ORIGINAL: Nathan King
ORIGINAL: bruce88123
Yep, RC is tougher. No seat of the pants, no instruments, no visual cues out the windshield, no wing buffet just before a stall. You'll find a lot of us that either still fly or used to fly full scale and I'd bet 98% will tell you RC is tougher. Oh yeah, no auto-pilot either although I never had that luxury. Not even a wing-leveler.
I know this isn't the topic of the thread, but I disagree. The power loading on a full-scale airplane is much different and the consequences of a stall are much more severe. You don't have gobs of extra power with full size airplanes. Full scale airplanes take much more specialized knowledge to operate. Flying a full-size airplane requires the pilot to think much further ahead and sloppiness is simply not permitted. Take a look at the current Private Pilot Syllabus. We don't teach a quarter of those relevant concepts at our R/C club. Those concepts that we do teach do not even approach the depth of information found in real-world training.
I find them different. Apples and oranges.
I think you are missing what Bruce is saying here. Trust me, I've watched dozens of full scale pilots trying to fly RC over the years, and I can tell you for a 100% fact that it's more difficult for them to fly RC. Why?? Simple. Perspective. Their perspective is different. They are no longer sitting IN the craft they are flying. They are standing outside looking at the plane from a different way than they have been trained to. Also, stick reversal is a major factor with them. They are used to having the plane go the direction that they move the stick, not opposite as an RC plane does when it's coming towards the pilot.
It's actually far more likely for a RC pilot to take the controls of a full scale craft and be successful immediately than it is for a full scale pilot to be successful in taking the controls of a RC plane. I'm not talking about piloting a plane from airport to airport, but I'm talking about taking the sticks and not crashing the plane within the first few minutes.
Bruce does have a unique perspective in this matter being the fact that he's a full scale pilot of many years experience as well as just at many years in RC planes.
Ken