover. It never did. Autohover is released by the X key, and automatically when a rotor is destroyed, the engine cuts, or you land shut down — steering while it is engaged is intentional behaviour, and the hold re-settles at whatever attitude and altitude you release it at
• Fixed The repair guide presented “within 3 m” and “within 5 m” as how close the player must stand. They are the helicopter’s maximum height above ground for rotor repairs and airframe-zone repairs respectively. The same page listed the repair kit and battery under classnames that do not exist — they are CZ_HelicopterRepairKit and CZ_HelicopterBattery, which matters for anyone who copied them into types.xml
• Fixed Damage-zone colour thresholds were documented as 75/55/35%; the real values are 70/50/30%, and a rotor stops producing lift at 15% health rather than only when destroyed
• Fixed Unit and reading errors throughout: the HUD airspeed dial shows horizontal groundspeed (not true airspeed), aerodynamics.groundEffectAlt is in metres while the altitude keys beside it are in feet, autorotation.descentCap is in knots rather than m/s, and the light and battery status icons live on the damage panel rather than the instrument cluster
• Fixed Corrected specifications across the fleet — masses, service ceilings, variant counts and per-livery classnames — and removed several superlatives that had been attached to the wrong aircraft
• Added Sling Loading and Mouse Flight now have proper pages; both shipped in v0.3.9 with no documentation whatsoever. The MH-47G Chinook has a full airframe page, the flight model gains an air density (ISA) section, and the troubleshooting guide covers every issue fixed in this release

• Info The release went through a full pre-ship audit. It caught a packaging fault introduced by the ramp fix that would have prevented servers from booting, plus three smaller hardenings, and confirmed that the save format (frozen since v0.3.8) and the network format are untouched by this update

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UPDATE — v0.3.9 | 7 August 2026

• Added The biggest airframe in the fleet: a tandem twin-rotor heavy-lifter — the only helicopter that can sling the heaviest vehicle classes
• Added A fully walkable cabin — stroll in off the rear loading ramp, with 25 cargo seats boarded from inside the hold plus the flight crew up front
• Added Rear loading ramp with a true two-stage fold — the lower ramp swings down while the upper section slides flush into the deck
• Added Real MH-47 engine audio — a full 45-second start-up and a proper shutdown, built from genuine Chinook recordings and synced to the rotors
• Added Twin-rotor downwash — two dust clouds, one under each disc, and a shot-out rotor’s cloud dies with it
• Added Multiple liveries including Night Stalkers, Royal Air Force, Australian Army, Canada and United Nations

• Added Four new Black Hawk paint schemes — Australian Army, Fire Rescue, Navy and United Nations join the base and Desert liveries

• Added Carry vehicles under your helicopter. Hook a car from the pilot seat (hover low over it) or as ground crew standing at the vehicle, winch the line up and down in steps, and release from the seat or the ground
• Added Every airframe has a real lifting class — light helis lift light cars; it takes the Chinook to move the heavy stuff. Overweight loads simply cannot be hooked
• Added The Chinook flies loads on its real fore/aft dual hooks — two chain bridles to the load’s front and rear, so long loads ride level and follow the airframe
• Added Modelled sling gear on the UH-1H, Black Hawk and Chinook — their own winch rope/chain hardware reveals when a load is hooked
• Added Anti-grief protections built in: line-of-sight checks and full server-side validation on every attach

• Added Fly the cyclic with your mouse — press U in the pilot seat to toggle; the dial cluster shows a KEYBOARD / MOUSE badge so you always know which mode you’re in. Keyboard keys keep full authority in both modes, and your choice persists between sessions
• Added Mouse feel is smoothed, and sensitivity is tunable via CZAutoz_MouseSens in your profile — an in-game settings page is planned for a future update

• Fixed The “choppy tilt” while flying with auto-hover assist on — the assist’s velocity brake handed authority back instantly and at full strength every time you released a key; the handoff now fades in smoothly, so tap-flying is clean at any speed
• Changed Auto-hover no longer fights aggressive flying — its tilt guard now only steps in past 40° instead of 25°
• Fixed Auto-hover and Mouse Flight toggles are true single-press — auto-hover’s displayed state can no longer be bounced by network timing, and the mouse toggle ignores the input echoes that previously ate presses
• Added Engine damage is now lethal in the air — an engine shot to critical cuts out mid-flight and drops you into autorotation, so guard that engine bay
• Added RPM-faithful rotor visuals — blades sag under heavy collective, droop in autorotation, and spool with real inertia instead of a fixed spin rate

• Added Air genuinely thins with altitude: roughly 9% less lift per 1,000m, so mountain flying — especially with a slung load — becomes a real pilot decision. Subtle on Chernarus, meaningful on tall custom maps
• Added Server-tunable: flight.isaAirDensity in the config and Admin Panel (1 = realistic default, 0 = off, up to 3 = exaggerated); applies live to all connected players without a restart

• Changed Downwash dust now blows from every airframe’s actual rotor disc instead of the model centre — Black Hawk and Merlin clouds sit correctly under their masts now
• Added Nav-lights status icon in the damage overlay — grey off, white on, visible to the whole crew
• Fixed Virtual garage bugs: a spotlight left on no longer haunts the pad after storing, and retrieved helicopters spawn with proper parked blades instead of a frozen blur
• Fixed Parked helicopters are now perfectly inert for physics — zero residual forces while shut down

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UPDATE — v0.3.8 | 2 August 2026

• Fixed Helicopters stored in a virtual garage before v0.3.7 came back corrupted on retrieval — server-wide freezes of up to a minute on each pull, helicopters coming out instantly ruined, and ruined hulls igniting, which produced invisible fire damage that hurt and killed players near parked helicopters. Root cause: v0.3.7’s battery-persistence feature appended a field to the helicopter’s save data. The engine’s own restart storage frames each entity’s data, so server restarts handled the extra field safely — but Expansion’s garage stores the save blob raw, with its own attachment and health data immediately after ours, so retrieving any helicopter stored under the old format shifted every following read by four bytes: a garbage attachment count froze the server, garbage health ruined the hull on the spot, and the ruined hull caught fire. The save format is now reverted to exactly match v0.3.6, so every helicopter stored before v0.3.7 retrieves perfectly again
• Fixed Fire damage zones can never linger invisibly — the fire’s damage area is a separate runtime object from its visible flames, and one cleanup path could clear the flame state while leaving the already-spawned damage zone alive: an intact-looking helicopter with a lethal invisible radius around it. Every fire cleanup now destroys the damage zone, the burn timers and the visuals together, on every path. Damage zones never persist across a restart, so any created during the incident were already gone the moment your server came back up
• Removed The v0.3.7 “battery charge survives storage” feature is withdrawn — it was the root cause above. Helicopter batteries now behave exactly like vanilla car batteries through garages: the charge rides the battery item itself, and whatever your garage mod does with a car battery, it does identically with ours. The feature will return in a future update, rebuilt on storage that garage mods can’t corrupt. Everything else from v0.3.7 remains: garage pulls never relocate helicopters, fuel.refuelOnRestart never fires on garage pulls, and lights cut off when the battery dies

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UPDATE — v0.3.7 | 1 August 2026

• Fixed Helicopters pulled out of virtual garages no longer get relocated — v0.3.6’s restart recovery (which grounds mid-air helicopters after a server restart) was being triggered by garage retrievals, because garage mods restore vehicles through the same persistence path a server restart uses. A heli pulled out at a base built over water was set down on the nearest land, and one pulled out on an overhanging mountain floor was placed on the cliff face below — both exactly as the recovery would treat a genuinely mid-air aircraft. The recovery now runs only for helicopters that existed at server boot: every aircraft latches at creation whether it was born during the boot restore (before any player has joined) or mid-session — and since a garage retrieval requires a player, it can never qualify again, with any garage mod, on any base. Helicopters simply parked on base floors were never affected either way — a restart leaves anything resting on a structure exactly where it was, because the recovery probes for solid surfaces beneath the aircraft before acting, and floors, piers and roofs all count
• Fixed fuel.refuelOnRestart no longer refuels on garage pulls — the same root cause quietly granted a free full tank on every garage retrieval when the option was enabled; it now refuels only across a true server restart, exactly as documented

• Fixed Battery charge can no longer be lost (or gained) through storage — some garage/storage mods rebuild the battery on retrieval without carrying its charge across, so helicopters came back with a dead battery — and no config setting could stop it, because nothing was actually draining (the investigation proved the mod has no engine-off drain path at all). The helicopter now records its battery’s exact charge in its own save data and re-applies it shortly after any restore — server restart and garage pull alike. This also closes the reverse exploit: storing a helicopter with a dead battery and pulling out a fresh full one. ⚠️ Withdrawn in v0.3.8 — this change corrupted Expansion virtual-garage retrievals; see the v0.3.8 entry above
• Fixed Lights switch off the moment the battery dies — a spotlight left on drained the battery as intended, but then kept shining on the dead battery indefinitely, which is where the “nav lights are on by default and drain everything” reports came from: passers-by kept finding lit helicopters with dead batteries. Lights now cut off at 0% (matching the rule that already applied at server boot). And for the record: nav lights never drain the battery — they are free to run; only the spotlight (per second) and engine starts (per start) consume charge, both tunable per helicopter under battery.*
• Fixed A rare start-up sound glitch source hardened away — the engine start/stop sound could compute a nonsense playback position for a single frame if the sound wave hadn’t finished loading; that path now carries the same guard its sibling code paths always had

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UPDATE — v0.3.6 | 28 July 2026

• Changed Free look is now a single press of Left Alt — press to orbit the camera freely, press again to lock it back behind the aircraft. The old double-tap gesture (and its hold-to-peek variant) is removed — and that removal is the fix for the long-standing stuck free look bug: the double-click detector could latch half-engaged and leave the camera stuck orbiting with no clean way back. Several rounds of field testing chased latch-clearing workarounds before the root cause proved to be the gesture itself. Your free look choice still persists between flights, vanilla-style, and servers can still force free look always-on via crew.freeLookAlwaysOn

• Fixed A server’s settings could silently fail to apply to a player until an admin re-saved the config (field-reported twice as “free look always-on stops working after every restart — opening the Admin Panel and pressing Save fixes it”). The investigation cleared the config system entirely — the file, the boot load and the panel were all provably correct — the failure was in delivery: the packet carrying the server’s settings to each player was sent fire-and-forget at the most congested moment of their session, mid-join while the world streams in, and when it dropped the player silently fell back to compiled defaults. Pressing Save only “fixed” it because that re-sends to everyone on already-idle connections — and a relog appeared to hold the fix only because the value survives in the game client between reconnects. Join-time delivery is now guaranteed (retransmitted until acknowledged), with a second send shortly after you finish loading as insurance — every setting, every join, every time
• Fixed The per-helicopter refuel range never actually applied for players — the server honoured the setting, but the value gating the refuel action’s reach was never shared with clients, so players were always held to the default 5 m regardless of configuration. Found by the full settings audit this bug prompted: every one of the 107 mod and per-helicopter settings was traced from its config file through save, load and delivery to the exact code that consumes it — this was the only gap
• Fixed The Admin Panel’s Stats tab showed every feature as OFF in packed builds — the same class of build-tool defect as v0.3.2’s dead panel buttons, caught on four display-only lines in the audit

• Fixed Sliding or rolling downhill on slopes — parked or through the whole spool-up (field log: a Merlin drifting 8.5 metres down a hill against full brakes while its rotor wound up). The root cause was old and simple: the wheeled helicopters inherited car-scale brake torque, and a ten-tonne Merlin saturates car brakes on any real slope. Both airframes now carry real, mass-scaled brake strength — roughly double the margin needed on a 30° incline — holding from engine-off right through spool-up and releasing as you pull collective to depart. Run-on landings are unaffected: rollout braking eases in progressively with speed, so autorotation run-ons still roll out and settle smoothly instead of grabbing
• Fixed The parked micro-wobble on wheels — a tiny visible rocking while sitting still, worst while seated as the engine wound up or down. The suspension dampers were far too light for airframes this heavy; both wheeled helicopters got a damping retune. The springs, travel and terrain-hugging stance are untouched — they sit exactly as before, they just settle two to three times faster and stay settled
• Fixed Wobble/judder while the ramp opens or closes, and while landing gear cycles, on a parked helicopter — three separate mechanisms were fighting the moving ramp, found and removed one by one across a live field-test session: two anti-creep assists that hard-stop a parked hull every tick kept freezing and releasing it against the ramp’s push (that freeze/release cycle at engine rate was the judder), and with those standing down, the hull’s natural response to the ramp physically prying off the ground still read as a small rumble — so every ramp and gear animation now also runs under the same heavy damping blanket the wake-settle system already uses. All three changes only act while a ramp or gear is actually travelling; parked behaviour outside animation is byte-identical
• Fixed A persisted helicopter could wake from a server restart with the wrong physical mass (field log: a 10,100 kg Merlin flying at a 1,500 kg placeholder) — a race between physics initialisation and config load on restored aircraft; the true weight now always wins, so a persisted heli flies identically to a freshly spawned one

