CV-22B Osprey

The CV-22B Osprey is the eleventh aircraft, added in v0.4.6, and one of the mod’s two tilt-rotors — the other is the Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey. Its two big proprotors — part rotor, part propeller — sit on engine pods called nacelles at the tips of its wing. It takes off, hovers and lands as a helicopter with the nacelles pointing straight up, then tilts them forward and flies on its wing like an aeroplane, far faster than anything else here. It carries 22 people. The pilot sits in the right-hand cockpit seat, as on the real CV-22, with the co-pilot on the left. Behind them, twenty fold-down troop seats line the cabin walls, ten down each side, facing the aisle. You walk in up the rear ramp or climb in through the crew door at the front right, and the cabin is tall enough to stand up in.

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Specifications

Per-helicopter config files live in $profile:\CZAutoz_Heli\HeliConfigs\.

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Variants

The CV-22B comes in one version, CZ_CV22BOsprey. The Marine Corps version is a separate aircraft, the MV-22B Osprey.

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Getting in

• Board through the rear ramp — open it (see Rear Ramp) and walk up it into the cabin — or through the crew door at the front right. Once inside, take any free seat, the pilot’s and co-pilot’s included
• The crew door comes in two halves, upper and lower, which open and close separately. Open both to get in: the lower half folds down into two steps up to the doorway, which is about 1.3 m off the ground and lower than a standing player, so crouch through. Shut, the door is solid; with the door halves taken off, the doorway stays open

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Rear Ramp

The Osprey’s rear ramp is part of the airframe, and it opens and closes the same way as the Chinooks’:

• From the pilot or co-pilot seat, scroll the cockpit prompt list to Open/Close Rear Ramp and press F
• Anyone standing outside at the back of the aircraft can also open and close it
• It works in the air as well as on the ground
• While the ramp is still moving the action is unavailable — let it finish, then press again
• Ramp opens and closes are written to the activity log when logging.activityLog = 1

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Getting out inside

The Osprey has no Move to Cabin / Return to Cockpit action, and it does not need one. As on the AW101 Merlin, Get Out from any seat — pilot and co-pilot included — leaves you standing in the cabin rather than outside. You travel with the aircraft, in the air or on the ground, and can take any free seat again at any time. To leave, walk out down the rear ramp or climb down through the crew door. Switch Seats moves you straight to a free troop seat along the same wall: look at it and tap the interact key. To change between the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, or to a seat across the cabin, get out — from any seat that leaves you standing in the cabin — and get in again. While you are looking at another seat in the air, the interact key never takes you out of the aircraft — to get out, look away from the seats first. The cabin is tall enough to stand fully upright in. The MV-22B and the two Chinooks are the only others like it; in every other aircraft with an interior you stay crouched. See Cabin Mode for full details.

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Flying it

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The nacelles

In the pilot seat, hold B and roll the mouse wheel (the hold key is yours to change in Options → Controls):

• Wheel up tilts the nacelles toward helicopter — straight up
• Wheel down tilts them toward aeroplane — pointing forward
• Each click moves them a tenth of the way. They turn at 7.5 degrees a second, so going all the way across takes about 12 seconds, like the real aircraft
• They move smoothly, for you and for everyone watching, and in aeroplane mode they line up with the wing

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On the HUD

A line above the dials reads NAC and the nacelle angle: 90 is straight up, 0 is fully forward. While they are moving it shows where they are going, for example NAC 45 > 0. The speed dial reads double range on the Osprey — up to about 324 knots — so the needle does not sit pinned in a cruise. The number in the middle is the real speed.

