Oh wow this morning was a doozy. I had a great flight for 8 minutes, practiced more hovering and slow flight in the field, and then I decided I was ready for it and I got the heli up about 20 feet in the air and jammed the throttle and forward cyclic. Wow, that heli takes OFF! It was across the field in about 5 seconds, traveling at around 25-30mph I think, it gained easily another 30 feet of altitude and this was all at 80% throttle (my pitch curve for normal mode limits max throttle at 80%). Steered it back and brought it home, took another 2 passes and was totally amazed. I then brought it back a final time, hovered it right in front of me and then landed spot on. Beautiful!

I decided to practice a bit more, so I brought the heli up again and went for another high-speed pass, things were looking good but it was getting harder to control (winds started to pick up a little and I was wearing out the battery) so I started bringing in the heli to land it again, and I noticed about 3 people walking across the street, totally amazed at this little heli. I glanced at them for no more than 1 1/2 seconds. When I looked back at the heli, it was doing the dreaded forward nose dive of doom. I panicked and pulled back on the stick while cranking the throttle to even out, but it was too late. Once again, the heli nosed in. However, this time I was lucky, since I pulled back early enough the left skid took most of the impact while the blades slowed down (when I realized it was gonna crash I throttle down immediately) and the blades had enough time to fold instead of damage anything. I also broke the ball on the blade grip that attaches to the pitch link, so I have to repalce that now too.

Anyways, as amazing as this heli is, it's a lesson for you all: DON'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF THE HELI! It only takes one second, even a fraction of a second, in which you take your eyes off and you lose it. That's all. And it only takes one blade hitting the ground or something else one time to break your heli or cause you to lose all control and crash. I know I've learned from this lesson, and I was lucky (and this was my third nose-in crash so I had a better sense of how to pull out of it) that this time I didn't snap any rotor blades, break my canopy or screw something else up.

So that's that. I tried using the Idle Up but my settings were off for the tail motor mixing for this mode so the heli made nasty right spins so I had to go back to Normal mode. I'm going to check those mixing settings again and work out the kinks there and soon I'll be flying in Idle Up mode and working on Idle Up to Normal mode transitions. Next thing after that is actual aerobatics!