What Is Rescue?
Rescue is a winching game. Somewhere out on the water there is a person in a life jacket, there is a ship at the other end of the sea with a deck and a mast, and there is a helicopter in between with a hook on a cable. Your job is to put the hook where they can reach it, lift them clear of the water, carry them across, and set them down on the deck without breaking anything.
The aircraft itself is deliberately forgiving. It weighs 1,600 kilograms, it hovers where you leave it, and its only vices are that the rotors take a moment to answer and that pointing the disc sideways costs you height, because the lift is the thrust and the thrust went with the tilt. Four seconds of full sideways tilt costs about three metres. That is a real cost and it is not a difficult one to manage.
What is not forgiving is the cable. Fifteen metres of it hangs below the aircraft with a 40 kilogram hook on the end, and it behaves exactly like what it is: a pendulum. Push the helicopter sideways and the hook goes the other way first. Stop pushing and it comes back, overshoots, and keeps going. The whole flight is a conversation with an object that takes seven and a half seconds to answer.
How to Play
- Press the button and the call-out starts. You begin at 220 metres from the ship with a full tank and a survivor somewhere out on the water. The map at the top shows where.
- Fly towards them at altitude. There is no reason to go low early. Height costs you nothing but fuel, and being low when you arrive means you have to climb back up with the cable already swinging.
- Line up over the survivor and stop. This is the part people rush and it is the part that decides the flight. The hook is still moving from the transit, and it will keep moving for several seconds after the aircraft stops. Wait for it.
- Lower the aircraft until the hook is at their hands. You are not aiming the hook, you are aiming the helicopter and letting the cable hang. The hook has to be within 2.4 metres of them and moving at less than 2 metres per second, and the second condition is the one that catches everybody.
- Wait for the grab. Once the cable is settled and you are in the right place, they take hold on their own. You will see it happen and the fuel readout will start to matter more.
- Climb away and carry them across. The load on the hook changes the way the cable behaves and not in a helpful direction, so fly smoothly. Every correction you make now is amplified by somebody hanging underneath you.
- Set them down on the deck. The delivery height is 22.2 metres, which clears the deck at 7.2 metres and the mast at 19. The score is mostly about how gently you put them down.
- Land, read the score, and take the next call-out. Your best is kept in the browser.
The fuel is the clock. The tank holds 100 units and the burn is between 1.65 and 2.15 units a second depending on how much power you are asking for, which is a little under a minute of flying. There is enough for the job and not much spare, so a wasted transit is a real loss rather than a rounding error.
Tips for Getting Them on the Hook
- Stop before you think you need to. The hook keeps travelling after the aircraft stops. If you arrive over the survivor and immediately start descending, the hook will still be swinging from the transit and will pass them at speed. Arrive, stop, count a few seconds, then descend.
- Watch the hook, not the helicopter. Every instinct says to fly the aircraft, because that is what the controls do. But the aircraft being in the right place is not the same as the hook being in the right place, and it is the hook that has to arrive.
- Make one correction and then leave it alone. Two small tilts in quick succession do not add up to one larger one, because the second one arrives while the hook is still answering the first. You end up with a cable that is being driven from both ends and no way to predict where it will be.
- Use height as your brake. If the hook is swinging and you need it to stop, climbing slightly is often better than waiting. The pendulum period depends on the cable being a fixed length from a fixed point, and moving that point upward changes the geometry enough to take the energy out.
- If it is not working, climb and start again. A failed approach costs fuel, but a fight with a swinging hook costs more. Going up two hundred feet, letting the cable go quiet, and coming back down on the right spot is usually faster than trying to settle it in place.
- Spend your gentleness on the delivery. The pickup is scored on whether you managed it. The set-down is scored on how gently you did it, and that is where the points are. A scruffy grab costs you nothing if the delivery is soft.
What Makes a Slung Load So Hard
The cable in this game is not a decoration and it is not a spring. It is a pendulum, and a pendulum is one of the few physical systems where the obvious intuition is exactly backwards. Everything else in flying rewards input. You push the stick and the aircraft answers. The load on a cable is the one thing in aviation that does the opposite, and that is why it has a reputation out of all proportion to how simple it looks.
The equation the game solves is the real one for a point mass on a rigid cable: the angular acceleration depends on gravity through the sine of the angle, on the helicopter's own accelerations, and on the drag on the hook. What falls out of it is a period of 2π√(L/g), which for fifteen metres of cable is 7.8 seconds. Measured, with the damping stretching it slightly, it comes out at 8.13 seconds. That number is the whole character of the game. It is far too long to correct against and far too short to ignore.
Think about what a 7.8-second period means in a game where the aircraft answers its controls in a fraction of a second. You have a fast system and a slow system joined together, and you are trying to position the slow one using the fast one. Every correction you make to the helicopter arrives at the hook nearly eight seconds later, by which time the helicopter has moved somewhere else. A pilot who flies reactively will drive the cable into a growing oscillation that never settles, because each input arrives out of phase with the swing it was meant to fix.
