Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
11-08-2010, 08:55 PM
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Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
I'm a former fixed-wing multi-engine instrument flight instructor. I'm rated in everything from gliders to seaplanes, and have flown powered parachutes and weight-shift trikes. Learning to fly an RC helicopter is orders of magnitude more difficult than any of those flying machines.
I'm not arrogant enough to think I was going to pick up the remote and be piloting a helicopter right away. I've read about helicopter aerodynamics, and have flown as a passenger in enough helicopters to understand that there is something diabolical happening when these machines take to the sky. One saying I've often heard is helicopters are made up of hundreds of parts trying to fling themselves apart. The first few minutes spent trying to fly a model helicopter proves that saying out!
As a fixed-wing pilot, I've always had tremendous respect for whirlybirds and their pilots. Airplanes are inherently stable. Take your hands off the controls of an airplane, and it will tend to keep on doing what it was doing. Helicopters, on the other hand, are inherently unstable. Removing your hands from the controls of a helicopter is akin to steering your car towards a cliff and letting go of the wheel. Sooner or later (probably sooner), you're going to go careening off into the abyss.
Modern RC helicopters are identical to their full-scale counterparts. In fact, with miniaturized gyros and digitally mixed servo controls, these machines boast features any full-scale student would die for. Searching around YouTube reveals a world of flight unobtainable to full-scale helicopter aviation. The Red Bull helicopter doesn't come close to the high energy, gravity-defying maneuvers these "3D" machines can accomplish. In addition to impressive aerobatics, RC helicopters make capable camera platforms. It was this angle that got me to take the plunge and begin researching my first helicopter.
The Internet is full of information. It's just not full of a lot of good information. There's a yawning difference between what makes a good training helicopter and what makes a good aerobatics or camera platform. The dollar amount contained in that difference can break your wallet. The fact is, when you first start out flying RC helicopters, you're going to crasha lot! What you need to do is find a helicopter that can give you the basic skills necessary and withstand the numerous crashes it will endure at your fingertips.
The helicopter I purchased first was the Blade 120 SR. When you open the box, the little 120 SR seems downright delicate. It's carbon fiber tail boom looks like a twig of straw, and its plastic rotor hub seems like it will disintegrate at the first whiff of a crash. When you pick it up, there's hardly anything there.
After charging the batteries (yes, get two extra), I turned on the transmitter and hooked the flight battery to the helicopter. After it initialized, I slid the battery into its catch in front of the main gear and sat the helicopter down on the floor of my condo. My living room is only about 200 square feet, so I don't have a lot to play with. With a couch, kitchen table, television and various other obstacles, my learning curve was going to be steep.
When you first push the throttle forward on the controller, the rotor blades spinning to life immediately get your attention. Even this little helicopter seems mildly threatening with its whirling plastic blades. And that's while it's still safely on the ground.
As I slowly brought in the power, the helicopter got light on its skids, began to drift left and immediately rolled onto its side as the left skid got hung up on the carpet. This was my first lesson in dynamic rollovera phenomenon that affects full-scale helicopters with poor dampening in their landing skids, or when they too get their skids caught on ground-based objects. Believe me, you'll get very familiar with dynamic rollover and gyroscopic effects within seconds of your first "flight." After collecting my machine, I looked it over carefully for any damage I may have caused. Luckily, this thing is built to take the punishment, and the only bruising was to my ego.
Placing the helicopter back in front of me, I was ready to go again. This time, I brought the power up more quickly, and it immediately lifted off the ground and began to drift to the left. I countered with too much right aileron, and it shot off to the rightinto the couch. I didn't know a couch could do that to a helicopter! The second the blades touched the edge of the couch, the helicopter fell to the ground and began hopping around like it was having a seizure. Again, the helicopter wasn't damaged, and again I placed it back in front of me.
For the next hour or so, I continued to "take off," crash and reset. My palms were sweating, my heart was racing and I was holding my breath for what seemed like minutes at a stretch. Looking back, I was only holding my breath while "flying," so it was only a few seconds at a time. Exhausted and defeated, I called it a night. I had gained no appreciable skill over when I started out the evening, and I seriously wondered why I had spent nearly 200 dollars on this little devil of a flying machine. I was completely at the mercy of this infernal machine.
