john68

Here's a little tip for those who are trying to learn nose-in hover on a helicopter...


When the helicopter is facing you, the controls are reversed. The natural reaction when watching the helicopter roll to your left, is to pull the stick to the right to correct, and vise versa. Right? That's the big hurdle you have to overcome, and I have found a great trick to take the confusion out of it.

When you see the heli move, put the stick under the low side of the rotor. For example, if you are nose in, and you see the rotor roll to your left, just push your thumb under that low side, so you'd push the stick to the left, therefore making the helicopter appear to be moving right. The same can be done for fore and aft. if you see the nose of hte heli drop like it is coming towards you, just put the stick under that side of the rotor. by thinking that the right stick is a round disk, and not 2 channels of control, you simply have to move the stick in the same direction as the rotor is moving, and it will stabililze. Pulling the stick back is actually putting the tip of the stick under the front of the rotor dish, causing the front of the rotor dish to raise.

By learning this way, I have been able to master a stable nose-in hover on a single charge of a 1200mAh 11.1V Li-Po... about 22 minutes... I tried tricking myself every other possible way, but this seems to be the easiest way to fool yourself into actually getting a firm control over the hover. You just have to remember that as soon as the tail whips back towards you, it's back to the usual way of balance.


I found this trick in an old instruction manual for a trainer airplane I had. "putting the stick under the low wing." It works great with helis too!!

Good Luck,

John

DVI

I will give it a try!
Thanks

johnnyf

to john68-that sounds like a great idea-thanx-can't wait to try it tonite

BarracudaHockey

My Feedback: (11)

I tried all sorts of tricks, it was kicking my butt. I finally bought a sim and without the fear of another VISA sponsorship I was able to learn pretty quick and now its a non issue. I know that the cost of the sim has been saved many times over in crashes prevented. Even factoring the cost of a new video card to run G3

DebianDog

Stick towards the problem is how I "think" of it. i.e. helicopter drifting left push left.

The problem is if you have to "think" in a real situation you are usually about 2 seconds away from hitting the ground.

heli-john

Absolutely.

cudaboy_71

My Feedback: (12)

nail on the head there. the 'trick' may get you hovering nose in, alright. but, in my experience it actually hurts you in the long run because you are thinking about it. get some hours in on the sim without 'thinking'. it just clicks after a while and you get it. nothing to think about.

someone once gave me a 'trick' for learning to fly backwards and it severely hampered my ability to 'just get it'...now i'm constantly thinking about the 'trick' and i still can only fly backwards in one direction.

it's like learning a new language...if you try to translate everything into your native tongue to spit out a sentence you're gonna be stuttering forever. when you get it, your brain thinks in that language. same with flying. you'll just be able to do it.

john68

Who said anything about thinking?

I said, "by thinking that the right stick is a round disk, and not 2 channels of control, you simply have to move the stick in the same direction as the rotor is moving..."

Think-meaning, "To look at it in a different way." I think this is about the same thing as moving teh stick in the direction of trouble. With smaller electric helis the rotor doesn't dip very far in any direction.

Of course practice is key.

md71

OK, so maybe it isn't a good idea to mention that I've been using a trick for the rudder (tail rotor for the purists). Put the left stick the same direction you want the side of the main rotor disk away from you to go . Works regardless of which way the nose is pointed.

colrod12

this is cool....... to thems that know how too, constructive pointers like this one may have no point at all. I think its cause, once you
've learned something.......why other people have such a hard time with it.... is kinda now hard to grasp.

I learned to fly myself in that, There was no one next to me with a buddy box. but I did have the benefit of advice, that I read on these here forums.

and none of them was pointless. I'm with ya John68, this is a neat trick for nose in..... thanks for taking the time out to post it[sm=thumbup.gif]

heli-john

I think the best approach is to "prop" up the rotor with the cyclic.
I would really suggest the sim but it's a lot easier to "brick" it when you are flying the real thing - your pride and joy.

1LO64

Agree'd, I think this is a good method.

I also believe that the simulator brought me to 80% of learning nose-in and 20% was mental.

James

credence

My Feedback: (2)

Sim is best for learning nose in. Do it enough in the sim and eventually the stick movement happens instinctively and you don't even think about it anymore.

Prairie Mike

that's a great tip!
I've got one which worked for me.
when it rotates, don't think right or left: Think close wise; counter clockwise.
right stick is clockwise---always---doesn't matter which way it's pointing
this also works with fixed wing and you need to slip to a landing. If you want to rotate the plane use the clockwise-clounter clockwise method.
how's zat?

priaire mic
can see the edge of the planet from my front door

OttoNP

I just look at the canopy and think canopy forward, backward, left, right, etc... Seems to work pretty good for me, learning this way helps with left-in hover and right-in hover and everthing inbetween. With this method I would have to think differently as the heli changes direction, instead of just one way the whole time. Also, the less I think, the better I fly.

fire@forthall

Don't you just love America! Someone come up with a great Idea and someone is there to stomp on you for that idea because it wasn't their own! FREEDOM OF SPEACH IS A GREAT THING! To all these are great post, some learn in different ways. Thanks for the different inputs.

heli-john

Who stomped on what? As far as I can tell the guys are all making suggestions based on what works for them!

john68

I didn't feel stomped on...

