Currently, whenever I use my joystick to fly around, I have to lower first and then raise the analog collective on my Slider completely in order to calibrate the full extent of the axis.
If I don't do this and leave it at full throttle, as it was on last mission/editor preview session, the heli won't take off to name an example.
First make sure your analog collective is set to the Slider+/- of your joystick accordingly.
-> the engine and rotors will start but the chopper will not lift off
alternatively
-> heli will spin up the rotor but not lift off until you lower and raise the Slider completely
Tested with a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro.
This used to work properly in Arma 2/OA.
I have the same setup including the same stick, but cannot 100% reproduce the problem.
After a fresh game start and entering the editor as per the repro steps, the heli did not spin up despite collective being set to full. Reducing to zero and back to full started the engine, and normal behaviour was restored.
Restarting the preview after crashing and keeping the collective on full causes the rotor to spin up and the heli to lift off 90% of the time. The odd exception cannot be explained.
Realized that Z-axis is used in Control Panel for rotation axis and what I meant is called "Slider" (also with + and - though). Fixed description and title accordingly.
Btw. I still have the problem, reproducable always. It's not a tragedy and easily fixed and could as well be related to my old joystick (even though I believe the model hasn't been changed ever since, I may be wrong).