• Changed Lift-off now arrives right at the end of the start-up sound, and the final stretch of spool-up is smoother — the window where the flight model gains authority was widened, and the power handover now blends over most of a second instead of stepping
• Changed Cutting or restoring engine power blends progressively — v0.3.5 eased five forces across the power boundary; v0.3.6 adds a rate-limited blend on the power fraction itself, so a mid-air engine cut settles into autorotation as one continuous sink and a restart picks the aircraft back up just as smoothly. The autorotation flare’s last hard edge (a cut-off at 20% rotor) is now a continuous fade too
• Fixed Small jolts when flaring hard on a fast, steep approach — two vertical catches could each step in a hard flare: the Simple-mode vertical hold applied force proportional to sink rate with no ceiling, and the touchdown cushion switched on at a fixed height regardless of arrival speed. The hold is now bounded and the cushion looks ahead by your sink rate, so both ease in progressively however hard you come down. Every normal landing is byte-identical — both changes only act at sink rates no normal landing reaches
• Changed Auto-hover’s position freeze only engages on a level, still ship — no more snap if it caught the aircraft mid-settle at a tilt

• Added The observer smoothing filter now covers every view of a flying helicopter — v0.3.5 smoothed unmanned aircraft for observers; v0.3.6 extends the same frame-rate-exact filter to helicopters being flown by someone else, so bystanders on the ground, seated passengers and cabin walkers all watch smooth flight instead of 20-per-second network stepping. It engages only while the aircraft is actually moving, hands back to the engine the moment a pilot takes the controls, and keeps the hard snap guards so a genuinely teleported aircraft never lags

• Added A helicopter saved mid-flight is placed safely on the ground when a dedicated server restarts — previously it free-fell from its saved position on boot. If the restart catches it over water, it’s set down on the nearest land, searching up to a kilometre of shoreline (piers and structures count). Dedicated servers only, and only across a true restart — relogging never moves a helicopter

• Fixed Repairing a burning wreck didn’t put the fire out — flames, glow, smoke and the burn’s area damage all ran their full configured duration even after the hull was fully repaired (only a boot-time cleanup ever cleared fire state; no live repair path touched it). Repairing a burning wreck — Admin Panel or field repair — now extinguishes it on the spot: the damage stops instantly, flames and glow cut, smoke stops pouring (what’s already in the air drifts away naturally, as with any fire), and a repaired helicopter can catch fire again properly if it’s destroyed later

• Fixed Moving to the cabin could glitch on arrival — the transition wrote to an active physics body mid-handoff; it’s rebuilt atomic (state settles first, then a single clean attach), with a recovery clamp that lands you in the bay if the engine delivers you anywhere strange

• Info Three complete passes over every script this release — a liveness audit (every line proven to run or removed: several hundred lines of dead and legacy code deleted), a settings audit (all 107 settings traced end-to-end from file to force — the refuel-range gap above was its one finding), and a correctness audit (every division guarded, every network write verified, every timer cleaned up on deletion). The result is the leanest build the mod has ever shipped, with the best server performance — an idle parked fleet costs the server essentially nothing, and everything that runs, runs for a reason

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UPDATE — v0.3.5 | 24 July 2026

• Fixed Wind on Simple flight caused constant jitter / rubber-banding — the wind buffet read each machine’s own weather sample. Only the smoothed average was shared between client and server; the gust that actually rocks the aircraft is the difference between the live sample and that average — a small number made by subtracting two nearly-equal ones, which amplifies any mismatch. So a trivial difference between your client’s weather and the server’s became a completely different buffet on each side: the aircraft rocked one way in your prediction and another way on the server, and the engine’s correction of that gap is precisely the jitter that was felt. It was worst in Simple mode because its auto-levelling assist then applied corrective torque against the diverged attitude, compounding the error rather than damping it (Advanced, with no auto-level, stayed closer). The fix follows the same rule that solved the touch-and-go stepping in v0.3.4 — a force must be computed identically on both machines or not at all: the server now takes the weather sample, it travels with the aircraft’s network state, and both machines derive the same raw wind, the same average and therefore an identical buffet
• Fixed A v0.3.3 regression in the wind-strength curve — the altitude fade that scales wind strength had been switched to the per-machine smoothed terrain height introduced in v0.3.3. That value also scales the horizontal mean-wind push, which broke the rule that the smoothed height may only feed vertical terms. It now reads the shared, position-derived altitude, so the sideways wind push is identical on both machines too. The three legitimate consumers of the smoothed height (ground effect, the grounded lift-cut and the touchdown cushion) are all vertical-only and were re-verified

• Fixed Jittery, jumpy motion for the first seconds after taking off, and again through shutdown and autorotation — rotor and engine speed turned out to be the only flight-model inputs that weren’t shared between your client and the server, and they gate everything: below about 97% rotor the flight model applies no force at all, and it reaches full authority by 99% — a two-percent window. The server drove that from its own rotor ramp. Your client drove it from a network mirror updated 20 times a second on a best-effort channel, then smoothed again locally — leaving it roughly 200 milliseconds behind. On a six-second spool-up that two-percent window is only about 120 milliseconds wide, so the lag was wider than the window itself: at the end of every spool-up the server was applying the full flight forces while your client was still applying none, and then your client switched its entire force budget on at once. Reconciliation couldn’t heal it either, because the value wasn’t part of the shared state — a replayed correction re-ran with the current rotor speed instead of the one from the moment being replayed. Rotor and engine speed now travel with the aircraft’s shared state on the same reliable channel as its position, so both machines cross that threshold at the same instant. Heavier airframes with longer spool-ups (the Merlin most of all) had the worst of it, because they sat in the divergent window longest. Note this also means a lossy connection made it worse — the old best-effort channel simply dropped updates, and every dropped packet widened the gap; the flight path no longer depends on that channel at all
• Fixed A thrust spike partway through spool-up — the engine-stage broadcast (added in v0.3.4 so distant players hear a shutdown correctly) also snapped the pilot’s rotor mirror straight to 100%, but the server announces “running” at only 50% rotor, so the pilot’s copy jumped and was then dragged back by the next update. The broadcast still reaches distant players exactly as before; it just no longer overwrites the pilot’s own copy, which was never stale to begin with
• Fixed The two halves of the ground-slide brake read rotor state sampled at different moments — your client and the server now sample it at the same point, so the low-level engine-off settle behaves identically on both
• Fixed Autohover heading-hold could be active on one machine and off on the other — the switch that releases heading-hold while you’re steering with the pedals is a latch: it engages on pedal input and only releases once the aircraft’s rotation settles below a threshold. Each machine was making that decision from its own rotation reading, and because it latches, a momentary difference didn’t average out — it stuck, leaving the server holding your heading with real yaw force while your own client applied none, or the reverse. The latch is now shared state, so both release together

• Fixed The moment the engine dies into autorotation (and comes back) is now smooth — a single on/off switch at 50% engine power used to flip five separate flight forces at once: how much control authority you had, the vortex-ring thrust cut, the descent-speed limit (which jumps from ~16–19 m/s powered to ~8–10 m/s in autorotation), the landing cushion, and an auto-hover ground assist. Flipping all five on one hard switch could produce a bump entering or leaving autorotation. Every one of them now eases across the power transition on the same shared blend the lift already used, so the hand-off is seamless. Normal powered flight is completely unchanged — the easing only does anything while the engine is actually crossing that band
• Fixed A sag in the last few metres of an autorotation landing — the coasting rotor wound down slowly up high and switched to a fast wind-down below 3m in one step; that step is now blended across 3–6m, so the flare settles smoothly
• Fixed Auto-hover dropping abruptly if the engine dies while it’s on — it now fades out as the rotor slows through its lower range instead of cutting off in a single frame
• Fixed The last un-shared flight value is now shared — the near-ground height smoothing that feeds ground effect and the landing cushion was the one remaining value each machine tracked on its own; after a network correction while flying low it could disagree for a few frames and shimmer the low-altitude lift. It now travels in the same shared state as everything else, so every value the flight model turns into a force is now identical on your screen and the server’s

• Fixed A momentary unsmoothness every time autohover was switched on or off while moving — the toggle used to take effect on the server first, and your own machine only learned of it a network round-trip later; for that instant one side was applying the full hover-assist forces mid-manoeuvre while the other wasn’t, and the disagreement showed as a hitch (worst when switching OFF mid-move). The toggle is now predicted on your machine the moment you press it — the same treatment every other flight control already gets — with the same validity checks the server applies, so both machines ease the assist in or out together and the transition is continuous

• New Server owners can disable the top-left damage-zone panel via crew.damageZonePanelEnabled in the general config (default on — nothing changes unless you turn it off)
• New Players can hide/show the damage panel themselves with a key (default H, rebindable under CZ Autoz Helicopter controls) — per-player, takes effect instantly, and only available when the server has the panel enabled

• Fixed A helicopter left flying with no pilot looked rumbly to everyone watching — including passengers still seated inside — only the pilot’s machine can own the aircraft, so while someone flies it, everyone else receives its motion through the engine’s smooth interpolation. The moment the pilot leaves the seat, the server simulates it raw and its updates reach clients as visible stepping on every move, tilt and roll. A frame-rate-exact visual filter now engages on every viewing client the instant nobody possesses the airframe, and hands back to the native interpolation the moment a pilot takes the controls again — piloted flight is completely untouched. Landed, stationary machines are unaffected (nothing to smooth), and the filter carries hard snap guards so it can never lag a genuinely teleported aircraft

• Fixed A faint wobble you could feel and see around 40–50ft on the Merlin and Black Hawk — ground effect (the cushion of lift near the surface) reaches higher on the large airframes than on the small ones, but the altitude smoothing that feeds it only reached up to a fixed height below where their ground effect ends. In the band between the two, ground-effect lift was computed from the raw, unsmoothed height, so any tiny vertical motion made it shimmer. The smoothing now always covers the full ground-effect band for every airframe, so the cushion fades in and out cleanly. The skidded helicopters never reached the affected band and are unchanged

• Changed Wind now moves the helicopter in Simple mode, not just Advanced — a gust used to push only on the aircraft’s attitude, and Simple’s auto-levelling promptly corrected that back out, so wind was felt mostly in Advanced. A gust now also nudges the aircraft’s position, which auto-levelling doesn’t hold — so you feel the weather in both modes, as a gentle live buffet on top of the steady lean into a sustained wind. It’s built from the same shared wind values as everything else, so it stays identical on your screen and the server’s (no jitter), and it scales with your wind-strength setting — zero when wind is off

• Fixed Rolling backwards while spooling up, and jumpy rotation for the first seconds of takeoff — v0.3.4 cured the rolling touch-and-go stepping by having a piloted, powered helicopter apply zero auto-brake on both machines. That reasoning holds for skids, but a wheeled airframe has nothing else holding it: parked on a slope with the engine running and the rotor turning, the Merlin and Black Hawk were left completely unbraked and crept and jittered backwards through spool-up. The takeoff symptom was the same defect seen from the other end — the two machines still disagreed during the spool window, because the server’s release was gated on rotor spool while the client’s was gated on collective. The moment you pulled collective with the rotor still winding up, the server was holding the brakes fully on while your own client had released them entirely, so the server decelerated an aircraft your prediction did not — and that gap reconciled as jumpy rotation until the rotor crossed its threshold and the two sides finally agreed. Both machines now run one brake law, driven purely by the reconciled collective: brakes hold firm while you are parked, spooling or unmanned, and fade off as you pull collective to depart. Because the input is shared state, the two sides cannot disagree at any point in the sequence — which is what removed the stepping in the first place, without ever leaving a wheeled airframe free to roll. Skid-equipped helicopters are unaffected either way, and every designed behaviour is preserved: parking clamps when the rotor stops or the crew leaves, unmanned roll-away protection stays, engine-off shutdown rollout still brakes, and autorotation rollouts still stop

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UPDATE — v0.3.4 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed A tipped-over helicopter never went to sleep — the park-sleep system (new in v0.3.2) refuses to sleep a heli that was recently disturbed, using fixed impact thresholds to detect disturbance. But a hull resting on its side (or a settled wreck lying on body geometry) generates contact events every single tick, and for a multi-tonne airframe the static resting weight alone exceeds those fixed thresholds — so the “disturbed” flags latched every tick and the heli could never sleep. Field log evidence: one tipped Merlin simulated (and physics-logged) at full rate for an entire session, adding permanent solver and script load — the kind that surfaces as delayed interactions and a desync feel for everyone. Upright helis never hit this because their skids/wheels rest on suspension, which raises no contact events. The disturbance bar now scales with airframe mass (~0.35 m/s of felt delta-v): static resting weight passes cleanly under it at any server tick rate, while crashes, rams and firm landings sail over it — every real wake path behaves exactly as before
• Fixed Physics-log spam from motionless helis — with physics logging enabled, a parked or tipped hull printed a near-identical line every second forever (plus a five-line wheel report each time for wheeled airframes). Idle airframes (engine off, not moving) now log at 1/30th cadence; anything moving, spooling or flying logs exactly as before
• Fixed Brief steppy motion during rolling touch-and-goes and wheels-low flight (field-reproduced on the Merlin) — the automatic wheel brake (the parking/settle assist) ran server-side only, every tick, gated on “grounded or below ~3 m AGL”. As a rolling touchdown slowed below ~3 m/s at low collective, the brake ramped in on the server — but the owner client never predicts it, so the server’s aircraft decelerated harder than the predicted one and the growing gap reconciled as visible stepping until lift-off and convergence. The audit then found the owner-side half of the same pair: the driver’s client applied its own full brake on a different law entirely (hard on/off at near-zero collective) — two machines, two different brake formulas, disagreeing constantly around touchdown. Both sides now speak one law: a piloted, powered helicopter applies zero auto-brake on both machines (identical prediction — divergence impossible; real aircraft don’t self-brake while flying or rolling under power), while every designed behaviour is preserved — parking clamps when the rotor stops or the crew leaves (on both sides), unmanned roll-away protection stays, engine-off shutdown rollout still brakes, and autorotation rollouts still stop

