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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.czautoz.co.uk/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

CZ Autoz Helicopter is a complete helicopter simulation built from the ground up for DayZ. Six aircraft, each engineered around its own real-world weight, drag, and rotor characteristics. A physics engine that rewards skill. A damage model with real consequences. A configuration system deep enough for any server’s vision. Nothing is shared across helicopters to cut corners — the Merlin feels nothing like the MD500, because it wasn’t built to.
Every feature on this page is included in the mod. No additional purchases, no DLC splits, no feature tiers.

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By the Numbers

6Unique helicopter airframes
20Livery and variant combinations
6Independent damage zones per helicopter
45+Tunable flight parameters per helicopter via JSON
18Maximum passenger capacity (AW101 Merlin)
10Extra cargo module slots per helicopter (1,000 slots each)
4Real-time particle effect systems
8+Distinct audio event layers per helicopter

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The Fleet

MD500 Civilian

4 seats — 2 cockpit, 2 cargo. Open-air airframe with removable doors and a nimble, responsive flight character. Four liveries: White, Classic Red/Silver, Blue Charter, Green Tour.

MH-6 Little Bird

6 seats — 2 cockpit, 4 bench. Automatic grab-hold system attaches bench riders to the airframe — passengers travel with the aircraft even when seated outside the hull. Two variants.

SA342M Gazelle

4 seats — 2 cockpit, 2 cabin. Reversed cockpit entry, latched rear doors. Three liveries: Standard Olive, Woodland Camo, Tiger Meet.

UH-1H Iroquois

5 seats — 2 cockpit, 3 cabin. Full Cabin Mode — pilot or co-pilot can leave their seat, move freely inside the cabin with WASD, weapon use, and ADS, and return to cockpit at any time. Four liveries.

MH-60L Blackhawk

8 seats — 2 cockpit, 6 cabin. Full Cabin Mode plus independently operable sliding windows on both sides. Two liveries: Olive Drab and Desert.

AW101 Merlin

18 seats — 2 cockpit, 16 interior. Rear loading ramp. Retractable landing gear. Seat Exit Free Walk — all seats exit into the enclosed fuselage, players link natively mid-flight. Four liveries.

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Feature Categories

Physics Flight Model

Per-helicopter mass, drag, inertia, and rotor characteristics. Each aircraft handles differently by design.

Autohover

One key locks a stable hover — holds altitude, heading, and position simultaneously. Deactivates cleanly on cyclic input.

Autorotation

Engine-off rotor inertia allows a controlled glide and landing. Collective flare, descent cap, gravity factor — all configurable.

Damage Zones

Six independent zones: Body, Engine, Chassis, Fuel, Main Rotor, Tail Rotor. Each zone individually toggleable per server.

Repair & Battery

HelicopterRepairKit repairs all six zones. HelicopterBattery drains on start, charges while running, drains slowly with lights.

Cabin Mode

Walk, aim, and fire from inside a moving helicopter. Cabin Mode on UH-1H and Blackhawk. Seat Exit Free Walk on the AW101 Merlin. Walk-on linking on UH-1H, Blackhawk, and MH-6.

Cargo System

Built-in storage on every helicopter, plus up to 10 optional extra cargo modules per aircraft (1,000 slots each).

HUD & Instruments

Airspeed in knots, altitude AGL in feet, health bar, fuel gauge, Autohover status, and a pilot control indicator — cockpit-only display.

Particle Effects

Rotor downwash dust cloud on approach to ground. Water spray when hovering over rivers and lakes. Engine damage smoke.

Sound System

Eight distinct audio layers: engine, rotor, startup, shutdown, warning beep, crash, rotor shear, and impact tap. All volume-configurable per helicopter.

Lighting

Red/green navigation lights, anti-collision beacon, and forward spotlight. All independently controlled, battery-drain configurable.

Fuel System

Configurable burn rate per helicopter. Escalating audio warnings as the tank empties. Fuel tank leak when damaged.

Rotor Kill Zone

Spinning rotor blades are lethal. Players entering the disc radius take fatal damage. Seated crew, Cabin Mode players, Seat Exit Free Walk players, and grab-hold passengers are automatically exempted.