The next day, I flew in the morning and evening. I slowly began to get the hang of up and down, and started to get a feel for left and right rudder, but the cyclic (aileron and elevator) was still an enigma.
Helicopters are momentum machines. Think of the rotor blades as a disc with a string in the middle. If you pull up on the string (add throttle), the helicopter will lift up. If you move the string in any direction (cyclic), the disc will lean, and the helicopter will begin accelerating in that direction. Notice I said accelerating. If you don't move to correct the tilt, the helicopter will quickly slam into whatever object happens to be in the direction of travel. The problem I encountered was that I would get the helicopter moving in one direction, it would start to get out of control, and I would over control in the opposite direction. This cycle is known as a pilot induced oscillation (PIO). New pilots, be they full-scale or RC, tend to over control their aircraft. Not touching the stick goes a long way toward recovery in this instance.
Don't kid yourself. Learning to hover and fly a helicopter will take days. And that's just with the nose pointing away from you. You'll go to bed one night thinking you've got it, pick up the controller the next day, and be surprised that you've lost everything you had the previous evening. There's nothing intuitive about it. Eventually though, you'll get to a point where you can start to recover from near disaster without crashing. When you are able to carry on a conversation with someone while flying your helicopter, it's time to turn it around and face it toward you. The conversation will immediately stop.
Full-scale aviation is easyyou're always sitting in the same spot, so your point of view never changes. Model helicopters, on the other hand, require you to learn how to fly from every perspective. Unless you always want to fly with the tail facing you, which would get boring rather quickly, you'll need to master nose-in and sideways orientations as well. The learning curve is exactly the same as when you first started out. You'll over control, panic and crash a lot. Eventually, it starts to make sense, and you'll slowly get the hang of it. Of course, you'll lose it overnight and wonder what happened, but it begins to sink in.
If you fly every day, it will take a couple weeks for you to get comfortable flying your helicopter the way you imagined when you first started flying. After chipping the blades of my 120 SR on the kitchen table a couple times, I decided to pick up a Blade MSRthe tiny little brother of the 120 SR. Its much smaller size and mass makes it less prone to damage when flying indoors. It is also very twitchy and responsive, so your reaction time increases tremendously.
You'll know you're getting better at flying these things because you'll have gone through a couple pairs of rotor blades, tail fins, landing gear, blade grips and the like. Broken parts are a right of passage of helicopter flight. That's why you want to pick a helicopter that will teach you the basics while keeping the parts cheap. The Blade 120 SR and MSR are very cheap to repair. In fact, if you purchase a spare set of blades, landing gear and a tail rotor for the 120 SR, you'll be set. For the MSR, get a spare tail fin, landing gear, rotor blades and two sets of blade grips; they are very flimsy on the MSR.
One day, you'll take your 120 SR outside and it will look like all those videos you've seen on YouTube. You'll have mastered the hover, and all of a sudden you'll begin to experiment with more advanced maneuvers. When you're 120 SR can no longer spook or surprise you, it's then time to move up to a more advanced machine. You'll have saved hundreds of dollars, and looked smart doing it.
I'm not arrogant enough to think I was going to pick up the remote and be piloting a helicopter right away. I've read about helicopter aerodynamics, and have flown as a passenger in enough helicopters to understand that there is something diabolical happening when these machines take to the sky. One saying I've often heard is helicopters are made up of hundreds of parts trying to fling themselves apart. The first few minutes spent trying to fly a model helicopter proves that saying out!
As a fixed-wing pilot, I've always had tremendous respect for whirlybirds and their pilots. Airplanes are inherently stable. Take your hands off the controls of an airplane, and it will tend to keep on doing what it was doing. Helicopters, on the other hand, are inherently unstable. Removing your hands from the controls of a helicopter is akin to steering your car towards a cliff and letting go of the wheel. Sooner or later (probably sooner), you're going to go careening off into the abyss.