Of course, I take everything said with a grain of salt. Unless I know the person posting, or have seen them fly (like Jason Merkle, who took first place in the world micro heli cup), then really their opinion doesn't mean much to me.

Dave ESPI

I just "fly" with myself "behind" the heli at all times no mater how it faces. Don't think of how it is facing you, but just from behind it.

I've eaten dirt a few times, but "reversing" things in your mind will cause more critical errors than they are worth in parts.

oops

Hi John68,

I'll explain some of the variation in opinion here - it might help.

Firstly, there's nothing overtly wrong with your concept from an experimentation point of view. I started that way too (on a sim) then realised I had to unlearn that skill. For a while I could hover nose in. Now I can't, and I'm relearning the skill.

Here's the reasons why.

Concious thought takes around a second or two. Your eyes see movement in the heli, your brain processes that. That takes almost a second. Then it generates concious unbalanced signals and sends them to your fingers, and your fingers move the sticks. This sends to the servo's and the servo's move. Simple enough eh?

But the total time from seeing your heli flying at you to when you respond takes two seconds... Long enough for you to find another way to stop your heli - with your head/body. Ouch!.

You can't argue with this. The times are physiological issues associated with the human body. These are limits we all have. No one can surpass them. Much science fiction is based on people being able to exceed these limits, but that's science fiction.

So if you need to think "Is the tail facing me or is it away" then you are restricted by this limitation. It's because you need to think about it.

You're probably questioning what I am writing, since you may wonder why we can fly helicopters at all? Two seconds is clearly too long (and I use the "two seconds" as an approximate value) so why don't we die as soon as we take off in real Helicopters? Why don't we crash everytime we fly a model?

The truth is we do die and crash. Watch an absolute beginner if you want to see what happens. This is exactly what happens. I know all about the physics behind model helicopters. I understand presessional forces. I know exactly what forces are in play when you move the paddles 90 degrees out of phase. I can calculate the drag experienced by a rotor blade at different RPM. You could say I have a small amount of "Expert" knowledge of Helicopters, even before I started flying. But just like everyone else, I crashed and repaired.

Fortunately, in our lower brain functions we have some throwbacks to the time when we couldn't think. The Brain Stem.

This is where we have our autonomous brain functions. The more we perform a task, the more it learns. It watches the tail with us. It sees our thumbs move as we fly the helicopter around. I learns and takes over and as you learn, it learns to pre-empt our concious thought and takes over.

It's physically closer to our thumbs as well, and it doesn't need to think. It's autonomous. After a while, it becomes our "Autopilot". We want the heli to go right. You don't even know what your thumbs are doing. They just do it. It knows how much to move your thumbs to turn the thought into remote helicopter flight. It sees what our eyes see and translates it into another sense you probable haven't heard about. There's a physical sense we have called proprioception. It takes slow senses like sight and sound and converts them into a real awareness of spacial positioning.

The Brain Stem uses proprioception coupled with concious thoughts and takes over control of our thumbs.

It's fast enough to fly a helicopter. All you have to do is train it. It can make decisions for you and get that into the heli in a few hundred milliseconds.

It learns pretty quickly, and it can make translational computations as well (eg, I'm not getting enough collective increase on this model to what I'm used to. The concious brain keeps sending me signals that it's thinking about this. I'll increase the thumb movement to compensate) and within minutes, you can fly a different model.

You have no control over this. Watch people watching a person flying intently while advising them. Watch their thumbs. They are moving to control the "Phantom" controls they aren't holding.

It's also why you need to see the helicopter at all times - it's the only signal your brain is getting and feeding into your proprioception sense. In a real heli, you have your inner ear to help.

So now you understand the physiological senses behind flight, let's look at why thinking is a bad idea.

You NEED your brain stem to fly the helicopter. Your higher brain functions aren't fast enough. So you train your brain to translate visual cues into proprioception so you can use this autonomously.

So now, do you fly tail-in or tail-out to train your autonomous skills?

It is true you can fly both, but if you think in two models, then you are learning two skills. What do you do when you get part in and part out? Which skills do you use? That's how you get confused and "dumb-thumb" it.

