If you have flown helicopters in other sims, most of this will be familiar. If your only reference is vanilla Reforger, read this — Rotor Framework helicopters do not fly like vanilla ones, and the reasons why are the whole point of the mod.
A helicopter has one source of lift: the rotor. Everything else — the engines, the gearbox, the electrical system, your collective lever — exists to keep that rotor spinning at a constant RPM with the right amount of pitch on its blades.
In vanilla Reforger, pulling collective is lift. In Rotor Framework, pulling collective changes the pitch angle of the blades, which changes how much air they bite, which produces lift — and simultaneously produces drag, which the engines have to overcome to keep the rotor turning. Lift is a result, never an input.
That single change is where every other behavior in this document comes from.
| Control | What it physically does | What you feel |
|---|---|---|
| Collective | Changes blade pitch on every blade at once | More lift + more drag. Climb/descend, but also loads the engines. |
| Cyclic (mouse) | Changes blade pitch depending on where the blade is in its rotation | Tilts the rotor disc → tilts your thrust vector → the aircraft accelerates that way. |
| Pedals | Changes tail-rotor pitch (or splits the two rotors on a Chinook) | Points the nose. Fights the torque the main rotor is putting into the fuselage. |
| ECL (Engine Condition Lever) | Sets engine power: OFF → GROUND/IDLE → FLIGHT | Not a throttle. It tells the engine what governed RPM to hold. |
The cyclic is not a steering wheel. You do not turn the helicopter with it — you tilt the rotor with it, and the aircraft follows where the thrust is pointed. The nose is pointed by the pedals, entirely independently.
The engine twists the rotor one way. Newton insists the fuselage gets twisted the other way. Left unopposed, the body of the helicopter would just spin under the rotor.
The tail rotor's whole job is to push sideways hard enough to cancel that. So:
On the Chinook there is no tail rotor. The two main rotors spin in opposite directions, so their torques cancel each other out. Pedals instead tilt the front and rear discs in opposite directions to yaw the aircraft. This is why the Chinook feels different — it will happily hover with the nose anywhere, and it is far less sensitive to power changes.
Rotor Framework has an auto-trim system that will hold the pedal for you, so you are not fighting this constantly. It knows how much pedal the current collective setting needs, feeds it in ahead of time, and then corrects any residual sideslip. If you want the raw experience, you can turn it off.
The rotor must spin at roughly a constant speed — usually 100% NR. The engines are governed to hold it there. You do not control rotor RPM directly; you disturb it, and the engines chase it back.