Modern RC helicopters are identical to their full-scale counterparts. In fact, with miniaturized gyros and digitally mixed servo controls, these machines boast features any full-scale student would die for. Searching around YouTube reveals a world of flight unobtainable to full-scale helicopter aviation. The Red Bull helicopter doesn't come close to the high energy, gravity-defying maneuvers these "3D" machines can accomplish. In addition to impressive aerobatics, RC helicopters make capable camera platforms. It was this angle that got me to take the plunge and begin researching my first helicopter.
The Internet is full of information. It's just not full of a lot of good information. There's a yawning difference between what makes a good training helicopter and what makes a good aerobatics or camera platform. The dollar amount contained in that difference can break your wallet. The fact is, when you first start out flying RC helicopters, you're going to crasha lot! What you need to do is find a helicopter that can give you the basic skills necessary and withstand the numerous crashes it will endure at your fingertips.
The helicopter I purchased first was the Blade 120 SR. When you open the box, the little 120 SR seems downright delicate. It's carbon fiber tail boom looks like a twig of straw, and its plastic rotor hub seems like it will disintegrate at the first whiff of a crash. When you pick it up, there's hardly anything there.
After charging the batteries (yes, get two extra), I turned on the transmitter and hooked the flight battery to the helicopter. After it initialized, I slid the battery into its catch in front of the main gear and sat the helicopter down on the floor of my condo. My living room is only about 200 square feet, so I don't have a lot to play with. With a couch, kitchen table, television and various other obstacles, my learning curve was going to be steep.
When you first push the throttle forward on the controller, the rotor blades spinning to life immediately get your attention. Even this little helicopter seems mildly threatening with its whirling plastic blades. And that's while it's still safely on the ground.
As I slowly brought in the power, the helicopter got light on its skids, began to drift left and immediately rolled onto its side as the left skid got hung up on the carpet. This was my first lesson in dynamic rollovera phenomenon that affects full-scale helicopters with poor dampening in their landing skids, or when they too get their skids caught on ground-based objects. Believe me, you'll get very familiar with dynamic rollover and gyroscopic effects within seconds of your first "flight." After collecting my machine, I looked it over carefully for any damage I may have caused. Luckily, this thing is built to take the punishment, and the only bruising was to my ego.
Placing the helicopter back in front of me, I was ready to go again. This time, I brought the power up more quickly, and it immediately lifted off the ground and began to drift to the left. I countered with too much right aileron, and it shot off to the rightinto the couch. I didn't know a couch could do that to a helicopter! The second the blades touched the edge of the couch, the helicopter fell to the ground and began hopping around like it was having a seizure. Again, the helicopter wasn't damaged, and again I placed it back in front of me.
For the next hour or so, I continued to "take off," crash and reset. My palms were sweating, my heart was racing and I was holding my breath for what seemed like minutes at a stretch. Looking back, I was only holding my breath while "flying," so it was only a few seconds at a time. Exhausted and defeated, I called it a night. I had gained no appreciable skill over when I started out the evening, and I seriously wondered why I had spent nearly 200 dollars on this little devil of a flying machine. I was completely at the mercy of this infernal machine.
The next day, I flew in the morning and evening. I slowly began to get the hang of up and down, and started to get a feel for left and right rudder, but the cyclic (aileron and elevator) was still an enigma.
Helicopters are momentum machines. Think of the rotor blades as a disc with a string in the middle. If you pull up on the string (add throttle), the helicopter will lift up. If you move the string in any direction (cyclic), the disc will lean, and the helicopter will begin accelerating in that direction. Notice I said accelerating. If you don't move to correct the tilt, the helicopter will quickly slam into whatever object happens to be in the direction of travel. The problem I encountered was that I would get the helicopter moving in one direction, it would start to get out of control, and I would over control in the opposite direction. This cycle is known as a pilot induced oscillation (PIO). New pilots, be they full-scale or RC, tend to over control their aircraft. Not touching the stick goes a long way toward recovery in this instance.
