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How To Fly A Radio Controlled Helicopter
Flying your helicopter is not quite as simple as it
looks. Follow these guidelines and we hope you will be up in the
air and in control in no time.
Simulator First:
Following these guidelines when using a simulator will improve your
performance in real life.
The flying tips are based on the idea that you have infact used
a simulator and have familiarized yourself with the charecteristics
of rc flight. There are many unexpected things you will encounter
if you don't have a simulator that are not listed here.
Don't let the helicopter hit you! This is a habit you definitely
want to avoid. (Even though it can not in the sim, it can in real
life)
Don't let that helicopter get too far away. Even though you think
it's too hard to see just because it's on a computer screen doesn't
mean it's any easier to keep it close in the real world. This is
definitely something to work on.
Ok, so you can land your helicopter in the sim now, but can you
make it land where you want it to precisely? Work on this.
Ok, so you can make it land where ever you want to, can you make
it land pointing any direction you want it to? Work on this too.
Try flying with all the trims slightly off center
Adjust the trims at random and get used to it, then do it all over
again.
Move all the sticks like crazy all over the place until the helicopter
is in a precarious position... then level it out as fast as you
can.
Turn the wind up to 10 mph and repeat all the above.
Turn the turbulence up to 10 mph and repeat all the above.
Practice flying from left to right back and forth, then practice
flying in and out without hitting or flying over yourself.
The autorotations in CSM are way way way too easy. Don't rely on
the practice to help you in a real event. To help you get close
to the difficulty of a real autorotation, go into whichever configuration
screen has "blade drag ratio" and double it. I think it's
at .22 by default, set it to at least .44.
Experiment, if you haven't already, with loops and rolls.
You're ready to try the real thing!
More advanced sim practice:
If you have CSM, turn all the colors of the model to pure black.
This will simulate the common lighting conditions you fly in for
real when the helicopter just turns into a silhouette. This is supposed
to disorient you because it will be hard to tell if the helicopter
is banking away or towards you etc. This happens in real life so
you should practice for it.
Turn the rudder trim half way off center so that the heli is doing
a complete 360 once every 2 seconds or so. Don't touch the rudder
now! Only use the collective. Try and slowly fly around without
touching the rudder, to do this you need to continually be adjusting
the cyclic (bank and pitch) since the helicopter will always be
pointing in different directions. Try to land this way. When you
get good at it, reverse the direction of the rudder. When you're
good at this, land while slowly pirouetting.
Practice hovering inverted and flying around inverted.
Practice flying around backwards slowly. This is very difficult.
Practice flying around backwards while inverted. Yikes.
Real Flight:
I suggest that you should wait to fly the real thing until you can
confidently fly around in the simulator and land without crashing.
You'll be much better off in the event of an emergency and learn
quicker too.
Put big training gear on your heli if you purchased one.
Have someone verify the linkages, reversing, and test fly if possible.
Practice doing small hops up to 6 inches, paying attention to how
the helicopter is trimmed. Don't adjust your trim in the air unless
you are very confident. Drifting to one side is normal and results
from the tail rotor thrust which you can compensate for by putting
a very-very slight right-bank in just after takeoff, but this is
different than pitching. If your helicopter banks, yaws or pitches
by itself you need to compensate with trim.
Practice hovering from 6 inches to 1 foot. Be prepaired for ghusts.
Wind will increase the effectiveness of your rotorblades and make
your helicopter climb fast. Don't overreact and slam it into the
ground. Slowly lower the collective and gradually bring it back
down. Be prepaired for the wind to stop and the helicopter to descend
more quickly. Again, don't over-react and send it launching into
the sky. Just take it easy and if it gets "on top of you"
don't touch anything but a little forward cyclic for 1 or 2 seconds.
Eventually it will fly out in front of you, level off and use back
cyclic as needed to stop, then level off again.
Adjust gyro as needed to stop wagging or tail swaying when you adjust
power.
Practice hovering out of ground effect. At least 3 feet up, and
hold it steady, the wind will really affect the height at this level.
Get used to how responsive the collective is. Give it a few SMALL
taps. You want to get used to NOT over-correcting with the left
stick. This is hard, most people want to move the stick all the
way down when they get in trouble, this is bad, this slams the heli
into the ground. Get used to merely lowering the collective 1/4
way down or so.
Practice walking the heli around. Follow at a safe distance behind
it and make it go places slowly. Be careful not to step in any holes.
Practice turning the heli a little bit to the right and left. Get
used to the perspective in real life. The sim experience only helps.
Practice flying the heli out and back (tail in both ways)
Practice a little side to side slow-flying.
Practice doing left / right turns in front of you while flying back
and forth. Almost like a figure-8, but always keeping the tail in
a little. Basically, just fly the helicopter sideways to the left
and right, in front of you, then start adding rudder so instead
of flying sideways back and forth, the nose leads the turn a little.
The helicopter will never turn with JUST the rudder or JUST the
cyclic. You need to use both the same time.
Practice turning the heli towards you a little more.
Practice doing small, very slow, circles. This is difficult.
Flying left to right is easier than flying in and out. Start doing
this.
Don't fly with the sun near the horizon. It gets hard to see the
attitude.
