I still cant hover I bought the FMS E sky 0905a simulator and I can fly it okay. I still crash some. I tried my honey bee cp2 and I cant get it up. As soon as I get it about a foot off the ground it takes off to the side I try to adjust it and then it goes the other way. I cant seem to find a happy middle. It doesnt seem like my heli acts the same as the simulator. The parts in repairing my heli is starting to get expensive. Is there some thing I am doing wrong. I rev it up one little notch at a time and as soon as it starts to lift off it goes to the side it wont hover. Also I seen the training stand would that be good or is it worth less. 60 dollars seems like alot.

More simulator - less flying. Hovering is like balancing a cue ball on a plate. It days, weeks, months to learn how to do it right... not hours. Only coaxial helicopters actually "like" to hover any other helicopter does its best to fight it.

hey honey bee


sorry about the the heli its not easy trust me i have two helis and have been doing every day for a month and still have some trouble hovering...my parts have cost more then the helis them selfs so dont feel bad...the sims help some times but i have trouble doing both...its diffrent on a sim then the real thing...when i hover its almost scary the actions i do when i panic and it hits the ground and see parts go every where..i just destroyed my raptor g2 and and now i am down to my walkera60...but hang in there because you arent the only one here that has trouble....good luck and god bless


Daryl aka punkinhead

I hate to say it, but part of the problem is the model you've chosen. There isn't anything wrong with the HB CP2, it's just hard to learn on. Larger models are more stable for hovering and general flight. Learning how to fly on a smaller model is difficult, but not impossible.

DD is right, more simulator time is a start. Training stand is the worst piece of equipment you can buy. You can build yourself some training gear though. Couple of golf whiffle balls and some wooden dowels and you got yourself some training gear. Don't get it too high off the ground, but just practice keeping it in one spot to start. You will have some ground wash to fight with, but all things being equal, it's going to be difficult regardless because of the model.

Yeah I have bought the training gear that has the orange balls.I have been trying to keep it low but how low is low. I have been reading forums all afternoon. and I keep hearing if I get it up kinda quick and about 3 feet that it will handle better.

High hovering will eliminate the ground wash effect, that part is true. But if you can't keep it two inches off the ground in the same spot, you shouldn't be bringing it up to 3 feet. Baby steps, baby steps. If you rush stuff, it's going to be expensive. I can't stress how important the simulator is and how important the right model is. Smaller models are harder to fly because they are smaller, larger models are more stable.

yeah, smaller models are hard to deal with, but you can overcome the problem by adding a few grams and sticking a bigger pinion on. i put the superskids kit on my honeybee FP, and a 10 tooth pinion, and it can actually take a little wind now. (like 2mph sustained, 5mph gust). mind you i took about 3 minutes off of my runtime, but i dont have a large indoor aera to practice in, so i'll take any wind handeling improvements i can get!

remember, if you can fly a tiny one, you will feel like you were born with the transmitter in your hands when you step up to a larger model. id say stick to the micros, crash resistant, and cheep parts when you do eventually crash (i've had i dont know how many rotor strikes and flips with my FP, its like the energizer bunny, straighten the blades and keep on going, and going, and going)

and what wck3 said, you have to land eventually no matter how high you fly, so you gotta learn to hover in ground effect... or atleast keep it close to one spot. besides, the lower you stay, the less damage you take when it flips over. just learn to know when to cut the throttle, if you see it tipping, slam the stick down. if it dosent have a one way shaft for autos, the head should lose a large amount of momentum by the time the blades hit anything. thereby saving lots of $$$ on repair parts.

Thats only partly true because if you learn to fly a stable larger heli and master that when you step to a twitchy micro you will now how to handle it and should get used to it quicker, its like learning to fly you start with a cessna and work up to an Extra 300 of you started on the 300 granted when you eventually learned to fly you would be a master but it works much better doing the 'normal' way. Besides how many people actually learn to fly on micro's I have read countless posts of people saying "I have done 50+hours on my CP2 and can now sort of hover" I wonder how far they would have progressed if they had started with a T Rex 600 or a Raptor 50......

You say it goes one way then the other etc..overcompensating is whats happening here...get someone to check your radio(if your not familiar with it yourself) and turn down the rates of your tail fore and aft cyclics to about 50% of what they could be and lash a load of exponential on the same sticks(you dont need much servo travel when your only hovering)...this will soften things out for you and the model will be more tolerant of sloppy sticks.

