Hi Guys,

I am not well-versed in heli flight at all. I'm coming from planes. What exactly does the "Pitch Adjust" knob do? That is, how does positive or negative pitch affect flight. My instincts say that positive pitch would require less throttle for lift off, while negative pitch would require more. What is actually the case? Thanks!

I asked a guy this yesterday that was flying 3d he said less pitch more head speed makes for a more stable flight and to much pitch will over power the tail rotor I'm sure theres alot more to it than just that all I know is he said about 11 degrees of pitch in either direction at full stick throw is a good place to set at.

Yeah plug your battery in, and without applying any throttle turn the knob and you'll see it changes the pitch slightly. Just like animalnut said less pitch will make the head speed slightly higher.

I usually set mine anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 on the knob towards the + side with a fresh pack, and about halfway through the pack I'll land and adjust it to about 1/4 on the knob so it'll stay stable till the end of the pack.


Animalnut: He said 11 degrees of pitch at both extents of the stick, You have to remember setting the pitch to that is when the Idle up switch is turned on. When you turn on the idle up switch it allows more pitch for aggressive forward flight and inverted flight.

You may already know this but I just wanted to clear it up for Yetti.

Like the above post states, rotating the pitch trim knob slightly moves the swashplate up or down by moving all three servos at once. The throttle control on your radio does a few things together. It increases or decreases the power to the motor AND it moves the servos up or down together (through mixing). There are two different mixes on the AXE radio which are Idle up or normal. The normal mode increases power to the motor and increases blade pitch the higher it goes. Idle up causes the motor to have 80% power in the middle and 100% at top or bottom and blade pitch is full positive (10 degrees) at top and full negative (10 degrees) at bottom. In normal mode: Lets say you are at half throttle so the motor is getting half power and the pitch of the blades is at half (4 degrees) also, but you find that the motor is bogging down because half pitch is too much drag and causing a slow head speed. You can reduce the pitch of the blades (with pitch trim moving the swashplate up) which will require you to move the throttle to say 3/4 throttle for hover which will give 3/4 power to the motor and still end up with the same blade pitch angle (4 degrees) for hover resulting in higher head speed. If you didn't have pitch trim you would have to lenghthen all three servo linkages by the same number of turns which you would have to do a number of times before you get a satisfactory head speed.

It does the same thing in idle up, but here your goal is to get the blades to be at zero degrees pitch when the throttle is at mid stick or 50%. Again, instead of adjusting linkages, you can just spin a knob. My older Axe doesn't have the pitch trim knob, and even though all the parts are supposed to be the same size new or old, I have to go through this time consuming process every stinkin time I rebuild the head following a crash.

The trim slider next to the throttle makes changes to the power going to the motor and to the three servos. The pitch trim knob only changes the three servos.

Thanks for your responses, guys. I'm still a bit confused though. Where is the throttle when trying to hold inverted flight?

Thanks Pilolight for the indepth explanation of this. I learned more about this topic as well.

Yetti: If you'll notice when you unplug your + main motor wire and unplug the tail motor, You can flip the idle up switch and see the drastic change in blade pitch even with the throttle stick pull all the way back. What happens is it puts so much negative pitch in the blades, even though they are still spinning the same direction it actually reverses the way the blades lift is directed. So with the heli sitting on the ground you flip the idle up switch on with the throttle pulled all the way back and the blades spool up, you can actually put your hand over the heli and feel that instead of the air moved by the blades being directed towards the ground, it pushes the air straight up which results in pushing the heli towards the ground. Now if you are inverted it will push the air towards the ground keeping you off the ground.

Like Pilot light said when your idle up switch is flipped on, At half stick on the throttle the pitch should be 0 which means the blades are not producing thrust in either direction. When you want the heli to hover inverted you actually pull the throttle stick towards you to reverse the blades thrust. Also called negative pitch.

Hopefully you can understand that Yetti, as I am not as good at explaining it like PilotLight is.

Thanks, CarGuy. That's what I thought. Makes sense now! I appreciate it!

P.S. Just ordered a Esky Belt V2. It'll be here tomorrow.