Some people learn tail-out. I chose tail in. The clever trick you mentioned is clever, because you are finding a method to compensate for lack of skills development by simplifying the model. Your brain can quickly learn something like that and make it autonomous, but when the tail moves out of nose-in, it gets harder. You don't have the proprioception skills with the model yet sorted.

We all start with a trick that works for us. Some people do learn to fly nose-in. I've heard of it before. It's just tail-in is more common.

The recommendation? Make a decision and learn to fly that way. Then you can start the hard work in training your lower brain functions to take over the hard work for you

David

john68

Hi David,

I must say again, as my post up a few says...

Who said anything about thinking? Seriously. You are the 4th or 5th person to mention this. I guess when(and you can refer to my quote in my other post) I mentioned "thinking about the right stick as a single control, or round disk, rather than 2 channels of control," people took that word the wrong way. I wasn't talking about "thinking" about what model is doing, but rather, thinking of the control as one, not 2. Thinking, as in, perceiving a concept... a different way to look at something. Maybe this was a non-issue with most people, but I have seen people get mixed up.

Yes, nose in hover is possible. I was able to get it down in 22 minutes of flight. That's why I thought (there's that word again) this was a good idea. I thought it might work for someone else.


Here's the other thing, and hey, I could be seriously hampering myself by doing this, but it worked with learning to type, and learning to play drums, and violin, and 3 finger picking style banjo, and piano, and guitar... etc... If you say it, you will play it.

example:

when flying an airplane in a pattern, say the direction, and then your fingers will go the direction. looking at the plane, if you want it to go in circles or an oval, say, "left" move finger left, straighten out, say "left" move finger left, straighten out... etc. It does work.

With a helicopter, there is another dimension. with an airplane, it is going to be moving forward constantly as you change direction. With a helicopter, it will move backwards just as easily as it will go forwards. Also, it will move backwards and left, or backwards and right, or forwards and right or any direction at all, really. So, you can't simply say, "left." That just doesn't work with helicopters in the way that it does with airplanes.

Here's the other thing that disturbs me... Everyone keeps saying, 2 seconds is enough time to smash into the dirt. I disagree completely. Everytime I hear this, I get this image in my head that you see on the side of the helicopter box, or online ads, of people practicing with the helicopter 15 feet in front of them, at eye level. I really really really hope no one is flying like this when learning or practicing something new. I would never practice or experiment like that, unless of course, a professional photographer was standing there telling me, "closer, closer... just get in a little more, ok now down... great!" Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone here is practicing fitting themselves and the helicopter into a photo frame. If you are learning, put the helicopter up in the air. 60 feet up, and 60 feet out is about where I am flying. Why? because if you get into trouble, there is plenty of time to correct it before the helicopter hits the ground or anyone else. I can roll, loop, and fly inverted. I just started on nose-in and side-in, and I can learn it all with minimal of crashes. The key is get really good at recovering from a trouble position, and the only way to do that is to get high enough up that you have enough time to figure out how to get it out of trouble, before applying the dirt brakes. It works, and no one has to loose a finger, or their head. That's how I was taught with airplanes. Sure, it scared the crap out of me to see the instructor take my brand new $500 airplane up so high in the air, and out so far that I swore there would be no way of ever finding it if it fell out of the sky. Well, it never did fall out of the sky, because there was enough air inbetween it and the ground, that it was always recovered, before it used the dirt brakes too. Try it. Go way up there. If it comes down, wrong side up, I guarantee the damage will not be any worse than from 15 feet up. Terminal velocity prevents that, and if you have the sense enough to cut the power before it does hit, usually, the main shaft won't even be bent.

That is what aggrivates me. Everyone keeps saying, "buy a sim," "practice on the sim," "don't think..." Well, that is rediculous. You can do without the sim, and you can do without the needless wrecks, if you know how to practice.

By the way, I still have my first trainer, and it is in excellent shape. I might have had the crap scared out of me worrying about how I will ever find it if it goes down, but I learned it doesn't nessesarily "have" to crash. You can learn to drive a car without crashing, andou can learn to fly a real helicopter without crashing. The same goes for R/C. Also, I have to disagree that the brain only operates on visual cues. When learning how much power to give the heli, you listen for the rotor chopping too much air, working too hard, and you can hear when the blades are operating efficiently.


I just think people take things too close to the limit, or the breaking point. You don't always have to operate on the edge. There is something to be said about conservative flying techniques. learning precision and accuracy takes a lot more work than playing everything fast and loose. Fast and loose might get you further along, faster, but slow, steady, and accurate always makes you more in control.

Sorry for being long winded, but honestly, I didn't think(there's that freaking word again) this post would stir up so much trouble.
I'm sorry for imposing my way of learning onto others. Hopefully no-one follows in my dangerous footsteps, for I surely am on a highway to helicopter hell.

oops

Heh, Thousands of bored armchair pilots. They can't fly (or else they wouldn't be posting). That's why a topic like this gives us all a chance to enjoy posting
And I doub't you'll go to helicopter hell... Unless you buy a Walkera 22A....