• Info The complete synchronization stack, line-audited — pilot input rides the native DayZ move pipeline (buffered and replayed on reconciliation, with the autohover toggle deliberately replay-safe so corrections can never double-fire it); all nineteen flight smoothers round-trip the network owner-state, so a correction rewinds and replays everything that feeds forces instead of snapping; network sync is entirely event-driven with zero per-tick churn; cross-helicopter state leakage is architecturally impossible (per-instance members and per-vehicle owner-state only, no shared mutable flight globals); and the full logging stack — debug, activity, physics, whitelist — runs on persistent file handles with throttled, idle-aware diagnostics. No further defects found

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UPDATE — v0.3.3 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed A momentary jolt crossing terrain steps at low altitude — the near-ground flight systems read the terrain height directly under the aircraft every tick, so flying low across a cliff lip, shoreline or sharp terrain edge changed that height by tens of metres in a single frame — sweeping their bands instantly and stepping the forces for a felt moment. Terrain-height changes now blend in at a rate faster than any real climb or descent can move (your steepest airframe descends at 19 m/s; the smoothing follows at 20), so actual flying is never affected — flat-pad takeoffs, landings and steady hovers are byte-identical — and only genuine terrain discontinuities get smoothed
• Fixed The complete family, audited — every consumer of the under-aircraft ground height was found and brought onto the smoothed value: the ground effect, the grounded lift-cut and its settling damper, the touch-and-go landing cushion (with the raw value, a terrain step up under a fast low pass teleported the aircraft into the cushion’s band and it kicked vertically), the wind-strength altitude envelope (buffet strength no longer steps at terrain edges), and the Autohover vertical hold (a cliff edge sliding under an engaged hover stepped the altitude error by tens of metres in one tick and slammed the collective — it still terrain-follows, now as a firm smooth climb instead of a violent snap). Also verified clean in the same audit: blowback’s acceleration input is properly low-passed, the wind gust model is zero-mean and reconciled, and the flight model contains zero randomness — fully deterministic
• Fixed Steppy first takeoff from rough ground — hovering low over uneven ground (a crash site, a boulder field), the terrain height under the drifting aircraft jumped every tick and fluttered the same systems — the classic case being the first takeoff after a rotor-shear crash, flip recovery and repair. Smoothed by the same fix
• Fixed Flip recovery now re-seats the airframe — flipping a rolled helicopter upright rotated it in place, so the upright hull inherited the side-resting height: either floating (then slamming down onto the skids) or clipped into the terrain, which left the contact physics fighting the ground through the next takeoff. The flip now settles the airframe cleanly onto its skids/wheels at the correct height and clears all residual motion
• Fixed Soft touchdowns no longer make the knock/contact noise — the contact tap sound armed on any airframe contact past a tiny fixed impulse floor, which on a multi-tonne helicopter corresponds to a felt bump of just a few centimetres per second — so even the gentlest skid landing clunked. The gate now measures real touchdown firmness (impulse relative to the aircraft’s mass): arrivals softer than ~1.2 m/s are silent, while firm plops and genuine obstacle strikes still knock exactly as before. Sound-only — landing physics, suspension feel and all damage thresholds are untouched

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UPDATE — v0.3.2 | 23 July 2026

• Fixed The Admin Panel was completely dead — Save stuck orange, Repair/Delete/Teleport doing nothing, only the FPS counter responding — v0.3.1 restructured the panel’s button-click handlers into a compact code construct this codebase had never used, and the build obfuscator mishandles that exact line shape: in the packed build, the button-name text on those lines reached the game still scrambled, so a click’s widget name never matched any handler and every button silently did nothing — no command was ever sent, which is why neither client nor server logged a thing. The FPS toggle was the lone survivor because it’s matched by widget reference rather than by name. Root-caused from live server logs (the server provably received zero commands while the panel was in use) and confirmed fixed in the field: the handlers are restored to the long-proven v0.3.0 layout. Alongside it, the same hardening pass shielded every role/permission text value from the obfuscator, removed the client-side permission pre-check entirely (the server is the sole authority and shows its own “Permission Declined” notice), and made a custom or mis-cased role name resolve consistently instead of silently granting nothing
• Fixed Every silent path now speaks — clicking a helicopter action with no row selected says “Select a helicopter in the list first” instead of doing nothing; a stale selection (the heli despawned/was deleted since the list loaded) logs [ADMIN_PANEL_NO_TARGET] server-side with the net-id, so “the button did nothing” is now always diagnosable
• Fixed A custom or mis-cased admin role could silently grant zero permissions — the server checks every action against the admin’s role, but a role that wasn’t owner and had no matching definition in permissions_admins_config.json (a custom name like founder, or Owner with a stray capital) was refused everything server-side, while the client still lit up every tab — so the panel looked fully usable yet nothing worked except the one command that isn’t permission-checked (the FPS counter toggle). Roles and permission keys are now normalised on load (trimmed and lower-cased, so Owner/OWNER behave as owner), and any unrecognised role falls back to the built-in admin role with a loud server-log line naming it, so client and server can never silently disagree again. Note that the admin fallback grants admin-level access, not full access — for full control an admin’s role must be owner, or a defined role that includes the all permission. You can check your own role in the panel’s Settings tab under “Your Role”
• Fixed The Script Log / Server RPT views load properly — the newest-file lookup used a $profile: path form the engine wouldn’t enumerate, so both views (new in v0.3.1) showed “no file found”. There’s also an engine reality these views now handle honestly: the server keeps its current session’s script log and RPT open and locked while it runs, so the live file often cannot be read from script at all — that’s an engine limitation, not filtering (the views never filter anything; they tail the raw file verbatim). When the live file won’t read, the view now automatically serves the previous session’s log instead, clearly labelled as such — which is exactly what’s wanted in-game for post-restart and crash checks. If neither can be read, it says so plainly rather than claiming the file is empty
• Changed The Cars and Our Mods pages got a refresh — the Our Mods showcase now carries the exact fleet numbers (6 aircraft in 19 variants, 41 vehicles in 228 colour & livery variants — every one also sold as its own standalone mod), mentions Smart Config Updates, the Merlin cabin walk and the free add-ons (the Workshop Golf MK4, Underglow and License Plates), and its footer shows the live running version plus docs, Discord and store links. The Cars page groups every detected CZ Autoz product as tiers / packs / standalones with counts, and points at the Logs tab’s fleet-wide whitelist view and the web whitelist manager. The Our Mods footer is now three clickable buttons — Website (czautoz.co.uk), Docs and Discord — that open in your browser, and both pages follow your chosen panel theme accent instead of a fixed blue. The Settings page’s About links gained Website and Whitelist Manager buttons alongside Discord and Docs

• Fixed Tumbling along the ground after shearing a rotor now damages the airframe — once a rotor stopped spinning, every contact through its geometry was swallowed with zero damage, and a helicopter rolling on its side touches the world mostly through the rotor head — so a full shear-and-crash-out could leave the global health bar untouched. A sheared or destroyed rotor’s contacts now count as the airframe scraping the world (hull damage on Body, honouring the damage-zone and crash-damage toggles), while bumping into a parked helicopter’s static blades stays exactly as harmless as before
• Changed The crash/bullet damage split is confirmed and documented: damage.heliCrashDamageEnabled gates collision hull damage only — bullets and explosions arrive via a separate path it never touches — and damage.playerCrashDamageEnabled gates crew crash injuries independently. Any combination of the two works

• Fixed A spawned helicopter simulated at full cost forever — the park-sleep system (which makes an idle heli cost nothing) required contact-based ground detection, and a helicopter placed on the terrain (admin panel spawn, CE event spawn) never generates a contact event — so it never slept and ran its full physics simulation every single frame for the rest of the session. Measured: one parked, empty UH-1H cost ~3,000 server FPS. The sleep check now also accepts terrain-height grounding (engine off, spool zero, stationary, within 3.4 m of the surface), so placed helicopters sleep within a second of settling, exactly like landed ones. Every spawn method is verified covered — trader purchases, CE/events.xml spawns, admin panel spawns, and helicopters restored across a server restart all reach park-sleep, because the simulation hooks are established in the entity’s constructor, which every creation path runs
• Fixed Burned-out wrecks no longer simulate forever — a destroyed helicopter persists as a repairable wreck, and wrecks were explicitly excluded from park-sleep, so every wreck on the map kept ticking its full physics simulation for the rest of the session — they accumulate, so this quietly grew into real server cost. Once the wreck’s fire is out and it has settled, it now sleeps exactly like a parked helicopter. Everything that should revive it still does, instantly: shooting it wakes it, a repair kit wakes it, the admin panel’s Repair wakes it, and the ramp still opens for looting (every exterior interaction — ramp, windows, refuel, boarding — explicitly wakes a sleeping airframe, verified path by path). The wreck fire itself is fully independent of the sleep (it runs on its own timers and a separate damage entity), so burns look and behave identically
• Changed Flying helicopters skip a per-frame terrain lookup they never needed — the park-sleep grounding check now runs its terrain-height lookup only once the cheap engine-off checks pass, so an airborne helicopter no longer pays it every frame. Behaviour is identical — a flying helicopter was never a sleep candidate

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UPDATE — v0.3.1 | 21 July 2026

• Changed Pitch response brought up to match roll across the fleet — pitch authority sat at ~70% of roll on every airframe, and a helicopter’s long fuselage already resists pitch far more than roll, so W/S always felt a step behind A/D. Pitch now sits at ~82–90% of each airframe’s roll authority, the MD500, MH-6 and UH-1H are sharpened overall (the 500-family gets its real fingertip crispness back, and the Huey’s teetering rotor answers the cyclic the way the real one does), and every response constant is one step tighter — inputs bite sooner, releases settle crisper. The weight identity is untouched: the MH-6 stays the fleet’s scalpel, the Merlin its stately heavy
• Changed Climb rates and service ceilings now match the real aircraft per airframe — the MH-6 finally climbs to its real ~18,700 ft ceiling and out-climbs the fleet; the Huey honestly tops out at its real ~12,600 ft; the Merlin remains the gentlest climber, as the real heavy is

⚠️ Values you left at defaults adopt the retune automatically on first boot (see Smart Config Updates below). Only rows you deliberately customised keep your values — reset those in the Admin Panel (applies live) if you want the new tune there too. The new per-airframe defaults are listed on each helicopter’s page.

• Added Updates now ship their tuning automatically. Until now, a stored config value could never change through an update — so shipped tuning improvements only ever reached fresh installs, and every retune came with a “reset your rows to adopt” chore. From v0.3.1, on the boot where the mod version changes, any value you never changed adopts the new shipped default automatically, and any value you customised is kept exactly as you set it — per key, so someone who tuned only liftMultiplier still receives the control retune — covering the per-helicopter configs and mod_config.json’s flight-mode profiles alike. Files that adopt values are backed up to Backups\smartupdate_v<version>_<date>\ first, and a per-row Reset in the Admin Panel makes that key adoptable again in future updates. No extra files or version fields — versioning is tracked once, by the version field mod_config.json already has, and your helicopter configs contain nothing but settings. This also fixes a subtle old defect where newly-added per-variant keys seeded at a generic default on existing servers instead of the per-airframe value — and it retroactively ships the v0.3.0 Advanced aero retune to servers that never customised those rows
• Added You’re always told what you kept — when an update changes a default behind a value you customised, the server log names it per row with both numbers (control.pitchStrength (yours 2.00, new default 2.30)), so you know exactly which of your custom settings shadow new tuning and can decide per row whether to keep yours or reset it in the Admin Panel to adopt
• Added Staff are notified in-game — admins and staff joining after an update receive an on-screen notification summarising the Smart Update (how many values auto-adopted, how many customised values were kept), and an update-available notice appears every session whenever a newer release exists than the one the server is running. Non-staff players never see any of it
• Fixed Corrupt configs now regenerate properly — a per-helicopter config that fails the boot sanity checks (broken lift, fuel, airspeed values and the like) is regenerated from true factory defaults; an internal aliasing bug meant the old regeneration could re-save the corrupt values while claiming a factory reset. The broken original is also backed up first now, so nothing is ever lost
• Fixed Deleted configs regenerate reliably on restart — the boot-time config load now writes any missing per-helicopter file. Previously only variants with a live helicopter already on the map regenerated their file at restart; the other variants’ configs stayed missing until one of them happened to spawn. Delete-and-restart now guarantees all 19 files come back (mid-session, saving or resetting a helicopter in the Admin Panel regenerates its file instantly)