Water & Crash Detection

High-speed water entry deals impulse-scaled damage. Submerged helicopters take continuous engine and body damage. Crew take crash damage on hard impacts.

Camera System

Lag-free camera anchor with configurable pull-back distance per helicopter. Free-look toggle keeps the aircraft responsive during manual orbit.

Controls

Full key reference for flight, engine, lights, Autohover, repair, cabin mode, cargo, and all crew actions. Keyboard and full controller / gamepad support.

1.29 Flight Architecture

Rebuilt on DayZ 1.29’s CarScript base — a velocity-kinematic flight drive that restores the responsive 1.28 feel, with native client-side prediction for low-latency input.

Co-Pilot Control Priority

Only one cockpit seat flies at a time. Press T to hand control to the other seat. Control passes automatically when the holder leaves or dies.

Admin Panel

In-game fleet management for server owners and admins — teleport, repair, refuel, reset, delete, reload configs, and a live map, all with role-based permissions.

Wreck Fire

Destroyed helicopters catch fire and burn for a configurable time, with a fire-damage area that hurts players standing too close.

Mod Compatibility

Community Framework (CF) is required. Optional auto-detected integrations — DayZ Expansion, MuchCarKey, TraderPlus CarLock, VPP Admin Tools, RaG Core, Community Online Tools, and Push.

Server Configuration

45+ parameters per helicopter via auto-generated JSON files, organised into clear nested sections.

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Standout Features

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Particle Effects

Three environmental particle systems respond in real time to the helicopter’s state:
  • Rotor downwash dust — as the helicopter descends toward dry ground, a dust cloud billows outward from beneath the rotor disc. Scales with rotor speed and proximity to the surface.
  • Water spray — hovering low over rivers, lakes, or coastal water kicks up a spray effect directly beneath the aircraft.
  • Engine damage smoke — when the engine zone is damaged, smoke rises from the engine bay. Intensity scales with damage state.
All three are purely visual and have no gameplay effect — but they make landings and low-level flight look and feel dramatically more alive.

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Cabin Mode

Players aboard supported helicopters can do something no vanilla DayZ vehicle supports — get up and move around inside a moving helicopter. Cabin Mode (UH-1H, Blackhawk) — the pilot or co-pilot uses the Move to Cabin action to leave their cockpit seat and walk freely inside the cabin with full WASD, weapon use, and ADS. The Return to Cockpit action puts them straight back in their seat at any time. Seat Exit Free Walk (AW101 Merlin) — because the Merlin has a fully enclosed fuselage, the standard “Get Out” action exits any seat into the interior rather than outside. Players link automatically and walk freely mid-flight. The rear ramp must be open to actually leave the aircraft. Walk-On Linking (UH-1H, Blackhawk, MH-6) — stepping onto the rear cabin opening or bench platform automatically links a player to the aircraft’s coordinate space. They travel with it until they step off. See Cabin Mode for full details on all three systems.

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Grab-Hold System (MH-6 Little Bird)

The MH-6’s bench seats work differently from every other helicopter in the pack. When a player sits on a bench, they are physically linked to the helicopter’s local space. The aircraft can bank, pitch, and accelerate — bench riders move with it automatically. No manual grab inputs. No risk of falling through geometry. The link is maintained from takeoff to landing and detaches cleanly when the player dismounts.

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Autorotation

When the engine dies in flight, the rotor keeps spinning — rotor inertia carries the aircraft into a glide. A controlled descent, a collective flare at the right moment, and a heavy helicopter can be put down survivably. The autorotation model has configurable parameters: gravity reduction factor, flare strength, maximum descent speed cap, and the speed at which ETL stops providing meaningful lift. Servers can tune it from forgiving to demanding.

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Sound System

Every helicopter has eight distinct audio event layers, each independently volume-configurable per aircraft in the JSON config:
LayerTrigger
EngineLooping, volume driven by engine spool fraction
RotorLooping, volume driven by rotor spool fraction
StartupOne-shot transient on engine start
ShutdownOne-shot transient on engine stop
Fuel WarningLooping beep tone when fuel below threshold
CrashOne-shot on hard impact or high angular velocity
Rotor ShearOne-shot when main or tail rotor blade shears off
Impact TapLight contact sound on minor ground touches
The interior sound environment is also attenuated — cabin passengers hear a reduced mix compared to the external soundscape.

