RMG2
Posts: 498
Joined: 8/13/2004
From: Private,
OR, USA
Status: online
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Three packs this morning at the park in conditions from still air, to mild gust a few mph. No crashes but darn close once  Low to the ground and flying nose-in back toward myself, I made a cyclic correction that was the wrong direction! That error started a chain reaction of cyclic over correction in all axis, and the M24's buzzing like a swarm of angry bees as they changed angle rapidly! Some how, some way I managed to save it and ended up back at hover! Like they say, "it's better to be lucky than good" 
The more I fly the FP outdoors in fast forward flight, the more facts about flying the FP become clear to me.
1, If there is even a breath of wind your FP is gonna gain altitude once it leaves hover and moves to forward flight. Without the ability to go negative pitch at the blades (CP) the translational lift will wisk your FP up, up, and away!  If you try to reduce throttle to control altitude the heli's head speed drops so much that the heli simply loses cyclic control and falls out of the air! The only way to control altitude is by applying forward cyclic (pointing the nose down), and flying the FP back down toward the ground! Once you have flown the heli back within 5-6' altitude you can bring it in close and move to hover where you can carefully reduce throttle to get it on the ground. Getting the FP in the air and flying it is the easy part, getting back on the ground is much harder I know I sound like a "broken record" with this advice, but it is so important to success flying the FP outdoors I really want people to be ready for this when they move outdoors with their FP for the first time!
2, It's very easy to lose perspective of your heli's roll/aileron position when it's up fairly high. I watch the heli's skids as my indicator of attitude as the FP goes zooming past on high speed passes. Often the heli is far enough away that I get confused about what I am seeing??? This has been the single biggest problem for me trying to stay consistent with my flight heading.
Along this same line of thought, swash setting becomes very obvious. We are told that our heli's swash is suppose to be level, but when we are just learning to hover we cheat and trim our heli's swash out of level to achieve a stable hover with minimum stick input. Problem with doing that is when we start forward flight our heli will not track a straight heading with the swash not level in the roll/aileron direction. If the swash is tipped back a little the FP's tendency to "pitch-up" in forward flight is enhanced. Bottom line, when you start fast forward flight make sure your heli's swash is level!
3, Setting-up your FP's center-of-gravity to be a little nose heavy is a good thing for forward flight in the wind.
4, You can add a couple minutes of flight time to your timer when flying forward flight verses just hovering. When flying forward flight the heli is so often cruising and letting translational lift do it's thing that throttle position is pulled way back (down).
5, The light weight, single rotor fixed pitch can be flown in much more wind than we originally thought so long as the pilot keeps the heli's nose down, and momentum up! The FP heli will cut nicely through the wind if it remains at fairly high speed!
6, Has become very obvious to me that a white colored canopy is NOT the way to go when flying against an overcast sky! Very hard to keep track of the heli's attitude! However, a white colored canopy is just fine against a blue sky background.
Just rambling out-loud about thoughts passing through my brain after flying this morning. Hope some person new to single rotor benefits from my thoughts 
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All Forums >> RC Helicopters >> Electric RC Helis >> E-Flite Helicopters >> RE: Struggling with Single Rotor basics 
RE: ... - 
I hope it comes through. Of course I could afford a Belt with that money but I think that a TX would benifit me more at this juncture of my heli flying. I'll keep you all updated. 