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Taking off

The pilot chooses how:

• Straight up, as a helicopter, with the nacelles up
• A rolling take-off — tilt the nacelles forward to the ground limit (the HUD shows GND) and add power. The Osprey rolls along and lifts off on its wing and its rotor thrust together as the speed builds. Raising the nose helps
• On the wheels the collective is a straight thrust lever: at the bottom the proprotors idle, at the top they give take-off power, and the roll builds up steadily, so push the collective up gradually for a longer roll. Don’t hold W on the runway: it pushes the nose down and keeps the wing from lifting
• 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

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Converting to the wing

• Tilt the nacelles forward as speed builds. Tilt them all the way forward from a hover with no speed and it sinks, because the wing is not flying yet
• With the nacelles forward, the wing stalls below about 110 knots
• Once the nacelles are forward, the collective is the throttle, like the real V-22’s thrust lever. The climb and descend keys move a lever that stays where you leave it, whatever your Collective Hold setting, and the needle on the collective dial shows where it sits. Centred is cruise power, up is full power and down is idle. Tilt the nacelles back up and it hands back to the normal collective
• With the collective centred it cruises at about 246 knots. Full power takes it to about 275 knots, just under its 288-knot limit. That is roughly 2.3 times its top speed as a helicopter. Below the middle the thrust lever turns the proprotors into an airbrake, slowing you hard at high speed — that is how you get down to landing speed
• On the wing, the controls are the aeroplane’s surfaces: they need airspeed to work, and the pull is limited to about 2.5 g
• Q/E swings the nose strongly and quickly as a helicopter, and keeps working with the nacelles part-way forward at low speed. In full aeroplane mode it is weaker, like a rudder, so turn by banking
• In Simple flight mode it holds its height for you on the wing: 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 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
• The control surfaces move with your hands: 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

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Coming back to a hover

Slow down first. The nacelles only come up as far as your airspeed allows — they are fully up at 120 knots or less — and the HUD shows SLOW while they wait.

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Landing on a runway

The Osprey can also land rolling, like the real aircraft. 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 while you are still high up, or it stalls. With the gear down, the nacelles come up by themselves close to the ground to keep the proprotors clear, so you touch down part-converted and rolling. 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. Brake with S on the ground. 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. At rolling speed the nose can’t be pushed down into the runway, and S still lifts the nose right down to touchdown. See Rolling Landings. On the ground it taxis like the other helicopters on wheels: W and S roll it forward and back, Q/E turns it on the spot, and the parking brake holds it with no input — see Taxiing. With the nacelles at their lowest and the thrust lever at idle, it stays put.

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When things go wrong

• One proprotor lost — the other still flies it, lopsided and on half the thrust. In a hover it rolls hard toward the dead side; at speed it rolls and yaws toward it
• Engines out on the wing — it glides, with the proprotors windmilling and dragging
• Both proprotors gone — with speed on, it still glides on its wing. Lose both in a hover and it falls
• Coming down fast and slow as a helicopter — one rotor can sink into its own downwash before the other (vortex ring state). The result is a violent roll toward the lower wing that more power cannot fix. It follows the server’s vortex ring settings, the same as every other aircraft: Advanced flight mode only, and never when vrsEnabled is off
• A damaged proprotor flies worse before it fails. The lift you lose follows whichever proprotor is in worse shape, the pedal you lose follows the average of the two, and once you are flying on the wing the rudder keeps your yaw — see Damage you can feel in flight

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Autopilot and Autohover

The autopilot flies a long trip as an aeroplane. On a trip longer than 5 km, once it is at least 50 m up, it tilts the nacelles forward and cruises on the wing, flying higher than it would as a helicopter — about 110 m above the ground ahead. It slows down on a schedule, so it is back in helicopter mode by about 2.5 km from the destination and arrives in a hover. A trip of 5 km or less is flown as a helicopter. Pressing Auto Hover or the landing itself brings it back to helicopter mode. Losing a proprotor switches the autopilot and Auto Hover off and leaves the nacelles where they are, so tilt them up yourself. Autohover and auto-land fly the Osprey only as a helicopter. Engaging either one swings the nacelles up, and you keep control until they are nearly there — a notification tells you so. If they stop on the way, slow down. Auto-land waits until the nacelles are back in helicopter mode before it starts the landing approach. Range on this fuel. The autopilot map’s range figure allows for the aeroplane cruise. For a destination more than 5 km away — where the autopilot converts — it is worked out at aeroplane cruise speed, 85% of flight.maxAirspeed, with the last 2.5 km flown as a helicopter and about a minute allowed for climbing, converting and slowing down. For a destination 5 km or closer it uses helicopter speed, about 93% of tiltRotor.helicopterTopSpeed, because the autopilot stays a helicopter on short trips. With no destination set, the map shows the long-trip figure. Fuel burns at the same rate per hour in both modes, so on the wing the Osprey goes roughly 2.2 times as far on the same fuel.