• Fixed Blackhawk/Merlin no longer roll away on slopes — spawn or land a wheeled airframe on a hill and it used to trundle off downhill with nobody aboard. The native driverless parking brakes now hold it, releasing automatically while someone pushes the aircraft and re-engaging after
• Fixed Engaging Autohover with a held stick no longer jitters — pressing X while feeding A/D/W/S showed a small body jitter at the engage: the heading hold was correcting against a target one network packet behind the aircraft’s own nose while in its follow state. It now stands down until the nose settles — the same treatment the position hold received in v0.2.9 — so the engage is clean whatever you’re holding

• Fixed A clean script log — the mod’s running version now prints once at the very top of the boot block, whitelist output lives exclusively in its dedicated CZAutoz_Whitelist_YYYY-MM-DD.log, and the stray engine debug prints (!!! OnError()) that DayZ’s own REST base class emits from webhook callbacks are silenced
• Added The version check answers in the script log too — a few seconds into every boot the background check reports either CZ Autoz Helicopter vX -- this version is the latest. or a loud UPDATE AVAILABLE: vX is released -- this server runs vY, so the log always tells you exactly where your server stands against the latest release (the same information staff receive as an in-game notice)
• Fixed The Admin Panel’s whitelist log view shows the whole fleet — the panel’s Logs tab previously served an internal helicopter-only buffer, so servers running other CZ Autoz mods saw none of their whitelist activity there. It now reads the shared CZAutoz_Whitelist_YYYY-MM-DD.log directly, so every product’s chain — [Helicopters], [Tier 1], [BMW X6M] and the rest — appears exactly as it does in the file
• Added View the native DayZ logs from the Admin Panel — the Logs tab gained two new views: Script Log and Server RPT. Each serves the newest lines of the current session’s live file straight from the server profile directory, so admins can check engine output, mod prints and errors in-game without remote-desktopping into the box. The read is tail-bounded, so even a huge RPT from a long uptime costs nothing to view

• Fixed Denied actions now say so — clicking a panel button your role lacks did nothing: the “Permission Declined” dialog existed but was never wired in, so the server refused silently and staff were left guessing. The dialog now appears and names the exact permission key you’re missing, so staff know precisely what to ask their owner for
• Fixed Role changes now reach online staff instantly — redefining a role’s permissions (or deleting a role) only took effect on each member’s screen after they reconnected; their panel tabs now re-sync live. Server-side enforcement was always live — this closes the cosmetic gap on the client
• Added Typo’d permission keys are rejected — the role editor is free-text, and a misspelled key (heli.list.veiw) used to be stored and displayed as if it granted something while matching no check ever. Unknown keys are now dropped on save and named in the script log
• Fixed The built-in admin role can no longer be deleted — it’s the fallback role members of deleted roles move to; deleting it stranded those members with zero permissions until the next restart re-seeded it. Its permission list remains fully editable
• Fixed “Your Role” in the panel’s Settings tab never filled in — it read -- forever; it now shows the role you actually hold
• Added A dedicated Admin Panel & Permissions docs page — every permission key, what the built-in owner/admin roles grant, staff-role recipes, and the safety rails (owners manage owners, the last owner is untouchable, self-edits are blocked, admins.manage can’t mint all). The old docs section also wrongly described per-admin “extra permissions” (never existed — abilities come entirely from the role) and claimed config pages were owner-only (they’re grantable via mod.config.edit / heli.config.edit) — both corrected

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UPDATE — v0.3.0 | 20 July 2026

• Fixed Advanced mode was broken at release — an engine-level scripting call in an Advanced-only code path failed at runtime and could take the flight model down with it the moment those features engaged. v0.2.9’s Advanced-mode aerodynamics genuinely never flew right — this is the release where they do
• Fixed Blowback was inverted — the nose pushed down as airspeed built (accelerating into an ever-steepening dive) instead of the intended nose-up rise you trim against. Worse, at the shipped strength it could out-muscle full aft cyclic beyond ~16° — a genuine control inversion. Sign corrected: the nose now rises with speed, exactly as described
• Added Hard pilot-authority caps — blowback and anti-torque coupling are now clamped to 25% of your own cyclic/pedal authority, so no configured value, however extreme, can ever take the aircraft away from the pilot
• Changed All three Advanced tells retuned from real flight testing: blowback 0.35 → 0.08, antiTorque 0.12 → 0.04, vrsSeverity 0.40 → 0.22 — present and demanding, not punishing
• Changed Advanced input smoothing eased up a touch — still the crispest, most manual mode, minus the twitch
• Added Collective gauge on the HUD — a small dial centred below the fuel gauge showing exactly where your collective sits (needle straight up = neutral, right = pulling up, left = pushing down), and it tracks the Autohover’s commanded collective while a hold is flying, like a real torque instrument. Shown in both flight modes — in Advanced, where there is no altitude hold, it’s your vertical-power instrument

⚠️ Existing servers: config migration keeps your stored values — a server that generated its config on v0.2.9 still carries the old 0.35 / 0.12 / 0.40. To adopt the new tuning, reset those three advanced rows in the Admin Panel (applies live) or edit mod_config.json and restart. Fresh installs get the new values automatically.

• Fixed The last near-ground jitter is gone. Tilting the aircraft in the final ~10 ft — hover-taxiing, nudging over a landing spot, lifting the nose to flare — could show a fine rotational jitter that vanished higher up. Root-caused deep in the client/server prediction handoff and eliminated at every input level, not damped over: ground-skimming cyclic work is now as smooth as cruise flight
• Fixed Skid helicopters sit like skid helicopters (MH-6, MD500, Gazelle, UH-1H) — the skid “suspension” was tuned like a car’s springs, so touchdowns squatted and wobbled and a firm autorotation arrival could bounce. The skids are now near-rigid with a purpose-tuned cushion for hard landings: touch down and the aircraft is simply down
• Fixed Wheel geometry corrected on the wheeled airframes — the Blackhawk’s front wheels and the Merlin’s wheels now match their visual size, so both sit properly on their gear
• Fixed Lift-off is one clean motion — the instant of leaving the ground could step as the flight forces snapped in at full rotor RPM; they now ease in smoothly over the last of the spool-up
• Fixed The cockpit collective lever is fixed for good — no more constant flicker while feeding collective (root-caused to the server’s lever state stomping the client’s on every network delta), and the lever now sweeps its travel like a real collective instead of teleporting between positions. The cyclic stick’s proven sync mechanism now drives both levers
• Fixed Pedal input (Q/E) no longer plays the car gear-shift animation in the pilot seat — no more phantom hand-clunk on every pedal press
• Fixed Ground Flip Recovery now works from any tipped attitude — a helicopter resting on its side (or nosed over) could fail the old upside-down check depending on the airframe’s resting angle, and a tipped hull with no wheel/skid contact could still read as airborne — the “recovery sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t” report. Eligibility is now physics-true: tipped past ~70° and at rest near the ground = recoverable, on every airframe
• Fixed Auto Shutdown on Exit is reliable after rough landings — a tipped or bouncy touchdown could leave the ground-contact flag unset at the exact moment you exited, silently skipping the shutdown; a near-terrain fallback now covers it (and stays strictly below the Auto Hover On Exit altitude gate, so the two exit behaviours can never fight)

• Fixed The Merlin and Blackhawk were running the wrong passenger animation set — v0.2.9 shipped the two big airframes on a bus animation set, which is what several of you were reporting as boarding walking you over the roof, exits dropping you under the map, and frozen ghost poses on get-out. Correct animation sets are now assigned across the whole fleet
• Fixed Merlin walk-in boarding is clean at every seat — boarding the cockpit or cargo seats from inside the cabin could flash the screen for a moment (a frame rendered at the far ocean) or visibly drag you toward the cabin centre mid-animation. Boarding now holds you at the exact spot where you pressed the action — the get-in plays from where you stood, pilot-seat smooth, every seat
• Fixed Cabin arrivals are solid at any framerate — on high-FPS clients, arriving in the cabin could land you in a stuck falling stance with a flickering camera: an internal safety window was counted in frames, so a 200+ FPS machine shrank it from 1.5 seconds to a fraction of that. The window now runs on real time, and the recovery path fully clears the falling state
• Fixed A ramp left open across a server restart no longer comes back looking open but physically closed — walking up the ramp works after every restart, and landing-gear state is re-asserted the same way
• Added Cabin crew now arrive facing the right way — each airframe’s model sets the direction you face when Move to Cabin places you in the bay (per-seat direction points), instead of whatever way the get-out animation happened to leave you pointing
• Changed The Merlin cockpit is now boarded from inside only — the pilot and co-pilot get-in can no longer be reached from outside the hull: open the ramp, walk in, and take the seat from within the cabin, the way the airframe was designed. Exits already worked this way; boarding now matches

• Fixed Engine shutdown and start now reach every player on the server, at any distance — engine state used to travel reliably only to nearby players, so someone far away could hear a shut-down helicopter “running” indefinitely and walk up to a stale “Shut Off Engine” prompt. Engine stage changes are now delivered guaranteed, server-wide: distant players hear the wind-down (and the start-up), and the prompt on approach is always correct
• Fixed After a shutdown, everyone sees the cockpit controls settle to neutral — no more sticks and levers frozen mid-air in an empty cockpit
• Fixed A wreck’s crash explosion no longer replays for players arriving (or re-approaching) later — it detonates once, when it happens
• Fixed Admin Repair / Repair All now fully revives a destroyed helicopter — the destroyed state is cleared and the physics woken: flyable immediately, no flight-mode flip or restart workaround needed

• Changed A sheared tail rotor now answers to the real emergency procedure — the failure spin is main-rotor reaction torque, which only exists while the engine is driving the rotor. Cut the power and the spin dies: autorotate down and land it straight, exactly like the real thing. And landing then shutting down no longer leaves the aircraft pirouetting on the deck while the blades wind down — with the engine off, nothing drives a spin. With the engine running, the spin fights you exactly as before
• Fixed A dead-tail wreck no longer receives a phantom permanent downforce once its rotor has stopped
• Fixed Autorotation landings now register on every surface — piers, rooftops and some map objects were invisible to the touchdown check, leaving the aircraft convinced it was still airborne and coasting forever. Landing detection now falls back to the visible surface: if you can land on it, it counts
• Fixed Touching down from an autorotation now winds the rotor audio down properly with the spool instead of hanging
• Fixed The rotor-wash dust could draw on the helicopter’s own airframe, and painted sideways dust at extreme bank angles — both screened out
• Changed Rotor and engine tone now track the flight — the v0.2.9 dynamic pitch only responded while a collective key was held, so the sound sat flat through normal cruise. The loops now also carry an airspeed term (blade bite builds as speed builds and eases off as you slow) and a tilt/load term (hard banking or steep pitch makes the disc labour audibly), with the collective term reading the same reconciliation-safe source as the cockpit lever — the change is heard consistently, pilot and passengers alike

• Added Refuel directly at fuel stations — land on or right beside a working pump (within ~12 m — the station roof counts), walk to the fuel cap with empty hands, and hold F: every airframe fills from empty in about 100 seconds, no jerry can needed. Works at vanilla and Enoch stations plus pump mods built on the vanilla fuel-station class — and it’s logged to the activity log like every other refuel

• Added Per-helicopter crash-damage toggle — damage.heliCrashDamageEnabled (Admin Panel: Heli Damage on Crash): set it to 0 and crashes, hard landings, trees and water no longer damage the airframe, while bullets and explosions still damage it normally. Per aircraft, live from the Admin Panel; default 1 keeps today’s behaviour
• Fixed The Admin Panel header now shows the real mod version — it was hard-coded to v0.2
• Fixed Activity log pilot attribution — rotor-shear, rotor-destroyed, fuel-ran-out, water-impact, destroyed and heli-deleted lines all logged an empty pilot/GUID (the internal pilot cache was never being filled; it now updates whenever someone takes the pilot seat and keeps the last pilot after they leave). Station-refuel completion now logs once with the correct tag (a full tank used to log twice as a 100% “partial”), the second engine log on spool-up is tagged ENGINE_RUNNING instead of a duplicate ENGINE_START — and the documented seat events are now genuinely recorded: PILOT/COPILOT/CARGO enter, exit and killed-in-seat, including exits by mid-flight disconnect (the combat-log signal)
• Changed A full server-side performance audit of every per-frame path, repeating timer, allocation and physics query closed out the release: parked helicopters were confirmed to cost effectively nothing (they leave the simulation entirely), the in-flight paths run allocation-free — and the rotor-safety scans were trimmed further still (constant model lookups now cached once). Lean stays lean

