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Sling loading lets a helicopter pick a vehicle up off the ground, carry it under the airframe on a rope, and set it down somewhere else. Every helicopter in the fleet can do it — what changes is how much it can lift, from the MH-6’s 500 kg up to the Chinook’s 10,000 kg.
Sling loading ships as EXPERIMENTAL. It is fully playable and safe to run on a live server — the netcode, the automatic releases and the config handling are all in place. What is still being refined is the rope and bridle visuals and the feel of carrying a load. Expect both to change between builds. If you would rather not run it yet, set features.slingloadEnabled = 0 in mod_config.json and the whole system disappears server-wide.

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What Can Be Lifted

Any vehicle — anything built on DayZ’s CarScript base, which covers vanilla cars and trucks as well as most modded vehicles — can be slung, provided:
  • it is sitting directly under the helicopter’s hook, and
  • its mass is within that airframe’s lift class
Other helicopters cannot be slung. A load over the limit simply will not offer the hook action — there is no partial lift and no dragging. Locked vehicles refuse the hook (v0.4.1). Before attaching, the mod asks whichever lock mod your server runs — MuchCarKey, Trader, TraderPlus and Expansion are all understood — and a vehicle reported locked simply never offers the hook action, so a helicopter cannot lift a car straight around its lock. Servers that prefer the old behaviour can switch it off with features.slingRespectLocks = 0.

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Lift Classes

The Chinook is the fleet’s heavy lifter and the only airframe that can move the heaviest vehicle classes.

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Hooking a Load

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From the cockpit

  1. Bring the helicopter to a hover directly over the vehicle — the load has to be under the hook, and the aircraft essentially stationary
  2. Keep the rotor at 90% or above — this is a running-rotor operation, not something you do at idle
  3. Scroll the mouse wheel until the side hint row shows Attach Sling Load
  4. Press F
The action is available to a crew member in the pilot or co-pilot seat. The rope length is set automatically from the hook’s height above the load when it takes.

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From the ground

Walk up to the vehicle with a helicopter hovering over it, look at the vehicle, and take the Attach Sling Load action. This is the easiest way to rig a load with a second player flying — the pilot holds the hover, the ground crew hooks it.

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Releasing a Load

  • From the seat — select the sling row with the mouse wheel and press F. The row reads Release Sling Load while something is on the hook
  • From the ground — look at the slung vehicle and take the Unhook Sling Load action. The load has to be near the ground and not moving

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The Winch

While a load is hooked, two more hint rows appear: Winch Load Up and Winch Load Down. Each press moves the rope 2 metres, between a minimum of 4 m and a maximum of 22 m. The live rope length is shown in metres on the sling hint row, so you always know how much line is out — useful for threading a load between trees, or for shortening up before a fast transit.

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Automatic Release

The load is dropped automatically, without any input, when:
  • the carrier is powered down, destroyed, or deleted
  • the load entity is lost
  • the load strikes the ground
  • the load strikes an obstacle
  • the load snags on something
These are safety releases, not failures — they stop a hooked load from dragging the helicopter into terrain. Every one of them is written to the activity log with its reason when logging is enabled.

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Flying With a Load

A slung load is felt in the flight model for as long as it is on the hook, scaled by how heavy it is relative to the aircraft: Simple mode carries most of the load’s weight for you. Advanced mode deliberately does not — you feel the mass hanging under the aircraft and have to fly around it, which is the point. See Flight Model for how these stack with the rest of the envelope.

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Airframe Hardware

Two things differ between airframes beyond the lift class: Modelled winch gear — the UH-1H, MH-60L Blackhawk and MH-47G Chinook carry their winch hardware on the model itself, which reveals when a load is hooked. The other airframes get a generic winch unit spawned in its place. Dual hooks — the AW101 Merlin and MH-47G Chinook have two hooks, fore and aft, with a bridle running to the front and rear of the load. Long vehicles ride level under those two airframes instead of hanging nose-down from a single point.

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Server Configuration

A sling.maxKg of 0 means unset, not “cannot lift”. On load, an unset value is replaced with that airframe’s preset default and the substitution is printed to the server log. To genuinely disable sling loading, use features.slingloadEnabled = 0 rather than zeroing the lift classes.
Both values are also editable live from the in-game Admin Panel, where sling.maxKg appears as Sling Max Load (kg).