Don't kid yourself. Learning to hover and fly a helicopter will take days. And that's just with the nose pointing away from you. You'll go to bed one night thinking you've got it, pick up the controller the next day, and be surprised that you've lost everything you had the previous evening. There's nothing intuitive about it. Eventually though, you'll get to a point where you can start to recover from near disaster without crashing. When you are able to carry on a conversation with someone while flying your helicopter, it's time to turn it around and face it toward you. The conversation will immediately stop.
Full-scale aviation is easyyou're always sitting in the same spot, so your point of view never changes. Model helicopters, on the other hand, require you to learn how to fly from every perspective. Unless you always want to fly with the tail facing you, which would get boring rather quickly, you'll need to master nose-in and sideways orientations as well. The learning curve is exactly the same as when you first started out. You'll over control, panic and crash a lot. Eventually, it starts to make sense, and you'll slowly get the hang of it. Of course, you'll lose it overnight and wonder what happened, but it begins to sink in.
If you fly every day, it will take a couple weeks for you to get comfortable flying your helicopter the way you imagined when you first started flying. After chipping the blades of my 120 SR on the kitchen table a couple times, I decided to pick up a Blade MSRthe tiny little brother of the 120 SR. Its much smaller size and mass makes it less prone to damage when flying indoors. It is also very twitchy and responsive, so your reaction time increases tremendously.
You'll know you're getting better at flying these things because you'll have gone through a couple pairs of rotor blades, tail fins, landing gear, blade grips and the like. Broken parts are a right of passage of helicopter flight. That's why you want to pick a helicopter that will teach you the basics while keeping the parts cheap. The Blade 120 SR and MSR are very cheap to repair. In fact, if you purchase a spare set of blades, landing gear and a tail rotor for the 120 SR, you'll be set. For the MSR, get a spare tail fin, landing gear, rotor blades and two sets of blade grips; they are very flimsy on the MSR.
One day, you'll take your 120 SR outside and it will look like all those videos you've seen on YouTube. You'll have mastered the hover, and all of a sudden you'll begin to experiment with more advanced maneuvers. When you're 120 SR can no longer spook or surprise you, it's then time to move up to a more advanced machine. You'll have saved hundreds of dollars, and looked smart doing it.
11-08-2010, 10:18 PM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
thanks for sharing.....
been there, done that but pretty much stuck at the coaxial point. Haven;t mastered the transition.
been there, done that but pretty much stuck at the coaxial point. Haven;t mastered the transition.
11-08-2010, 10:45 PM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
Welcome to the forum, and thanks for the amusing anecdote. You are a very good writer, and it shows even in a forum post.
The mSR is my favorite Heli. Mostly because I can fly it indoors over the course of a cold Canadian winter, but also because it's very small, fast and tough.
The mSR is my favorite Heli. Mostly because I can fly it indoors over the course of a cold Canadian winter, but also because it's very small, fast and tough.
11-08-2010, 11:29 PM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
Hello Reggie,
I am at a loss for word's, you've used them all, and I say that with kindness. What an enjoyable read! In fact, having been in the hobby for sometime and fully understanding everything you wrote I broke into laughter at your plane to heli comparison. Akin to driving off a cliff, loved it! If your not a writer then you should be.
I would like to suggest that you go on line and read Radds Rotary Flight. I think it will help guide you on this path you have chosen to take.
Best of luck to you.
JPEE
I am at a loss for word's, you've used them all, and I say that with kindness. What an enjoyable read! In fact, having been in the hobby for sometime and fully understanding everything you wrote I broke into laughter at your plane to heli comparison. Akin to driving off a cliff, loved it! If your not a writer then you should be.
I would like to suggest that you go on line and read Radds Rotary Flight. I think it will help guide you on this path you have chosen to take.
Best of luck to you.
JPEE
11-09-2010, 12:25 AM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
Reggie,
What a wonderful post. Normally, I would never read a post as long as yours, but you got my attention and kept my interest up. You certainly have a gift to express yourself, and remind me so much of my father. It's a post, I think that all new comers should read. You seem to have a direction of where you are heading and have the knowlege to do the research necessary to reach your goals. Orientation with the RC Helicopters is one of the most challenging things for sure. That, and repairing, finding why the darn things wags from side to side, shakes, rattles and rolls is another. It's a hobby that takes alot of patience and perseverance, without question.