​

UPDATE — v0.2.9 | 16 July 2026

• Changed The server now trusts the pilot’s flown path instead of second-guessing it every tick — the last source of the occasional micro-snap under held input is gone. Combined with the v0.2.8 prediction rework, pilot flight is now fully smooth under any input
• Fixed The fine sawtooth jitter in banked turns at speed (holding A/D) — one assist filter decayed at slightly different rates on client vs server, so every correction landed as a tiny step
• Fixed The one-tick hitch when feeding in pedal (Q/E) at speed, and when first rolling into a bank — hard assist on/off gates are now smooth fades
• Fixed Holding several inputs at once (full forward + bank + pedal) could hit an internal combined-force cap and step for a frame — the cap now clears the multi-axis peak, a follow-up sweep closed the last hard on/off gates in the model, and overspeeding into the Vne limiter now settles smoothly at the cap instead of snapping
• Fixed Background sync traffic (fuel ticking down, landing gear moving, damage updates) could nudge the pilot’s collective for a frame — eliminated
• Fixed A physics spike (e.g. a hard collision or heavy desync) can no longer poison the flight model with runaway values — it’s caught and calmed instead of catapulting the aircraft, and it can no longer kill or injure the crew with phantom crash damage either
• Fixed J-hooks / combat landings work again — swinging the nose around at speed used to fight you: the stability assists (weathervane and turn coordination) kept dragging the nose back toward the flight path, so you “turned on the spot and stopped”. Both assists now release at large sideslip — and the release band was then retuned so normal cruising and coordinated turns keep their full stability, in both flight modes. Deliberately throw the nose off the flight path and the aircraft is yours: hold the swung attitude, slide through on momentum, flare, set it down
• Changed Steep attitudes now cost you altitude in Simple mode too — Simple’s altitude assist quietly held your height at any orientation, so a 90° dive barely descended and inverted flight floated along. The assist now fades out beyond ~30° of tilt and is gone before ~60°: steep dives and inverted flight drop the way physics demands (thrust becomes speed, not free altitude), and the recovery is the skill — roll out, get the disc above you, catch the fall with collective. Everyday Simple flying under ~30° is completely untouched

• Added Real wind now pushes the aircraft — strength and direction follow the world’s live weather, delivered as gust-driven buffeting rather than a constant shove: weather fronts genuinely wobble and lean you, and a hover in a storm takes real stick work. Off by default — enable it per flight-mode profile (simple.windPhysicsEnabled / advanced.windPhysicsEnabled, or the Admin Panel)

• Added Vortex Ring State (VRS) — descend too fast into your own downwash and the rotor loses its bite: the sink rate runs away until you fly out of it (gain forward speed or reduce collective). Severity and onset are tunable (advanced.vrsEnabled / vrsSeverity / vrsOnsetDescent)
• Added Anti-torque coupling — pulling collective kicks the nose the way a real single-rotor helicopter does; hold it on the pedals. Signed setting — flip it for opposite-rotation rotors (advanced.antiTorque)
• Added Blowback — the nose wants to rise as airspeed builds; trim against it (advanced.blowback)
• Note All three live only in the Advanced profile — Simple mode stays clean and assisted

• Changed The level-out is back to its original buttery-smooth self — arresting to a hover (nose comes up, wings level, settle) is one clean motion again. A “smarter” controller introduced during the rework turned out to ring against itself — the stepped/jumpy settle some of you felt — and it has been retired outright in favour of the original smooth control law
• Fixed The hover no longer slowly pivots on the spot by itself (as if a pedal were held) — the heading hold was chasing its own correction
• Fixed Pedal turns (Q/E) under hover now stop clean on release — no yank-back to the old heading after a maneuver
• Fixed Releasing a sideways nudge (A/D) settles back to level smoothly instead of in visible steps
• Fixed Climbing and descending inside the hover is smooth — the vertical hold now yields while you’re on the collective and re-captures your new altitude on release (it used to fight you in jumps), and the choppy feel when hovering close to the ground is gone
• Changed Hover on and off are now a true crossfade — toggle off while already feeding in input and the aircraft hands over seamlessly: the hold eases out exactly as your stability assists ease back in, over the same fraction of a second (and engaging at speed melts them away just as smoothly). The last one-tick jump when leaving a hover into motion is gone
• Fixed Engaging auto-hover mid-flight could instantly flick back off (green icon flashes, nothing happens) — a state bug treated a flying aircraft as parked. Engaging now reliably holds anywhere in the air
• Fixed Engaging on the ground with the engine off is now refused up front — the HUD icon tells the truth. Airborne engine-off engage still works (autorotation practice, ocean-restart recovery)
• Fixed Releasing collective as the hover catches you no longer slams the vertical hold in — it blends
• Fixed The hover refuses to engage inverted, and its authority fades sensibly when far from level — no more fighting the aircraft mid-aerobatic
• Added Move to Cabin now engages auto-hover on the way out (same rules and toggle as Auto Hover On Exit) — a solo pilot’s aircraft holds position while they walk the cabin
• Fixed A helicopter left hovering unmanned now reads perfectly still for everyone — spectators and anyone walking around inside it: the held aircraft streams a truly motionless state to every client, so the slow phantom lean/climb remote viewers could previously see is gone for good

• Fixed The AW101 Merlin spooled up far too fast — its 60-second start-up sound was rejected by a safety cap by a tenth of a second, so it fell back to a 6-second spool and was flyable long before the start sound finished. Start-up timing follows its sound again
• Fixed The v0.2.8 engine-start failsafe no longer trips on genuinely long start-ups — only when a start is actually dead
• Fixed Engine start is now refused while the main rotor is sheared or destroyed — no more start-up sound spooling a rotorless airframe
• Fixed Alt-tabbing out during a start-up no longer leaves the start sound playing after the rotors are already at full RPM — while minimized your game pauses the sound but the server keeps spooling in real time; the lagging sound is now retired when the rotor reaches full

• Fixed Navigation lights — fixed for good this time. Beyond the earlier flicker fixes, the engine itself was continuously re-applying the model’s default (dark) light textures during active simulation — so lit faces went dark in flight, the beacon only showed for a blink, and a parked aircraft looked fine while a flying one didn’t. The lights now assert themselves every frame while switched on: solid, steady navigation lights in flight and on the ground, near and far — with the beacon still strobing as intended
• Fixed A destroyed helicopter now properly extinguishes its navigation lights and spotlight
• Fixed Toggling the headlight/spotlight no longer causes a momentary flight jitter under auto-hover

• Added Dynamic engine & rotor pitch — the loops now re-pitch with rotor spool and collective load instead of playing flat: pull hard and the rotor bites deeper, unload and it relaxes, and spool-up/down sweeps through your ears instead of stepping
• Fixed Losing the tail rotor no longer plays the engine-shutdown sound — the engine is still running, and now it sounds like it

• Fixed The 3rd-person camera no longer snaps sideways at the end of a roll or loop — it holds a truly constant heading through the whole aerobatic and re-engages seamlessly
• Fixed A second gimbal case — diving steeply while twisting with free-look held — could flip/fling the view; now gimbal-safe too
• Added A subtle speed-lag on the chase camera — it trails the aircraft slightly with velocity (the same formula the native vehicle camera uses), adding speed-feel and absorbing the last visual micro-corrections

• Fixed Move to Cabin arriving glitched/floating for the co-pilot — the cabin attach ran on a fixed 1.5-second timer that could fire mid get-out animation on the co-pilot’s side, and the still-running animation fought the placement (the float). The attach now waits until the get-out has actually finished — both cockpit seats, there and back to your reserved seat
• Fixed Walking the cabin in flight is clean — arrival no longer dips into a fall, moving around no longer black-flickers the camera, and the aircraft’s audio no longer warbles as you walk
• Fixed Move to Cabin is reliable at any attitude — entering during a hard maneuver or onto a steeply banked deck could wedge you in a falling pose with a flickering camera: a safety net misread the split-second of a steep arrival as a crashed session and tore it down mid-placement. Arrivals now land you standing every time, and the recovery layers underneath were rebuilt to restore your full physical state should anything ever blip
• Fixed Cabin walking works at any bank or pitch — the floor, wall and edge sensing was world-aligned, so a steeply tilted deck (a pilot maneuvering hard while you’re in the back) could freeze you in place until the aircraft levelled out. The whole sensing rig now tilts with the airframe: walk freely through the maneuver, with the walls and edges still protecting you
• Fixed You can hear your helicopter from the cabin again — moving to the cabin in flight silenced the engine and rotors entirely (nothing left but birdsong); the aircraft’s sound now correctly follows you inside
• Fixed Walking the cabin of a held, hovering aircraft is now a rock-steady, level deck — what you see from inside finally matches what the pilot seat sees (the unmanned-hover fix above)
• Fixed Reconnecting can no longer leave your character’s controls locked from an earlier cabin walk — movement inputs are now restored on every exit path, including crashes, death, and the aircraft being destroyed while you were aboard (previously a full game restart could be needed)
• Fixed The cabin walk now cleanly self-recovers if the helicopter is deleted or destroyed under you
• Fixed Passengers and co-pilots no longer feel the airframe rumble in flight — non-pilot clients were running local physics against the network feed; they now ride the feed cleanly, exactly like native vehicle passengers
• Changed Passenger get-in animations and seated poses are now assignable per helicopter, with a first pass shipped on all six airframes (1.29 removed helicopter-specific animation sets entirely; refinement continues)
• Note “Transfer Controls” remains disabled — the 1.29 pilot-only limitation from v0.2.8 still applies (only the pilot seat can fly; this is engine-wide for every CarScript helicopter mod). The rebuilt handover — whoever holds control priority transfers it to the other cockpit seat via a physical seat swap, the only arrangement 1.29 allows — is in development and returns in a future update once it has been fully proven in multiplayer testing
• Note Remaining passenger-view micro-stepping during aggressive maneuvers is the engine’s proxy update-rate ceiling — a dedicated smoothing layer for non-pilot viewers remains in development

• Changed mod_config.json features are now three blocks: features (universal — applies in both flight modes), simple and advanced (per-mode profiles). The server’s flightMode picks which profile is live — so you can pre-configure two personalities once (e.g. assists on and calm skies in Simple; wind, harsh VRS and no auto-hover in Advanced) and swap the whole set by flipping the flight mode, live from the Admin Panel
• Note Migrated automatically on first boot — both profiles start seeded from your existing values, so behavior is identical until you deliberately edit one. Field names are unchanged — they only moved home
• Note The Advanced-only aerodynamics (VRS, blowback, anti-torque) live only in the Advanced profile — they never functioned in Simple mode, so they no longer pretend to
• Changed The Admin Panel now mirrors the config files one-to-one — the mod page gains Simple Flight Features / Advanced Flight Features sections, and the per-helicopter page’s sections now match the per-heli JSON blocks exactly (Flight Dynamics / Altitude / Aerodynamics / Control / Autorotation / Tail Rotor Failure / Damage / Fuel & Battery / Audio / Camera). Reset-to-default per row works across every new section

• Added Twin-rotor (tandem) foundation — the flight model, damage system and rotor collision now natively understand Chinook-class helicopters: two counter-rotating main discs (front and rear) with no tail rotor. Torque cancellation (no anti-torque pedal dance), yaw by differential cyclic, a rear-disc failure emergency in place of the tail-rotor spin, and correct blade-strike geometry for both discs — all wired as a base class a future tandem airframe plugs straight into. Nothing changes for the current fleet; this is the runway for what’s coming

• Added FoXyNoFlyZone support — our helicopters now respect FoXy no-fly zones out of the box, following the zone owner’s configured behaviour (warnings, engine shutdown, etc.), with the shutdown correctly driving our custom start-up/spool system. Nothing to configure — it activates automatically when both mods are loaded
• Note Verified against the new DayZ stable update (“Road to Badlands” Update 1, 1.29.163401) — no mod changes were required; update DayZ and fly

• Changed Admin entries and roles moved to their own file — $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\permissions_admins_config.json now owns the admin list, roles and whitelist retry setting. Your existing admins are migrated across automatically on first boot; the old admin block in mod_config.json is retired
• Fixed Admin rights occasionally missing after joining (the panel refusing a real admin until relog) — the client now pulls its admin status itself if the join-time grant was missed, and an admin-panel save can no longer wipe custom roles
• Fixed A network blip during a whitelist re-check can no longer disable flight on an already-verified server — connection problems (public IP lookup or registry temporarily unreachable) now retry quietly without touching the verified state. Boot verification and genuine registration checks are unchanged
• Fixed Water-ditch crew damage now respects the playerCrashDamageEnabled toggle and the damage cap — ditching with crash damage disabled no longer hurts the crew
• Fixed Destroyed hulls now come fully to rest (a wreck could previously keep hover state alive and never settle), plus a pass of internal timer-leak fixes and dead-code removal — a little lighter on the server every hour it runs — capped by a full end-of-cycle audit of the entire codebase (every subsystem reference-verified; the mod ships lean)

• Fixed Touch-and-goes are smooth — a descent-rate cushion removes the jolt on powered wheel contact, and rolling through no longer gets grabbed by the parking brake mid-run
• Fixed A seated, idling helicopter no longer slides down slopes — sitting in the pilot seat was silently releasing the parked brake
• Fixed Freshly spawned unmanned helicopters no longer roll or slide during spool-up on uneven ground
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) no longer creep slowly backwards while spooling up on the spot — the parking brake now holds until you actually pull collective, and grounded idle rotor thrust can no longer push the airframe horizontally. Slopes stay planted through start-up too
• Fixed Operating the ramp or doors on a parked, sleeping helicopter no longer makes it visibly wobble as it wakes — it settles invisibly and stays put
• Fixed Ramp/gear animations no longer freeze if the pilot leaves the seat mid-motion, and boarding a long-parked helicopter no longer has a delayed get-in action

​

UPDATE — v0.2.8 | 9 July 2026

⚠️ DayZ 1.29 limitation — co-pilot flying controls: on 1.29, only the pilot seat can fly (this applies engine-wide to every CarScript helicopter mod). The co-pilot Take Controls / handover feature is therefore disabled for now, and engine start/stop is pilot-only — the co-pilot seat is a full passenger seat with instant actions. If Bohemia opens this up, handover comes back.