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Damage

All six damage areas are on by default, chassis included, the same as the other aircraft on wheels. The damage panel shows them as LROT and RROT (left and right), and the repair kit offers Repair Left Rotor and Repair Right Rotor.

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Sound

The Osprey has sounds of its own: two turbine engines and two big three-bladed proprotors. The rotor note drops when the nacelles go forward, just as the real aircraft slows its proprotors from 412 to 333 rpm in aeroplane mode.

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Sling Loading

The Osprey lifts up to 6,800 kg on one hook — more than the AW101 Merlin, less than the two Chinooks.

• Its winch gear is not part of the model — the mod supplies the winch unit when a load is hooked, the same way it does for the Mi-24
• The weight limit is sling.maxKg in the helicopter’s config file. A load over the limit gives you no hook-up action at all

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Landing gear

The Osprey sits on a nose wheel with two tyres and two main wheels, and they fold away in flight. Raise and lower them with the landing gear action, which works the same way as on the AW101 Merlin. The Merlin, the Mi-24 Hind and the two Ospreys are the four whose gear folds away. After a take-off the gear comes up by itself once you are climbing away more than 15 m up at over 40 knots, as long as you took off with it down and have not worked it since, and never while Auto Hover or the autopilot is flying; the pilot gets a message when it does. Lower it again before a rolling landing: the nacelles only tilt up to keep the proprotors clear of the ground while the gear is down.

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Door and wheel classnames

It also takes one HeadlightH7 bulb, for the spotlight under its nose. The 20 troop seats have no doors of their own and are taken from inside. There is only one CV-22B, so the same door and wheel items fit every one — put the two door halves in your types.xml if you want it to spawn with the crew door fitted. The MV-22B has door and wheel items of its own; the two Ospreys’ parts do not fit each other.

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Retexturing

The Osprey has one paintable body texture, the camo slot — the tenth entry in its texture list, after nine light slots and before the four navigation-light slots, the same layout as most of the fleet. The outside of each crew-door half is painted from the same body texture, so one repaint covers the doors too; the inside of the doors and the rotor blades keep their standard finish. See Retexturing.

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Cargo

As well as its built-in storage of 1,000 slots, the Osprey takes up to 10 extra cargo modules, the same as the rest. Set how many with cargoModules.cv22b.modules and how big each one is with cargoModules.cv22b.cellsPerModule in mod_config.json. These two settings are the CV-22B’s alone — the MV-22B has its own pair under cargoModules.mv22b.

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Tilt-rotor settings

Only the two Ospreys’ config files have a tiltRotor section. Having no tail rotor, they also have no tailRotorFailure section. The Admin Panel shows the tilt-rotor settings under a Tilt-Rotor heading:

• Nacelle Turn Speed (tiltRotor.conversionRate) — how many degrees a second the nacelles turn. 7.5 takes about 12 seconds end to end
• Top Speed, Nacelles Up (tiltRotor.helicopterTopSpeed) — the airspeed limit with the nacelles up, in knots, and the speed below which they can come fully up. Level flight with them straight up tops out a little below it, nose well down; the autopilot tilts them a few degrees forward and cruises at about 110 knots nearly level
• Wing Stall Speed (tiltRotor.wingStallSpeed) — the speed, in knots, below which the wing stalls with the nacelles forward. The STALL warning and the stall horn come on at 1.1 times this
• Propeller Pull at Speed (tiltRotor.propellerPull) — how well the proprotors keep pulling as speed builds. 1 is stock; higher is faster on the wing

See Per-Helicopter Settings for the ranges each one allows.

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Default Flight Tuning

See Per-Helicopter Settings for a full description of every parameter.