Practice hovering a little bit higher, say 10 - 20 feet. Don't force
it back down, lower the collective a little bit at a time. If it
starts to sink rapidly, raise the collective slow at first and slowly
raise it faster until it stops falling. Start lowering it again
and do a slow, controlled descent. If you descend to quickly you
will enter your own down wash and the helicopter will pull itself
into the ground and need considerable collective to compensate.
This is a bad condition.
Practice doing a little bigger circuits but keep the speed down.
Your ready to take the training gear off. They're slowing you down
and you're probably developing bad habits by using them for visual
cues.
After you take the training gear off, start all over again, because
it's much more responsive now and much more difficult to see, however,
it will fly much much better.
Practice subtle 180 stalls and figure-8's.
Practice going faster and slowing down.
Practice transitioning from fast forward flight to landing.
Practice in a little more wind... wind really makes a heli jump
around, be on top of it.
Practice controlled flight. Try to make the helicopter go exactly
where you want it to. Take more authority of the sticks.
Practice "baby-autos" where you hit the throttle hold
at 3 or 4 feet to send the engine to idle. The helicopter will drop
suddenly, but don't over react and pop it up into the sky or you'll
use up all your momentum and it will really drop like a rock. It
would be better just to let it land itself if you're unsure about
how much collective. Start with a little and work your way up and
try to use up all the blade speed touching down at the last second.
Practice doing nose-in landing approaches and hovering at many different
aspects.
Practice "fake-autos" where you don't use the throttle
hold at all, just bring it in as fast and hot as possible with the
collective as low as you can, to simulate a emergency decent. Stop
the helicopter at 8 feet up in a hover and do it some more.
Practice the "baby-autos" from 6 feet, NO MORE than that.
You should have enough rpm in a hover to softly touch down from
a 6ft power loss.
Practice aborting autos, where you hit the throttle hold up high
and "glide" on in, but abort at about 10 feet by unflicking
the throttle hold.
You're ready to try a whole auto. Autorotating in 10 to 20 mph wind
is the easiest because forward speed makes the blades lift better.
Start your auto with power and get 15mph of forward speed, hit the
hold switch and keep the nose down 15 degrees and the collective
so the blades have -2 or -3 degrees in them. If you have too much
negative you'll actually loose rotor speed. Bring it in with as
little cyclic and collective change as possible. As you get to 15
feet, gradually pull back on the elevator to slow down your forward
speed. As you start to drop from your decrease in forward speed
gradually feed in collective like you did from your 6ft baby-auto
and you know the rest. Note: It's better to land with too much forward
speed than to land on the tail, the helicpter will harmlessly slide
like an airplane on skies with extra forward speed.
Before you start looping, get used to very steep 180 stall turns
where you practice the first 1/4 of a loop. Your goal is to get
as high as possible so you understand how smooth to be on the elevator
in the first part of the loop.
Remember to enter the loops with a high forward speed, plenty of
altitude and start the loop gracefully so that you don't kill your
airspeed, as you reach the top of the loop your collective should
be at about -2 degrees then pull more and more cyclic to return
to a right-side-up dive and pull out while adding positive collective.
Never add negative collective until you're at least on the top of
your loop or you'll stop all your forward motion and start flying
upside down backwards. If this happens, just yank back on the elevator
to follow through with your loop. It won't be pretty, but you'll
come out of it all the same.
When practicing aileron rolls, try to time it so you have 0 pitch
at the 90 degree bank and -6 at full invert, and 0 again at 90 then
back to what ever at level. If you're used to airplanes and pull
up prior to doing a roll you'll loose all your forward speed and
end up with a helicopter flying right-side up but backwards in the
end. I actually dive 5 or 10 degrees before I roll to maintain forward
speed.
Tricks
Add a pierouette to the top of your loop.
In FFF, climb 45 degrees, bank 90 degrees with 0 collective and
do fast pierouettes, then level off and come out of it nose-down
45 degrees as it would naturally.
A tic-toc is when you make the helicopter look like the boom is
fastened to a metronome. You alternate positive collective and backward
elevator with negative collective and forward elevator back and
forth so you don't loose any altitude. The boom from the profile
view looks like this motion: \ to | to / and back and forth.
A death spiral is when you go from a high hover to a 90 degree bank
with 0 collective and 0 speed, then give full forward or back elevator
only for as long as you can. Correct any time by banking the opposite
as you did to begin the bank. If you wait too long the tial may
not keep up and it will dive nose down. Be prepaired!
The "moon walk" is when you go through the motions of
a loop, but you make it look streched out so it's not really a loop
any more. Enter it as a regular loop, when your vertical from the
1/4 of the loop add lots of negative so it maintains it's forward
momentum, keep the elevator steady the whole time. You'll end up
flying backwards inverted for a second or two, but keep holding
the elevator. As it points straight down start adding in lots of
positive collective and level out.
The Split-S is a half loop and half roll. You can choose if you
roll first or loop first. If you roll to inverted first you pull
out rightside up with a half loop. To gain altitude, do a half loop
to inverted, then roll to right side up.
Fly inverted, and do all of the aerobatics you can do, inverted.
Fly backwards, and do all the aerobatics you can do, backwards.
Try doing big circles in front of you while rolling.
Try doing big circles in front of you while pierouetting.
Try doing extreemly tight circles (10ft diameter at 75 degree bank)
with near full collective.
Combine pierouettes and flips to do strange looking "pierouetting
tumbles"
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