⚠️ Running @Vehicle3PP? 1.29 made helicopters subject to its third-person whitelist. Add CZAutoz_Helicopter_Base to your $profile:3PPVehicleWhitelist.json (or empty the list) to keep third-person flight.

• Changed The entire flight simulation now runs on a physics force model with native client prediction — the pilot’s aircraft responds instantly and smoothly to input, with no server round-trip feel, no rubber-banding, no “stepping” while holding a turn
• Fixed The low-altitude stutter/instability near the ground under input — several force transitions (altitude hold, ground lift blending, landing braking) flipped on hard thresholds the client and server could disagree on; all are now smooth ramps
• Fixed Lift-off is smooth — the jolt as the helicopter left the ground is gone
• Changed Attitude holds on stick release — bank into a turn, let go, and it stays banked like 1.28. Auto-level-on-release is gone from free flight in both modes
• Changed Full aerobatics — loops, rolls and inverted flight in both flight modes; tilt past vertical and you lose lift realistically until you roll back out
• Changed Per-helicopter rebalance, real-life-informed: MH6 and MD500 the agile light birds, SA342M fast and nimble, UH1H steady, Blackhawk a stable fast heavy, Merlin a stately heavy-lifter. Top speeds raised to realistic values (up to ~138 kt where appropriate)
• Changed Autorotation, properly — cut or lose the engine and the rotor windmills: glide, flare with collective, and set it down; the landing settles cleanly. The autorotation tuning values (autorotation.*) are now fully functional on the new model
• Changed Tail rotor failure is a real emergency — lose the tail and the aircraft winds into an uncontrollable spin with extra sink (tailRotorFailure.* tunables now fully live), while the main rotor keeps flying; lose the main rotor and you’re going down — no lift, no authority, the healthy tail keeps spinning until shutdown
• Fixed Weathervane (nose-into-wind at speed) now actually works — the value existed but was inert on 1.29

• Fixed Cabin Walk is fully working again and enabled by default (cabinModeEnabled = 1). The in-flight rework promised in v0.2.3/v0.2.4 is done — move to the cabin in flight and you track the moving aircraft smoothly: no snapping, no teleporting, no flicker, at any speed
• Fixed The black-screen/camera flicker when moving in the cabin is gone, you stay crouched, and edge & wall blocking holds you inside the airframe
• Note Your cockpit seat stays reserved while you’re in the cabin — return to it any time
• Note Available on the cockpit-door helicopters (UH1H, MH60L Blackhawk); the AW101 Merlin and cabin passengers already walk the cabin natively

✅ If you disabled Cabin Walk on our earlier advice, turn it back on: config migration keeps your custom values — so if you set cabinModeEnabled = 0 back in v0.2.3/v0.2.4, it will stay 0 after updating. Set crew.cabinModeEnabled = 1 (or flip it live in the Admin Panel) to get the finished feature.

• Added A new mod-config setting flightMode — "Simple" (default) or "Advanced", switchable live in the Admin Panel
• Added Simple — forgiving assists: releasing collective holds your altitude, turns auto-coordinate, inputs are smoothed
• Added Advanced — raw and manual: altitude is yours to manage, minimal turn coordination (fly the pedals), crisper input response
• Note Both modes fly the identical physics and share the same per-helicopter tuning — the mode only changes the assist layer

• Changed Engaging at speed now decisively counter-tilts and brings you to a clean stationary hover — fast, straight and smooth; engagement ramps in rather than snapping on
• Fixed The curve/bank while arresting to a hover is gone — turn coordination and weathervane no longer act under auto-hover
• Fixed Altitude hold works properly (terrain-referenced) — no more diving or climbing away on engage
• Changed You can nudge the hover to reposition — the hold suspends while you steer (capped at a safe tilt), then re-arrests where you release, not back at the original spot
• Fixed The heading twitch on engage and the “fights every small input” feel

• Changed Start-up is now real: no lift and no control authority until the rotor reaches full RPM — exactly when the blades blur. Spool time follows each helicopter’s start-up sound automatically, or set it with the new spoolUpTime / spoolDownTime overrides (rotorSpoolRate remains the visual blade-spin rate only)
• Fixed Engine start can no longer get stuck (radial menu stuck on Start, rotors never spooling) if the start-up sound failed to play — with a server-side failsafe behind it
• Changed Main and tail rotor are properly independent — shear the main and the engine keeps running with the healthy tail spinning until you shut down; the reverse holds too
• Fixed Gunfire can kill rotors again — sustained fire on a rotor disables it in-session (the basis of rotors-only damage mode for AI servers)
• Fixed Rotor shear detection is snappier (~100 ms), and a sheared rotor repairs correctly — no more “reappears but doesn’t spin”
• Fixed The repair actions show reliably for every player when zones are damaged — and disappear the moment the repair completes (no more repeatable ghost repair)
• Fixed A damaged engine smokes and a holed fuel tank visibly leaks — and now leaks in flight, not just on the ground
• Fixed Wreck fire no longer re-ignites on an old wreck after a server restart — and a fully repaired helicopter can burn again if destroyed later. Fire only ever ignites on genuine destruction, never on a live airframe
• Fixed Crew crash damage setting renamed playerCrashDamageEnabled — your existing value migrates automatically

• Added True park-sleep: a parked, unoccupied helicopter now stops simulating entirely (matching native 1.29 vehicle parking) and wakes instantly on any interaction — doors, windows, ramp, refuel, repair, damage, boarding. Big server-tick savings on heli-heavy maps
• Fixed Parked helicopters no longer run per-frame physics checks on every nearby client — a fleet of parked helis at a trader is now nearly free
• Fixed Parked helicopters no longer slowly sink into the ground over time
• Fixed Gear/ramp animations and lit nav-lights no longer spam network sync / material updates every frame

• Fixed Players no longer fall through BaseBuildingPlus floors (and other elevated structures) on relog or server restart
• Fixed Autorotation landings, rotor dust and low-altitude warnings now correctly detect base-building floors and rooftops as ground — not just terrain
• Fixed A helicopter that persisted mid-air (server went down while flying) now falls and autorotates on restart instead of teleporting to the terrain below

• Fixed Co-pilot actions are instant — getting out, doors, everything (previously delayed, flickering or vanishing from the co-pilot seat)
• Added Your own door opens instantly as a passenger (client prediction)
• Added Survivor Animations support (optional soft-dependency): run @Survivor Animations on server + client and pilots sit in a proper helicopter pose instead of holding a car steering wheel
• Fixed Pilot cyclic sticks animate correctly in flight for all viewers, and the collective lever no longer flickers while held
• Fixed A warning now appears again if another mod’s keybinds clash with the collective controls (input pinned)

• Changed The health bar is now continuous and accurate (white → yellow → amber → red), synced from the server
• Fixed Damage-zone boxes are accurate for the co-pilot and passengers, not just the pilot
• Fixed The 3rd-person camera no longer whips/flings during flips and rolls with free-look — and a client crash-log flood on entering/exiting vehicles is fixed (plus another from helicopter sound effects)

• Fixed The Blackhawk no longer leans and sinks onto its front-right wheel — its centre of mass was off in the model
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters sit flush and stable on their suspension, with proper tyre grip (no more sliding on slopes)
• Fixed The Merlin’s ramp no longer sinks the hull into the ground when operated while parked

• Fixed Admin panel slider ranges now match what the config accepts — edge values no longer silently reset a setting to its default
• Fixed The per-helicopter config Edit flow applies correctly
• Changed Admin panel input handling security-hardened
• Fixed The startup Discord webhook fires reliably on boot
• Changed A server that boots without internet now recovers its whitelist the moment someone starts an engine — no waiting out the retry timer

• Changed The fuel drum classname is now CZ_HeliDrum (matching the other items). The old CZAutoz_HeliDrum still works everywhere — existing drums, types.xml and traders unaffected — but please migrate; the legacy name will be hidden in a future release
• Removed Dead config values tiltLiftComp and b2tRampRate (superseded by the new flight model — cleaned from your configs automatically)
• Note Config migration is in place as usual: custom values kept, new keys added at defaults, originals backed up to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.7 | 20 June 2026

• Fixed A v0.2.6 regression in the wreck‑fire delete‑cleanup that could fail to compile the World script module — on boot (server) or on join (client), shown as Undefined function CZAutoz_WreckFireStopEffects. The cleanup now runs entirely client‑side where the effects live; the v0.2.6 wreck‑fire, burnDuration = 0, and rotor‑shear fixes are all unchanged and intact

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.6 | 20 June 2026

• Fixed Deleting a burning wreck (admin tools, server cleanup, etc.) now removes the fire, smoke and light with it — previously the flames could keep burning at the spot until the next server restart
• Added Setting a helicopter’s burnDuration to 0 now fully disables its wreck fire — no flame/smoke particle, no light, no burn damage. Handy for servers with lower‑end clients, since the fire particle is the FPS‑heavy part. Set it live in the Admin Panel or in the per‑helicopter JSON

• Fixed With rotor damage turned off (damage.zones.rotor1 / rotor2 = 0), a crash no longer shears or deletes the rotors — they stay intact, consistent with the toggle. With rotor damage on (including rotors‑only mode), shearing works exactly as before

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is unchanged in this release — still off by default and still being reworked. Keep it disabled (cabinModeEnabled = 0) until a future hotfix.

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.5 | 19 June 2026

• Fixed Helicopters pulled from a garage (e.g. LBmaster Garage) now keep their fuel instead of arriving empty — and topping one up before you store it now sticks. The helicopter reads its fuel from the same native tank the garage restores, exactly like a vanilla car

• Fixed Helicopters parked on a BaseBuildingPlus floor (or any elevated structure) no longer drop through to the terrain after a server restart or when pulled from a Virtual Garage. A restart re-positioning step meant only for helicopters left in mid-air was wrongly snapping parked ones straight down through the base

• Fixed Getting out of a helicopter with Autohover engaged no longer makes it climb away — it now holds its altitude cleanly. The hover was mistaking the just-exited pilot beneath it for the ground “rising”; a player walking under a hovering helicopter could nudge it the same way, and that’s fixed too

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is unchanged in this release — still off by default and still being reworked. Keep it disabled (cabinModeEnabled = 0) until a future hotfix.

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.4 | 04 June 2026

⚠️ Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is still being reworked — and is now OFF by default. New or first-time-generated configs set crew.cabinModeEnabled = 0 automatically. Please keep it disabled (set cabinModeEnabled to 0 in mod_config.json) until a future hotfix completes it — when enabled it does not yet hold the pilot/co-pilot inside the cabin correctly. Cabin passengers and AW101 Merlin seats are unaffected.

• Fixed Helicopters already persisting on the map are now reliably operable immediately after a server restart — starting the engine, flying, and getting in and out all work first time. Previously they could load in a disabled state (engine wouldn’t start, you couldn’t get out of the seat) until the world was wiped — even though freshly-spawned and Virtual Garage helicopters were unaffected
• Fixed A persisted helicopter that went idle/parked before the server finished its startup checks no longer stays stuck disabled

• Changed The startup integrity check now resolves earlier and recovers quickly from a transient network hiccup at boot, so a whitelisted server never leaves its map helicopters briefly inert after a restart
• Fixed An edge case where certain server network setups (multi-homed / NAT) could be momentarily mis-flagged at startup — a correctly-registered server now stays enabled

• Changed Cabin Mode now defaults to OFF (crew.cabinModeEnabled = 0) — first-time and regenerated configs set this automatically. When off, the “Move to Cabin” action simply does not appear
• Known issue The in-flight Move-to-Cabin rework is not finished and should stay disabled until a future hotfix. Existing servers: set cabinModeEnabled = 0 in mod_config.json to be safe
• Note Affects only the pilot/co-pilot Move to Cabin action. Seat Exit Free Walk and Walk-On linking (cabin passengers, AW101 Merlin) are engine-native and unaffected

• Fixed Getting into a helicopter in 3rd person no longer zooms the camera far out and back in on entry — and the brief freeze / black-screen some setups saw at that moment is gone. The chase camera sits at the right distance from the first frame

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.3 | 03 June 2026

✅ Good news — version updates no longer reset your configs: every previous version regenerated all configs from defaults on update, so you had to re-apply your settings from the backup afterward. From v0.2.3 the mod migrates your configs in place — new settings are added, removed ones cleaned up, and all your custom values are kept. Your originals are still backed up first to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\, just in case.

⚠️ Known issue — Cabin Walk (Move to Cabin) is still being reworked: moving to the cabin while the helicopter is moving, hovering or in flight can repeatedly snap or teleport your character as the aircraft moves, instead of holding you cleanly inside the cabin — the in-flight “ride the deck” attachment is not reliable yet. For now it is most stable while the helicopter is landed and stationary (or held still with Autohover before you leave the seat). A proper fix is in active development and is the top priority for the next update. This affects only the pilot/co-pilot Move to Cabin action — Seat Exit Free Walk and Walk-On linking (used by cabin passengers and on the AW101 Merlin) are engine-native and unaffected.