Yep if you can fly a Blade CP type helicopter well you can fly anything larger, for sure. The problem is with the smaller helicopter you will be crashing a lot trying to learn. You will be rebuilding a lot and... waiting on parts a lot. So you have to stay motivated. I have met a lot of people that have quit trying to learn on a Blade CP or equivalent. Having flown a few I DO NOT wonder why.

A 50 sized helicopter is kind of the best of both worlds. It flies well and is not too expensive to fix. Just leave it stock with wooden blades and cheap servos. Then when you learn to fly throw a Kasama head, fast servos, a good gyro, and some carbon fiber blades on then start tearing up the sky. Or sell your 50 to another newbie. (Pay it forward) and go buy yourself a kick butt helicopter, of your choice.

I started with a df4.It was very twitchy but at the end of 6 months I could hover nicely, correct any mistake I made and jump from couch to table and vice-versa... Then I went to the club and flew on the caliber 5. It was a breeze! If you master a mimi micro then big helis are easier.

I have no one around where I live to show me anything, I am getting everything I know from all of you. There is no hobby shop that deals with any for 60 miles, so everything I have to learn is on my own. So could this be explained to me more so that I might be able to do it my self?

Try http://www.pilotlocator.net , that should help you find some local pilots.

I'm not terribly familiar with the radio you are using, so... I wouldn't know how to put some exponential into your cyclic. Your radio documentation should have a section on exponential if it has that function. If you had a Futaba 9c, 9z, 12z or 14mz I could walk you through it

I have a honey bee cp2 and controler is a esky 0406 it all came in the box the so call RTF kit, if that helps at all. I tried watching the videos but my internet is so slow that i cant get them I left it buffering for a hour and was only 3% done so that is out the window.

Looked up that radio on the net and have never seen it before...and it does appear fairly basic so maybe doesnt support expo. but it may have some sort of endpoint control.
Have a trawl through the manual...what your looking to do if possible is decrease the movement of the swashplate over the range of the stick (and maybe the tail). This may be through endpoints/ATV's for those particular channels.
This will help prevent the model from "running away from you" and you will be in control (hopefully!!!)
Marty.

I don't think that radio has an expo function. The problem with some of the RTF/entry level stuff is that you outgrow it too fast or it hampers your learning because of function or design.

i learned to hover fairly well in a week using the RADD technique it worked for me [link]http://www.dream-models.com/eco/index.html[/link] god luck

Yeah I have been looking at that. I figured out that my swash plate wasnt level so when I got it level it came up nice for a secound then I put it back down. But now I have other issues

Radiomatthew,

I have had a similar experience to yours. Purchased a Blade CP since all the reviews said it would pretty much hover hands free out of the box. Well that was not the case. After flying it some with the training gear on it and busting a few parts it became unmanageable. Finally saw that the swash plate was not level. After adjusting it the helicopter will hover hands free. It think the big difference between helis and planes it that helis need more attention to the mechanics since it is less likely that you can see a trim/setup is out of whack. I can eyeball a planes’ control surfaces well enough to get it into the air and have it trimmed in short order. A heli takes more observation to get it figured out. I have spoken to many people who have given up on helis simply because they could not get the basics figured out. I now believe it was probably the result of a mechanical trim problem. I see no reason why any helicopter that is properly setup should not all but self hover.

what other issues do you have??the heli will not hover on its own if thats what your thinking you need to put minor control inputs to actually get it to hover,however if properly trimmed it should hover for a quick sec or two on its own in a stable hover.keep at it follow the radd technique and you sould be hovering quicker than you know it..ived tried in the past to fly a nitro hirobo shuttle with no luck actually quite a few years ago and gave up on it,replacing blades and main rotor shafts got expensiveThese micro helis are cheap to repair compared to others so i gave it another shot followed radds lessons and was very impressed wth the outcome. god luck

yeah I got it to hover for a second but then I put it down, then I have problems with my right side servo going all the way down, I can still hear it trying to go down more like I was holding the stick over. then the tail rotor just lit up to full speed and I couldnt shut it off like something shorted out. it spun on the ground for about a minute with the transmittier turned off. now the main motor wont do anything. I think my 4 in 1 went out.

did all this happen while the radio was off batterries weak in tx?before you shut down the tx you should always always disconnect the power to the heli first,once your tx is turned off any interference can cause the heli to power up.