I think your idea has some merits - it's just the path less travelled.

Anyway, you did bring up an even more interesting subject, especially since our Heli's are so small. You're right about many of us not wanting to get too far away from them. Yet the small plane pilot's don't seem to mind. Strange isn't it? I always find that if I get 8 to 10 metres up, I start to worry... It really bothers me. Not so much if it's a distance away, but once the angle from me to the Heli gets past 45%, it starts to make me worry quite a lot.

Sorry if my post made you think I was flaming you - Not my intention.

David

john68

David,

No worries about flames. Like I said, I take everything with a grain of salt. If I disagree, I say so. That's why I posted. No one else really gave any explaination as to why "thinking" was dangerous. You did, and I appreciate the added effort to post such a great reply. I guess I am falling away from the realm of "beginner" and closer to intermediate. That makes it harder to convey what I am doing, so the student will benefit, as was the intention of my original post.

My biggest concern is waiting on parts, not what others are posting here. I do read, and comprehend what is posted, but at the same time, I don't see a need to take everything said as law. Sure, plenty of ideas and concepts might go over teh heads of others, but I do try to step into someone else's shoes, everytime I read something beyond what I have done. The hard part is to understand why they do what they do, or think how they think, if they don't give any information to support their claims. You have given plenty of information to support yoru claim that thinking is relatively slow, compared tot eh speed of helicopter controls. What I haven't read, or heard yet is the correct way to learn nose-in hover. It seems no one can explain the correct way to learn it, yet everyone is quick to dismiss a technique that I use. It gets frustrating, yet somehow rewarding, since a theory left disproved remains a theory, and therefore becomes closer to law. Why I can't get a clearcut answer to the question of "what is the correct way to learn nose-in hover" is that there is no correct way, and as people learn at different speeds and inadvertently train themselves in nose-in hovering, they can't recall the exact steps it took to get the muscle memory involved in performing the task.

This is all great information, and I do appreciate the arm-chair pilot.

Thanks for participating. Your information and insight did not fall on def ears. (stubborn ear, maybe, but not def!)

heli-john

Blimey, long posts or what. So hey, here's mine.
A new skill requires the development of a neural pathway. It takes a while for the brain to develop a new neural link but happily, barring something like brain damage, it is always there. Just like riding a bike - you never forget. Learn something new every day.
As for learning RC helicopter flying - I will admit I found it to be possibly the hardest skill I have ever learned. I took to driving like a duck to water but I took to RC helis like a duck in the kitchen.
There is something about these ships that makes me want to be closer rather than distant. I think it is to do with orientation. I have had more crashes caused by distant flying than nearby flying.
In a real heli there is the seat-of-the-pants input as well as visuals of the horizon and sound. Though I agree the sound of the engine on a model does help the only real reference is visual and that's why it is easier to learn to fly a full size helicopter.
As for how to nose in, one suggestion is to do bigger and bigger figure of eights until the bird is virtually coming at you straight on. Some advocate putting the training sticks back on and just relearning to hover. Use the cyclic stick to prop up the rotor disc so if the disc is leaning right (your right but the bird is leaning to its left) then input the stick to the right (your right) so you are propping up the disc! Likewise for fore and aft. Tail rotor remains the same as the heli is rotating on the same axis whether facing you or not - bit like a compass needle I suppose - so if the tail needs left, give it left. I can nose in on the sim no probs but I hate nose in on the field and will avoid it at all times.
In my opinion, for what it is worth, two seconds is a long time. I can transform a heli into an earth dart in a couple of seconds but even with automatic flying still I am thinking about what the bird is doing. It's in an emergency when the automatic aspect plays a part and means the difference between dumb thumbs and control.

john68

Heli-John,

Here's a question for you.

How is, "propping up the rotor" any different than "putting the stick under the low side?" It seems to me to be the same technique, so maybe I am not loco en la cabasa. It also would appear that "putting the stick in the direction of trouble" would be the same thing.

Oh, and I am all about "muscle memory" and building it. Have you ever watched Earl Scruggs play foggy mountain breakdown, and wondered how the heck he does it? It's a mystery to me, too. The problem is, I can play it just like he can, but don't ask me how, because I am so disconnected from my hand, that when I am doing it, I could easily be talking to you, or listening to another song at the same time.

I watched a guy in college play the entire 1st level of Super Mario Bros, with a blindfold on. He had played the game so many times, that he didn't even need to look at the screen to tell where he was. It was spooky... very very spooky... but he won all kinds of bets, including some money from me, so it all paid off in the end for him.

happy flying,

John