• Known issue Moving to the cabin while the helicopter is moving or in flight can repeatedly snap/teleport you as it moves — it does not hold you cleanly on the airframe yet. Most stable while landed and stationary, or with Autohover engaged first
• In progress The in-flight attachment model is being rebuilt so you stay locked inside the cabin and bank/pitch with the aircraft smoothly at any speed — this is the top priority for the next update
• Note Cabin passengers and all AW101 Merlin seats use Seat Exit Free Walk / Walk-On linking, which are engine-native and not affected by this

• Removed @CommunityFramework is no longer a dependency — the CZ Autoz whitelist now runs natively inside the mod. Remove it from your server’s Required Items / load order if nothing else uses it

• Added New Our Mods tab — an at-a-glance overview of the CZ Autoz range
• Added New Cars tab — appears automatically when CZ Autoz car content is detected on your server, and lists what’s installed
• Changed Config edits now apply live — saving in the panel updates already-spawned helicopters and every connected player instantly (cabin-mode toggle, action hold-times, refuel rates and more), with no respawn or reconnect
• Fixed Helicopters spawned from the panel now land on BaseBuildingPlus floors and other structures instead of dropping through to the terrain

• Changed Version updates now migrate your configs in place instead of wiping and regenerating them — custom values kept, new keys added, removed keys cleaned up, originals backed up first
• Changed Ruined Parts Fall Off is now a single global feature toggle (previously per-helicopter)

• Fixed A co-pilot can now start the engine on a parked helicopter with no pilot in the pilot seat
• Fixed The first crew member to board now always receives controls immediately — no occasional “no control” until you exit and re-enter
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters now brake the instant the engine is switched off — no more rolling on a slope while the rotors wind down
• Fixed Engine and rotor audio no longer briefly drop out when changing seats or camera

• Fixed Helicopters already persisting on the server are now reliably operable after a restart
• Fixed A healthy helicopter restored from a Virtual Garage no longer shows wreck smoke/fire

​

HOTFIX — v0.2.2 | 28 May 2026

⚙️ Please read — a version update resets ALL configs to defaults: updating the mod regenerates every config from defaults — both mod_config.json (admin roles, feature toggles, and all server settings) and every per-helicopter config. Your existing configs are automatically backed up first to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\v<oldversion>_<date>\, and only client_prefs.json carries over. Re-apply your settings and per-helicopter tuning after updating — copy them back from the backup folder.

• Fixed Walking the cabin in flight no longer flickers — you’re now bound into the helicopter’s local-space render hierarchy and track the moving aircraft smoothly (the 1.28 cabin walk, migrated to the 1.29 API)
• Fixed You now stay crouched while moving in the cabin instead of standing up on the first movement key
• Fixed Cabin mode behaves identically on every entry, not just the first — a stale state flag was bringing back the stand-up and flicker after returning to the cockpit
• Fixed Edge & wall blocking restored — you can’t walk off the helicopter, and the white-screen flicker at edges is gone
• Fixed Moving to the cabin reliably teleports you onto the interior position (no more ending up outside or below the floor)
• Added A pilot or co-pilot who moves into the cabin reserves their cockpit seat — nobody else can take it while they’re out walking (both cockpit seats reserve independently and at the same time)
• Fixed Parked/idle helicopters no longer go to sleep (and drop you) while someone is walking the cabin

• Changed Realistic inverted flight — tilt past vertical (loops, flying upside-down) and you lose lift and fall under the aircraft’s own weight, recoverable by rolling or pitching back upright. Loops and aerobatics still work, with no artificial tilt limit
• Added Tilt Lift Compensation (tiltLiftComp) — a new per-helicopter value, live-editable in the admin panel, controlling how much lift is retained as the aircraft tilts

• Fixed The per-zone damage toggles (Chassis / Body / Engine / Fuel / Rotor 1 / Rotor 2) now gate all damage — gunfire and explosions, not just collisions. Previously a helicopter with its damage zones turned off could still be shot to a wreck
• Added True rotors-only damage — enable only the rotor zones so AI or players can damage (degrade/shear) the rotors while the hull stays invulnerable; ideal for servers running AI that shoot helicopters
• Changed Turning all damage zones off is full invincibility, now enforced reliably in both directions
• Added Ruined Parts Fall Off — new per-helicopter toggle: a door (or any attachment) that becomes ruined detaches and drops off the helicopter instead of sitting ruined in its slot (default off)

• Fixed AW101 Merlin no longer wobbles or jitters while the cargo ramp or landing gear is moving
• Fixed MH-60L Blackhawk side windows no longer open and close on their own when using movement or flight inputs
• Fixed Animation states (gear, ramp, fuel, windows) are no longer incorrectly driven by player input or movement

• Fixed DayZ Expansion Car Keys — locking a paired helicopter works again; it no longer reports “close all doors to lock” when every door is already shut

• Fixed Cabin collision — interior geometry that previously had no collision now blocks correctly, so the cabin edge/wall protection works as intended

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HOTFIX — v0.2.1 | 24 May 2026

⚠️ Please read — flight smoothness (important): This hotfix makes the flight simulation — the motion that actually carries you through the world as you bank and turn — smooth and kinematic again. It does NOT yet make the helicopter visually 100% smooth. The body-frame transforms during flight can still visually rumble. This is a known, separate issue and needs a dedicated rework against the DayZ 1.29 native rendering/prediction API to appear fully smooth on-screen. In short: your helicopter flies and moves through the world smoothly — the remaining rumble is purely visual, and it is actively being worked on for an upcoming update.

• Changed Restored the smooth, kinematic flight feel from 1.28, rebuilt on the 1.29 engine — fluid world movement, banking and turning
• Changed Rebalanced per-helicopter top speeds (in knots), tuned to sit below the engine’s FPS-drop threshold
• Removed Auto-leveling in both powered flight and autorotation — the aircraft now holds the attitude you set
• Added Altitude retention through banked turns
• Fixed Autorotation tilt smoothed to match powered flight

• Changed Helicopters inherit CarScript again (Transport in v0.2). The v0.2 force-based flight model, autorotation, tail-rotor failure, control feel, admin panel, lights, particles and audio are all unchanged — only the base class changed
• Changed Wheel suspension, movement prediction and contact damage now use DayZ’s native CarScript systems instead of the custom Transport-era replacements

• Removed The manual <rootclass name="CZAutoz_Helicopter_Script" act="car" reportMemoryLOD="no" /> entry that v0.2 required is no longer needed — as a CarScript vehicle the helicopters are covered by DayZ’s native vehicle Central Economy root automatically
• Upgrading from v0.2: safely remove that <rootclass> line from your mission’s cfgeconomycore.xml
• Important Wipe helicopter persistence once on update — the save format changed with the base class, so existing saved helicopters will not carry across

• Changed DayZ Expansion (get-in, safe zones, locks), MuchCarKey, TraderPlus CarLock, VPP Admin Tools and Community Online Tools now recognise the helicopters natively as CarScript vehicles
• Removed The v0.2 Transport-era compatibility shims that hand-rolled this recognition — no longer needed
• Changed All mod compatibility stays optional & auto-detected — no hard dependency

• Changed A sheared rotor no longer shuts the engine off — unless fully ruined, the engine and tail keep running and the aircraft stays powered; you only lose control authority
• Fixed Fuel leaks now start the moment the tank is damaged (previously only once a player boarded) and stop once the tank is empty or repaired
• Fixed Wreck fire now triggers when an unoccupied helicopter is shot to ruined — it no longer requires a player to board first

• Added Adding an admin or changing a role now applies live — no rejoin needed to open the panel
• Added Removing an admin now revokes access instantly and closes their panel

• Fixed Rotors creeping/spinning slowly forever after shutdown or a server restart
• Changed Netsync optimisation — lower bandwidth and fixed the Blackhawk camera/rotor desync
• Changed Parked/idle helicopters stop ticking to save server FPS

• Changed Two per-helicopter config keys were renamed for clarity: inputSmoothRate → b2tRampRate, and playerCrashDamage → playerCrashDamageEnabled
• Important Regenerate your per-helicopter configs so the new keys populate — those two fields revert to defaults until you do. Note that updating to a new version regenerates all configs from defaults (including mod_config.json); your previous configs are backed up to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backups\v<oldversion>_<date>\ first, so re-apply your settings afterward

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UPDATE — v0.2 | 21 May 2026

• Changed Flight system migrated from CarScript to Transport — the correct DayZ 1.29 base class for script-driven aircraft. The old CarScript wheel, suspension and gearbox subsystem has been removed from config
• Changed All helicopter motion is now driven by force and torque (ApplyForceAt, dBodyApplyTorque) — direct velocity and orientation assignment has been removed from the flight code
• Added Native client-side prediction — pilot inputs are tied to physics ticks and replicated through DayZ’s own prediction pipeline, replacing the previous custom 40 Hz input RPC
• Changed Passengers, co-pilots and bystanders now receive helicopter movement through native Transport interpolation between network updates
• Changed Pilot/owner detection moved from seat-index checks to the native Pawn API (IsOwner() / IsProxy()), matching the 1.29 network model
• Removed 10 physics-state network-sync variables (velocity, orientation, angular velocity) — physics state is now handled entirely by the native Transport system
• Fixed On 1.29 only the pilot’s client was simulating the helicopter — the moment the pilot left the seat, nobody else saw the rotors spin or heard the engine. All clients now see and hear the helicopter whether or not a pilot is seated
• Fixed Physics body going dormant between network updates and stopping simulation — the body is now kept active while in use

Still being worked on: hard snapping during flight is gone, but some rumble on tilt and rotation can still be seen and is being actively worked on. This is the first phase of the 1.29 flight rebuild — further smoothing and refinement is coming in the next phase.

• Added Only one cockpit seat holds flight control at a time — the first player into either cockpit seat receives it
• Added Press T (rebindable) to hand control to the other cockpit seat — the receiving player must be seated and alive
• Added Control passes automatically if the holder leaves or dies, and resets when both cockpit seats are empty
• Added Without control, all flight and systems inputs (cyclic, collective, yaw, autopilot, lights, engine) are locked out
• Added HUD control indicator — green when you hold control, red when you do not

• Added Full controller / gamepad support for flight — cyclic on the left stick, collective on the triggers (right raises, left lowers), and rudder/yaw on the shoulder buttons. Autohover stays on X by default. Every binding is rebindable in the controls settings
• Added New rebindable keybinds: open the admin panel (default F10) and transfer cockpit control to the other seat (default T)
• Changed All flight inputs are now read locally and delivered through the native prediction move pipeline rather than a synced input action, removing input latency

• Changed The pilot control indicator and the auto-hover icon have been repositioned on the HUD
• Changed The airspeed readout is now smoothed to remove needle and number jitter, and shows true airspeed in knots (the old per-helicopter speed display factor has been removed)

• Added The 3rd-person chase camera now smooths its position and gently leans with the helicopter’s pitch and roll, for a less rigid, more cinematic feel
• Added Free-look can now be held momentarily as well as toggled with a double-tap
• Changed The 1st-person cockpit view now updates every frame, smoothing it at the physics-tick rate

• Added In-game admin panel for server owners and admins — manage the whole helicopter fleet without leaving the game
• Added Fleet actions — teleport to a helicopter, repair, refuel, reset, delete, repair all, delete empty, and reload configs live
• Added Roles & permissions — assign admin Steam64 IDs to roles and grant granular per-action permissions; the owner role always has full access
• Added Live map view of active helicopters
• Added Server-side validation on every panel action — nothing can be triggered by a modified client

• Changed mod_config.json reorganised into clear sections (logging, features, gameplay, repair, refuel, extra modules, admin) under the new CZAutoz_ naming
• Added Admin roles & permissions block — define which Steam64 IDs are admins, their role, and the exact panel actions each role may use
• Added Physics logging toggle for flight diagnostics
• Added Automatic config backup on version change — existing configs are copied to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backup\v{version}_{date}\ before regenerating, so no settings are lost when updating
• Removed In-game config guide generation — configuration is now documented at docs.czautoz.co.uk
• Changed All config files regenerate on the first server start after updating — your old files are backed up automatically so custom values can be re-entered

• Changed Per-helicopter configs reorganised into clear sections — flight, altitude, aerodynamics, control, autorotation, tail-rotor failure, damage, fuel, battery, audio and camera — under the new CZAutoz_ naming
• Changed Control feel rebuilt — the old per-axis acceleration/decay multipliers are replaced by a time-constant (Tau) smoothing model per axis (rollAccelTau/rollDecayTau, pitchAccelTau/pitchDecayTau, yawAccelTau/yawDecayTau)
• Added Aerodynamics tuning — ground effect, effective translational lift (ETL), and flight-envelope drag
• Added Altitude tuning — lift fall-off start altitude and hard ceiling
• Added Bank-to-turn strength (b2tStrength)
• Added Autorotation coast duration (coastMinutes) — how long the rotor keeps turning visually and audibly after a mid-air engine cut
• Added Tail-rotor failure tuning — spin and descent behaviour
• Added Per-zone damage toggles (body, engine, fuel tank, both rotors, chassis) and post-destruction burn tuning (duration + radius)
• Removed Per-helicopter mass key — mass is now read directly from each model’s physics body, set via mass in config.cpp per variant
• Removed Speed display factor
• Changed Tuning units are now more natural — altitude values are entered in feet and maximum airspeed in knots — and the previous hard caps on top speed and climb/descent rate have been removed (each tuned per variant)