Another thing that comes into the equations, is what should I purchase next???? There are soooo many options in this hobby, that it would make your head spin (no pun intended)
. Should I get a 450, 500 or 600 size heli or bigger? What servos are best, what gyro is best, what motor is best? Oh, the list goes on from there too. How about electric or a nitro heli down the road?
As JPEE suggested in his post, check out Radds School of Rotary Flight, he's a drill saregent for sure.
Here's the site for it:
http://www.dream-models.com/eco/flying-index.html
Best wishes and best of luck, any questions you can ask here for sure,
Dave
What a wonderful post. Normally, I would never read a post as long as yours, but you got my attention and kept my interest up. You certainly have a gift to express yourself, and remind me so much of my father. It's a post, I think that all new comers should read. You seem to have a direction of where you are heading and have the knowlege to do the research necessary to reach your goals. Orientation with the RC Helicopters is one of the most challenging things for sure. That, and repairing, finding why the darn things wags from side to side, shakes, rattles and rolls is another. It's a hobby that takes alot of patience and perseverance, without question.
Another thing that comes into the equations, is what should I purchase next???? There are soooo many options in this hobby, that it would make your head spin (no pun intended)
. Should I get a 450, 500 or 600 size heli or bigger? What servos are best, what gyro is best, what motor is best? Oh, the list goes on from there too. How about electric or a nitro heli down the road? As JPEE suggested in his post, check out Radds School of Rotary Flight, he's a drill saregent for sure.
Here's the site for it:
http://www.dream-models.com/eco/flying-index.html
Best wishes and best of luck, any questions you can ask here for sure,
Dave
11-10-2010, 02:06 AM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
Yes, I will echo the comments of other respondees to your post...
What a great story... and I am hearing you 1000%..
I also am a full size commercial pilot, and even flew real Police helicopters for a number of years...(AS350s)
My very last landing in a real helicopter... 2 years ago..
I actually posted a similar thread here.. though yours is a better read...
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9959846
That was about 10 weeks ago and was my first collective pitch RC heli.. I'm lucky enough to havetime to fly almost 100 flights per week and now have over 700 flights on CP helis.
From day 3 with my first coaxial in May 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJmFZWmi5P4[/youtube]
to the 120 SR (which I also love)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSYJVoUmPqY[/youtube]
to this beasta few weeks ago..
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNrafMSx_AU[/youtube].
And what a fun learning experience it has been.. (and will continue to be..)
What a great story... and I am hearing you 1000%..
I also am a full size commercial pilot, and even flew real Police helicopters for a number of years...(AS350s)
My very last landing in a real helicopter... 2 years ago..
I actually posted a similar thread here.. though yours is a better read...
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=9959846
That was about 10 weeks ago and was my first collective pitch RC heli.. I'm lucky enough to havetime to fly almost 100 flights per week and now have over 700 flights on CP helis.
From day 3 with my first coaxial in May 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJmFZWmi5P4[/youtube]
to the 120 SR (which I also love)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSYJVoUmPqY[/youtube]
to this beasta few weeks ago..
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNrafMSx_AU[/youtube].
And what a fun learning experience it has been.. (and will continue to be..)
11-11-2010, 02:09 AM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
Great story, thanks for sharing. What about simulators? I received advice to not buy a heli yet and practice on the sim till it's butter.
11-11-2010, 02:36 AM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
ORIGINAL: clank72
Great story, thanks for sharing. What about simulators? I received advice to not buy a heli yet and practice on the sim till it's butter.
Great story, thanks for sharing. What about simulators? I received advice to not buy a heli yet and practice on the sim till it's butter.
11-13-2010, 03:23 PM
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RE: Story | Learning to Fly a Helicopter
ORIGINAL: clank72
Great story, thanks for sharing. What about simulators? I received advice to not buy a heli yet and practice on the sim till it's butter.
Great story, thanks for sharing. What about simulators? I received advice to not buy a heli yet and practice on the sim till it's butter.
