Hello everyone!

I'm pretty new to RC helis, about a month or so ago I purchased a Dragonfly from HobbyJapan. Now I can hover pretty steady a full battery pack in my living room. Sideways hover is so so, and nose in hover, I've mastered it in FMS but when I do it with the heli I get more nervous and have to crash/land it often.
Now I want to move on to forward flight, but every time I move the cilcic forward and the heli picks up speed the nose rises and the heli stops. I've read this is normal on fixed pitch helis, but does any of you perform forward flight with a fixed pitch heli relatively decently?? Any help would be appreciated! And could anyone explain the phisichs behind the fact that a FP heli does it and a CP heli doesn't?? Just curious, I'm quite into planes, I've flown RC gliders for some time and I'm a full scale pilot too, but helis are just that misterious and tricky flying machines that always intrigued me but never got to until now.

Thaks a lot for any help I can get!

Congratulations for this forum!! It has really helped me to get my heli well set up, and thanks to it now I'm able to hover it right in my tiny living room.

Congratulations to YOU!!! That is good progress!
One of the physical differences between CP and FP helis that leads to ballooning is blade coning. CP blades are primarily a flat disk when rotating. FP blades often form a cone, with the tips of the blades higher than the center, like a cone with the pointy end downwards. This coning makes the heli more susceptible to breezes when hovering and more prone to the nose up balloning when in FFF.
This situation can be improved. A head stiffener helps reduce blade coning. This is an easy way to see improvement.
Higher head speed also helps. Something to do with the relative blade speed compared to forward flight speed. I really do not know the exact reason, but higher head speed helps. I cut down the blades to reduce their pitch, and went with a bigger pinion, and it helped hovering in breezes.

Let us not forget wooden blades either. Combine those with the head stiffener for a great improvement, both in forward flight and hovering stability.

Which wooden blades are you using. I'm using the flat bottemed set from helihobby.com.

EPHelifan,

[link=http://www.like90.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2]Here are my blades[/link] and for a decent price too. These guys also ship real fast and are nice to deal with.

Thank you very much for your replys guys, VinceHerman, your explanation was great, now I can clearly see why this happens. I've held the heli on my hand by the skids and given it full throttle and I can see the coning you are talking about, due to the flexible nature of the blades. Now I can really see also why some wooden blades would reduce this greatly.
Wooden blades are the way to go, for now, until I can get my hands on one of this higher performing CP helis like the Shogun or the Trex...hahaha
Now what I'll also need is a bigger place to practice in. I've learnt hovering at home, and tried the forward flight thing inside the parking of a shopping mall (when it was pretty much empty), but I guess if I want to move on to real FFF I'll need to find somewhere where people gather to fly thins things, like basketball courts and stuff like that (i've seen it in some vids).

Thanks for the info guys!

The wooden blades will also help you out with this situation as you would no lonnger be confined to indoors. Wooden blades can actually allow you to go out in a breeze.

With your stock blades, you wouldn't have a prayer with 5 MPH wind speed

You are totally right lawnhawk, this really opens up a whole new set of possibiliteis... oh my....
Finally its gonna really get hard to convince the wife of this "extra" costs that this little evil machine is bringing...hahahahaha But if they really help that much in flying this sucker in a breeze I may just go ahead and get them blades before I have to become member of a basketball stadium or move on to the more costy CP helis.

Thanks for the info!