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Rotor Kill Zone

The main rotor disc and tail rotor are active kill zones when spinning. Any player entering the disc radius takes fatal damage — making ground crew and bystanders genuinely at risk around a running helicopter. The system automatically exempts:
  • Seated crew members
  • Players in interior cabin walk mode
  • Players on grab-hold benches
  • Players in the seat-exit walk window (just dismounted)
The rotor disc geometry is also hidden from the physics scene while spinning at altitude, preventing the visual mesh from clipping into terrain on low approaches. This can be toggled server-side.

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Damage System

All six zones can be enabled or disabled per helicopter, per server in the JSON config. A helicopter with all zones set to 0 takes no damage — useful for PvE or event servers that want indestructible aircraft.
ZoneConsequence when destroyed
BodyProgressive HP drain
EngineCannot restart; rotor spins down
ChassisStructural damage; impact threshold lowered
FuelTank leak; fuel drains continuously
Main RotorAircraft falls; no lift recovery
Tail RotorUncontrolled yaw spin; heading cannot be held
Rotor blade shear is a separate system — when the main or tail rotor health reaches zero, the blade physically detaches with an audio crack, the spool animation freezes, and the rotor geometry hides. The sheared state persists through server restarts. Hard-impact crash damage to crew is also configurable — the impulse threshold, maximum HP damage per impact, and whether crew damage is enabled at all are all server-controlled.

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Water & Crash Detection

Water impact: High-speed entry into water deals impulse-scaled damage to the Body zone and crew members. A slam cooldown prevents rapid repeated damage on bounced impacts. Drowning: A helicopter that remains fully submerged takes continuous damage to the Engine (350/s) and Body (200/s) zones after a short grace period, ultimately destroying the aircraft. Hard landing: Impulse above the configured threshold triggers the crash sound, applies zone damage, and zeroes angular velocity to prevent spinning. A position correction is applied on the next tick to prevent floor clipping.

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Server Configuration

Every aircraft in the pack has its own JSON config file generated automatically on first server start. Parameters are applied immediately on vehicle respawn — no server restart required after editing. 
$profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\
├── MD500_Civilian_config.json
├── UH1H_Nasa_config.json
├── MH60LBlackhawk_config.json
├── AW101Merlin_RoyalAirForce_config.json
├── ... (20 files total across all variants)
└── mod_config.json          ← global settings
Each per-helicopter file is organised into clear nested sections — flight, altitude, aerodynamics, control, autorotation, tailRotorFailure, damage, fuel, battery, audio and camera. Together they cover:
  • Rotor spool rate, lift multiplier, max airspeed (knots) and vertical speed
  • Altitude lift fall-off start and hard ceiling (feet)
  • Cyclic authority (pitch / bank / yaw strength) and per-axis Tau response smoothing
  • Bank-to-turn strength, input smoothing, drag
  • Ground effect bonus and altitude, ETL bonus and speed, flight-envelope drag
  • Autorotation gravity factor, flare strength, descent cap, and coast duration
  • Tail-rotor failure spin and descent behaviour
  • All six damage zone toggles, contact damage coefficient, and post-destruction burn (duration + radius)
  • Crash threshold, player crash damage enable
  • Battery drain/charge rates, fuel burn rate, max fuel capacity
  • Audio volume multipliers for all sound layers
  • Camera pull-back distance
All config files regenerate on the first server start after updating, and your existing files are backed up automatically to $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\Backup\v{version}_{date}\ so no custom values are lost.
See Per-Helicopter Settings for the full parameter reference.

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Logging & Administration

When enabled in mod_config.json, the mod writes timestamped activity logs to the server profile directory: 
$profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\CZAutoz_Heli_Activity_YYYY-MM-DD.log
Every log entry includes the player display name, Steam GUID, helicopter type, and world position. Logged events include engine start, engine stop, boarding, disembarking, landing gear toggle, refuel, rotor kill, crew crash damage, and pilot death in seat. A separate debug log (CZAutoz_Heli_debug.log) can be enabled independently for detailed physics and config diagnostics without flooding the activity log. Both logs are opt-in and disabled by default.