Why the person on the hook changes everything
Here is the part of this game that is not in most flying games, and it is a genuine piece of physics rather than an invented difficulty curve. The damping on the cable is set by drag over mass, and drag depends on how big the thing on the end is while inertia depends on how heavy it is. Put a person on the hook and both numbers change.
The game treats that honestly. An empty hook is 40 kilograms of steel and strop. The same hook with somebody in a harness on it is 150 kilograms, and the frontal area barely changes at all. So the damping ratio drops from 0.34 to 0.09. In plain terms, the empty hook is damped to about a third of critical and settles inside a single swing. The same cable with a person on it rings for nearly half a minute.
The measured numbers are the ones the tests print. An empty hook displaced and released comes to rest in 5.8 seconds. The loaded one takes 26.9 seconds to settle inside the same tolerance, which is 4.7 times as long, and you can watch it happen: the troughs of the swing come at -0.189, -0.109, -0.063 and -0.036 radians, each about 58% of the one before it. That is a very slow decay and it is entirely a consequence of hanging a hundred and ten kilograms of person on a hook designed to be light.
This is why the game has two different kinds of difficulty in it. The pickup is a precision problem: you need the hook in the right place at the right speed, and the cable is quiet and well behaved while it is empty. As soon as they have hold of it, the cable becomes a completely different instrument that will not stop moving, and the same corrections that were fine a moment ago are now being applied to something that stores them and gives them back later. The hard part of a real winching operation is not getting somebody onto the hook. It is flying away with them afterwards.
Why a swinging hook cannot be caught
The rule the game enforces is two conditions, not one. The hook has to be within 2.4 metres of the person, and it has to be travelling at less than 2 metres per second when it gets there. Both are checked, and the second one is the one that decides whether a hover works.
That is true to life in a way that a single distance check would not be. A hook moving at three metres a second is not something a person in the water can grab. It is a piece of steel coming at your head at running speed, and the correct thing to do with it is get out of the way. The game models the survivor as making that judgement, which means the fastest way to fail a pickup is to fly a perfect approach too quickly.
The tests make the point by measuring both passes. Released from a hard swing, the hook crosses the survivor's position doing 3.67 metres per second and goes straight through without connecting, even though the geometry was perfect. Left alone, the same cable settles in about three seconds and the pickup then happens on its own, with the hook travelling at 1.99 metres per second. Same hover, same reach, same person. The only thing that changed was how fast the hook was going.
Which turns the whole approach into a waiting game, and waiting is a skill that flying games rarely ask for. There is a specific moment in a good rescue where the correct action is to do nothing at all, with the survivor directly below and everything in the world screaming at you to descend and get on with it. That moment is the game.
Reading the water and the wind
The wind in this game does three things at once and they all matter. It pushes the helicopter, which means a hover is a continuous small correction rather than something the aircraft does for itself. Left hands-off in 5.4 metres per second of wind, the helicopter drifts 73 metres in fourteen seconds, which is most of the width of the rescue area. Holding station is work.
It also carries the person in the water. This is the detail that catches people out, because the survivor is a small object on the sea and it is very easy to treat them as a fixed mark. They are not. They drift downwind at about a tenth of the wind speed, which is a slow enough motion to be invisible and fast enough to matter: measured, a survivor moves 5.3 metres in twelve seconds in that wind, and a flight lasts long enough for that to put them 17 metres from where you last looked.
And it sets the sea state, which is what ends the flight if you get it wrong. The rotor disc meets the water at 2.4 metres and there is no recovery from that. The ship is equally solid, and it is worth knowing before you fly at it that the deck sits at 7.2 metres with a mast at 19. The aircraft is 2.4 metres tall, so a low pass over the deck is not a low pass. It is a collision.
Flying a Winch on a Phone
A call-out runs between one and two minutes and nothing in it is quicker than a human reaction, which makes it an unusually good game to play on a touchscreen. The pendulum takes nearly eight seconds to swing, the survivor drifts at half a metre a second, and the tank lasts the best part of a minute. None of that changes if you are holding a phone rather than sitting at a desk.
On a keyboard, the arrow keys fly it and W, A, S and D do the same job for a left hand. Up and down work the collective, which is the lever that sets how much lift the rotor is making, and left and right tilt the disc. P pauses.
On a phone or tablet, hold the left or right edge of the stage to tilt and use the on-screen pad for climb and descent. The tilt control is a rate rather than a position, so holding it keeps tilting for as long as your thumb is down, which is the right behaviour for a control you are using to make small corrections against a slow oscillation. Let go and the disc self-centres.
The one thing worth knowing about the small screen is that the map at the top is where the survivor is, and on a phone it is worth glancing at it rather than at the world below. The world only shows you what is in front of you. The map shows you where the person you are looking for has drifted to while you were busy.