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Sling loading lets a helicopter pick a vehicle up off the ground, carry it underneath 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 Barrel Helicopter’s 120 kg to the Chinooks’ 10,000 kg.
Sling loading ships as EXPERIMENTAL. It is fully playable and safe to run on a live server — the multiplayer side, the automatic releases and the settings all work. What is still being worked on 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 sling.enabled = 0 in mod_config.json and the whole thing disappears server-wide.

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What Can Be Lifted

Any vehicle — vanilla cars and trucks, and most modded vehicles — can be slung, as long as:
  • it is under the helicopter’s hook, and
  • it weighs no more than that helicopter’s lift class
Other helicopters cannot be slung. A load over the limit simply never offers the hook action — there is no partial lift and no dragging. Locked vehicles refuse the hook. Before hooking up, the mod asks whichever lock mod your server runs — MuchCarKey, Trader, TraderPlus and Expansion are all understood — and a vehicle that comes back locked never offers the action, so nobody can lift a car around its lock. Servers that prefer the old behaviour can switch that off with sling.respectLocks = 0.

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Lift Classes

The two Chinooks are the fleet’s heavy lifters and the only ones that can move the heaviest vehicles.

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Hooking Up

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From the cockpit

  1. Bring the helicopter to a hover over the vehicle — the load has to be underneath, and the aircraft has to be nearly still (under 3 m/s)
  2. Keep the rotor at 90% or above — this is a running-rotor job, not something you do at idle
  3. Scroll the mouse wheel until the side hint row reads Attach Sling Load
  4. Press F
Either the pilot or the co-pilot can do it. The rope length is set automatically from how high the hook is above the load.

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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 easy way with two players: the pilot holds the hover, the ground crew hooks it on. For the action to appear, the helicopter has to be 3 to 16 m above the load, within about 7 m sideways of it, with the rotor at 90% or more and nothing in the way between the hook and the vehicle.

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Letting Go

  • From a seat — select the sling row with the mouse wheel and press F. It 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 within 3 m of the ground — or of the platform or base floor it is set down on — and barely 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 4 m and 22 m. Both are available to the pilot and the co-pilot. The rope length is shown in metres on the sling hint row, so you always know how much line is out — handy for threading a load between trees, or shortening up before a fast run.

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Automatic Release

The load drops on its own, with no input, when:
  • the helicopter is shut down, destroyed, or removed
  • the load itself is lost
  • the load hits the ground
  • the load hits an obstacle
  • the load snags on something
A load that is hanging when the server restarts is set down on the ground directly below where it was, moved to one side if it would sit under a helicopter. These are safety releases, not faults — they stop a hooked load dragging the helicopter into the scenery. Each one is written to the activity log with its reason when logging is on.

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Flying With A Load

A slung load is felt in the handling for as long as it is on the hook, scaled by how heavy it is against the aircraft’s lift class: Simple mode carries most of the weight for you. Advanced mode deliberately does not — you feel the mass hanging underneath and have to fly around it, which is the point. See Flight Model for how this sits alongside the rest of the handling.

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Airframe Hardware

Two things differ between aircraft beyond the lift class: Modelled winch gear — the UH-1H, MH-60L Blackhawk and MH-47G Chinook carry their winch on the model itself, and it appears when a load is hooked. The others get a generic winch unit put there instead. Two hooks — the AW101 Merlin and both Chinooks have a hook fore and aft, with the rope splitting to the front and rear of the load. Long vehicles ride level under those three rather than hanging nose-down from one point.

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Server Settings

A sling.maxKg of 0 switches sling loading off for that one helicopter, and it stays off through restarts. Only a file with no maxKg line at all is given the aircraft’s built-in lift class. To switch sling loading off on every helicopter at once, use sling.enabled = 0.
Both values can also be changed live from the in-game Admin Panel, where sling.maxKg shows as Sling Max Load (kg).