Alright, I know I'm the ultimate noob here, but I'm just trying to learn about rc helis and I'm reading a lot to see if I should withdraw half of the money from my bank account to drop on a helicopter. And I keep seeing people talk about autorotation, so what exactly is it?

An auto is where you land the heli without any assistence from the engine. There are three reason why you do this.
1. Your engine stops midflight because of failure or you were just an idiot and forgot to put fuel in it.
2. You like the rush of flicking the throtle hold switch on your transmitter and landing the heli on its own
3. You like to practise the above technique so as if number 1 happens you dont ***** ya pants.

To get it to autorotate you pretty much set your heli up so as when you flick the throtle hold swich (on ya TX) and move the the throtle stick down it puts the main blades into a negitve pitch. This enables the blades to gain/retain headspeed from the air going thru them as the heli hurdles towards earth. As you get about 10 feet off the ground you give the Tx some collective (this turn the blades into a positive pitch) which causes the heli to slow down and then hopefully into a hover at around 2 feet at which stage you can lower the collective a little causing the heli to slowly land. Sounds easy but there's a lot of skill to make it work. There are are couple of other things you can do to make it easier but this gives you the general idea.

if you flick the throttle hold swith, what happens ? (does this mean that your throttle will simply stay in one position so that you can move your left stick and that only the collective will move ?, if so, where does your throttle hold, do you have to deffine this in advance or does it stay where you last putted it ?)

thx

you define any level, but it is intended to be idle. handy that you can set it to any level give it half throttle so you can just about hover if you need to, so you can go thru the motions of an auto without the risk. do that a few times them start backing the setting down a few clicks at a time till it is down to idle.

Another reason for being able to Autorotate is if you have a tail rotor drive failure. It will stop the heli from trying to spin itself to death!

All other posts describe the reasons and why you autorotate, I thought I would share a definition of the word just to help with what others are saying:


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Yeah think they are fun on a R/C I did them all the time in CH46E when the pilots practiced for currency, now that was a blast when they dumped collective I would jump up and float for a good 10-15 seconds before we recovered around 200 feet. We did them with both engines online so if we really needed to in an emergency we could just pull collective and land controllably.

They are life savers, now I am on the MV22 now and we have no auto capabilities we crash if we loose both engines yay!!


Tony

You will indeed have a problem ...