<rootclass name="CZAutoz_Helicopter_Script" act="car" reportMemoryLOD="no" />

• Changed Script files reorganised into Client/, Server/ and Shared/ folders by compilation layer — easier to locate and hotfix systems
• Changed Server-side physics, systems, damage and rotor safety consolidated into a single server module
• Changed Preset loading unified into one generic loader, replacing six separate dispatch chains
• Changed Wheel attachment slots for wheeled variants (Blackhawk, Merlin) moved from the CarScript SimulationModule block to standard attachments — wheel items still work as normal
• Added Server FPS overlay, toggleable from the admin panel, for live performance monitoring
• Fixed Spawning a helicopter could drop the server or client to ~1 FPS until relog — wheel and inventory initialisation was running inside the physics tick; it now runs deferred, outside the simulation loop
• Changed Rotor strike detection — used for blade shearing and the rotor-disc player kill — has been optimised: the spinning disc is now built as a circle sampled from the rotor’s centre and tip memory points instead of relying on the model’s collision-geometry disc. This is cheaper to run and more reliable
• Changed General optimisation pass across the server simulation and client visual/HUD paths

• Fixed Some variants could not be started at all — a faulty condition in the start sequence was blocking startup for certain configurations

• Fixed Rotor spin no longer snaps to a stop after a mid-air engine cut — the rotor now coasts down gradually over the configured coast time
• Fixed The shutdown chime no longer plays on a mid-air cut when the rotor has enough energy to autorotate — it only plays on a normal grounded shutdown
• Fixed Engine and rotor audio now fade together over the full coast instead of the engine cutting to instant silence
• Added Tilting the cyclic during autorotation now translates the helicopter — you can glide forward and steer the descent, instead of only rotating in place

• Added Destroyed helicopters now catch fire and burn for a configurable time — a flickering fire light plus a fire-damage area that hurts players standing too close (burn duration and radius are set per helicopter). Suppressed underwater, and a destroyed wreck will not re-ignite if shot again
• Added Crash and hard water-impact damage now also applies to players moving in the cabin or standing on the airframe, not only those buckled into a cockpit/cargo seat

• Added New built-in pump-refuel action — fuel a helicopter directly at a working fuel station (vanilla, Enoch, or a Simple Gas Pump) with no jerry can needed, at a faster fill rate
• Added Helicopters spawned by the Central Economy (types.xml / events.xml) now start with a partial fuel load rather than empty or full

• Removed The Emergency Recovery reconnect action has been removed — it was never meant to be player-facing, and the situation it covered is now handled internally with no player action needed

• Added Every integration below is auto-detected and optional — there is no hard dependency. The mod runs standalone, and each integration only activates when that mod is also loaded
• Added DayZ Expansion — helicopters register as Expansion vehicles: respected by Expansion safe zones (no damage inside a safe zone), routed through Expansion’s damage and explosion system, and persisted through Expansion ModStorage
• Added MuchCarKey — lock and unlock helicopters, assign keys, show the owner’s name on the vehicle, and optionally require the correct key to start the engine
• Added TraderPlus CarLock — password lock/unlock with an on-screen lock menu, attach and detach a CarLock, lockpick attempts, and lock/unlock/alarm sounds
• Added VPP Admin Tools — the /refuel chat command now fully repairs and refuels a CZ helicopter and maxes every damage zone
• Added RaG Core — helicopter enter/exit, door open/close, deletion and weapon-hit events are written to RaG’s vehicle activity log
• Added Community Online Tools (COT) — helicopters appear in the COT vehicle manager, “spawn with attachments” picks the correct doors for each variant, and bulk delete (all / destroyed) now includes them
• Added Push — the vanilla push action works on a grounded helicopter, scaled by a per-helicopter push-force multiplier

• Fixed Exit/get-out actions on doorless cockpit seats no longer appear both centre-screen and in the cockpit hints panel — they now show only in the cockpit hints panel

• Fixed Spotlight (landing/search light) and navigation lights (port, starboard, tail and beacon) now work correctly on DayZ 1.29 — the move to Transport dropped the old CarScript light handling, so both have been reimplemented as independent, network-synced toggles that every nearby player can see
• Changed The spotlight also lights the cockpit dashboard, and lights require a fitted, charged battery to switch on

• Fixed Rotor downwash now appears over buildings and other objects, not only over terrain
• Fixed Water spray no longer spawns beneath a structure the helicopter is landed on over water — surface detection now uses what the helicopter is actually resting on

• Fixed Touching down while still moving and holding descend could send the helicopter skidding across the ground at very high speed — body tilt was still feeding flight thrust after ground contact. A helicopter on the ground at idle or descending collective no longer accelerates from its attitude, and instead bleeds off any remaining landing speed and settles to a stop
• Fixed Stationary helicopters with the engine off are climbable again — a damping value was being rewritten every tick and preventing the body from settling
• Fixed Helicopters restored from persistence (server restart) or pulled from a virtual garage onto an elevated structure — such as a BaseBuildingPlus floor — could drop straight through it to the terrain below. The ground check now starts above the airframe and reliably detects the structure underneath, so the helicopter stays where it was placed

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HOTFIX — v0.1.5 | 05 April 2026

• Added CZH_autoHoverOnExit — controls whether autopilot automatically engages when the pilot exits their seat while the helicopter is airborne. Default: 1 (on — existing behaviour, no change for current servers)
• Changed Default refuel action distance increased from 4.2 m to 5.0 m — the action now triggers from slightly further away, making it easier to refuel without needing to stand directly against the airframe. Note: servers with existing per-helicopter config files must delete them and restart once to pick up the new default, or manually update CZH_refuelDistance in each file

• Changed JSON configuration system, internal class structure, variable naming conventions, and config map pipeline have been fully rebuilt from scratch — the CZH config architecture is now entirely distinct and independently authored with no structural overlap with any third-party helicopter mod implementation

• Fixed Players reconnecting after a mid-flight crash over ocean were being snapped to the ocean floor
• Fixed Players reconnecting after a mid-flight crash above a rock, cliff or building were snapped to terrain level and placed inside or below the object — they are now correctly placed on top of it

• Fixed Helicopters that were airborne at the time of a server restart now land safely on the nearest terrain or geometry surface on the first simulation tick after restart — engine and rotor are shut down, physics are reset, the helicopter settles as if it had been parked
• Fixed Helicopters that were airborne over ocean at restart no longer fall into the water — autopilot is automatically engaged to hold their position until a pilot returns
• Fixed Helicopters parked on the ground bouncing for several seconds immediately after a server restart

• Added Pilots who reconnect after a game crash or server restart while their helicopter is airborne now receive an Emergency Recovery hold action (3-second hold)
• Added The action is exclusive to the pilot who was last in control — tracked by a persisted GUID on the helicopter that survives server restarts; no other player ever sees it
• Added On activation, the pilot is placed directly into the pilot seat with no extra button press required
• Added The action disappears automatically the moment another player enters the pilot seat, the helicopter lands, or the helicopter is destroyed — it is never permanently visible

• Fixed Servers using the War Dogs 3PP mod crashed when a player held the native free-look key inside a CZH helicopter — no effect on servers not running War Dogs

• Fixed Turning the engine off while airborne caused the helicopter to freeze completely in place — it now correctly enters autorotation and descends under its own mass
• Added Autorotation descent rate now scales with helicopter mass — heavier helicopters descend significantly faster than light scouts, reflecting real rotor disc loading behaviour. The existing CZH_autoRotGravityFactor preset still lets admins tune the base rate per aircraft

• Updated Ground wash particle effect — rotor downwash now kicks up dirt and dust when flying close to the ground, replacing the previous effect

• Updated Simulation module adjusted — suspension and wheel behaviour improvements
• Fixed Geometry adjustments to reduce entry blocking on both sides of the helicopter — players could previously get stuck or prevented from climbing in

• Fixed Landing gear and cargo ramp sounds remaining fixed at the location where they were first triggered instead of following the helicopter — audible when flying away after activating them mid-flight

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HOTFIX — v0.1.4 | 04 April 2026

• Added CZH_autoShutdownOnExit in mod_config.json — when set to 1, the engine shuts off automatically when the pilot exits their seat while the helicopter is grounded and the engine is running. Default: 0 (off)
• Added CZH_engineHoldTime in mod_config.json — controls the hold duration in seconds for the Start Engine and Stop Engine action circles. Default: 1.0

• Added Ramp, landing gear, and exit actions on doorless pilot and co-pilot seats now display on the side of the screen — removes centre-screen clutter during flight

• Changed Door open/close action while seated now only appears in 1st-person view — prevents the action cluttering the screen during 3rd-person flight

• Fixed Suspension compression animation playing in the wrong direction on takeoff and landing
• Fixed Cargo ramp auto-closing the moment the pilot entered the seat after a server restart
• Fixed Cargo ramp showing “Open Ramp” when the ramp was already open after a server restart
• Fixed Cargo ramp state now correctly restores after a server restart — open stays open, closed stays closed
• Fixed Landing gear spawning retracted on server restart — gear now always lowers on server boot regardless of its state at shutdown

• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) rolling down slopes during engine spin-up
• Fixed Suspension and wheels not settling correctly when the engine is stopped during landing — the helicopter would freeze mid-settle with wheels at uneven heights
• Fixed Wheeled helicopters (Merlin, Blackhawk) no longer snap level when landed on a slope
• Fixed Stationary helicopters no longer jitter or shift when a nearby helicopter spins up or flies past
• Fixed Damping and ground contact stability improvements across all variants

• Fixed Severe FPS drops on spawn — simulation module adjustments applied across all helicopter variants
• Fixed Client FPS drop during engine spin-up — a broken startup effect was silently failing 60 times per second throughout the entire startup sequence

• Changed Wheel radius and wheel hub radius adjusted across affected variants

• Changed Move to Cabin and Return to Cockpit actions changed from press to hold — prevents accidental activation while moving around inside the cabin

• Removed Switch seats temporarily removed — will return fully working in a future update

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HOTFIX — v0.1.3 | 03 April 2026

• Fixed SA342M, UH1H, MD500 and MH-6 suspension constraint was collapsing server FPS to 1–6 during flight

• Fixed Action not always appearing or completing correctly
• Fixed Jerry can refuelling instantly on second use instead of gradually
• Fixed Fuel drum draining at the same rate as a jerry can
• Fixed Fuel leak not draining correctly with engine off
• Fixed Repairing the fuel tank now fully stops the drain — fuel was continuing to drop silently after the effect stopped
• Fixed Helicopters spawned via admin tools with no fluids selected were spawning with a full tank
• Added Fuel pump mods (Simple_Refueling, Gas-Pump-Refueling) now work with CZH helicopters
• Added Helicopter Fuel Drum (CZH_HeliDrum) — 2 drums fill any helicopter from empty by default
• Added Refuel amounts and drain speed per container type now configurable in mod_config.json

• Fixed Clipping terrain at speed caused a full instant stop
• Fixed Helicopter spinning to 90° on engine start after landing

• Fixed Helicopter jumping or tilting when interacted with while parked on a slope

• Added New CZH_freeLookAlwaysOn option in mod_config.json

• Fixed Safety snap firing every second near any helicopter — now fires once on connect only

• Fixed No hub spin on startup with sheared rotors
• Fixed Admin repair now correctly restores blade geometry

• Fixed Remote players saw rotors instantly jump to full speed on startup and shutdown

• Fixed Standing on a hovering helicopter caused constant camera shake — 50/50, awaiting confirmation

• Fixed Helicopter nearly inaudible when facing away from it

• Added Damaged fuel zone now shows a drip particle at the fill point

• Fixed Running out of fuel froze all simulation — now enters autorotation with full control

• Added Going past 90° bank applies downward force — full cyclic retained to flip back

• Fixed Bounce on touchdown after autorotation
• Fixed Opening a door with engine off jolted the helicopter post-autorotation

• Fixed Damage HUD now shows base name only — variant suffix no longer squishes text

• Fixed JSON float values writing at full IEEE 754 precision — now clean
• Fixed New config keys from updates now appear automatically on restart without deleting files
• Recommend deleting all JSONs in $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\ to regenerate clean — we are still in early builds

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HOTFIX — v0.1.2 | 02 April 2026

• Fixed Cargo modules not appearing as extra cargo space
• Fixed Cargo modules respawning empty on server restart — contents are now preserved across restarts

• Fixed Engine startup and shutdown sounds not heard by players outside the helicopter — remote clients now correctly receive engine transition sounds

• Fixed Pilot and co-pilot seats could not be entered from outside when the helicopter was on a natural slope

• All helicopter classnames now use the CZ_ prefix (e.g. CZ_UH1H, CZ_MH60LBlackhawk). Any existing types.xml entries, trader configs, or persistence saves referencing old classnames must be updated. Pre-existing helicopters on the map will despawn if classnames are not updated before loading this version.

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HOTFIX — v0.1.1 | 02 April 2026

• Fixed Flight system conflicting with cars causing them to jitter on the spot

• Fixed Opening a door or leaving a seat while landed on a slope caused the helicopter to reset position into the ground

• Fixed When using no-damage mods (e.g. Hunter’s Improved Vehicles), a sheared rotor would instantly respawn — now fully controlled by CZH and toggleable via CZH_rotorBladeShear in mod_config.json

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v0.1.0 | 01 April 2026