Hope that you have been doing great with your RC helicopter flying course. Today we will fly our RC helicopter controlled slow circuit around a fixed position. Today’s exercise is for getting you more comfortable with tail rotor controls and getting you accustomed to handling your RC helicopter from left and right.
Remote control training gear is essential even today and same pre flight checks are required to be done which were conducted in earlier exercises. Platform should be grass and calm day is still a preference for today’s flight.
Place you RC heli into the wind, start it and place your position 12-15 feet away from it. Bring the RC helicopter at a hover of 4 feet from ground and turn its nose to the right slowly and start flying it in a clockwise direction around your position, while maintaining the distance of 12-15 feet between your heli and you. For the ease of handling you should keep facing the helicopter, turning with it as you would do while flying a line control plane. Keep flying your RC helicopter slowly as it should take 25-30 seconds in completing one circle around your position. Keeping it slow is also required to keep you from dizziness because of turning in circles.
If you feel that turning with RC helicopter is getting you disoriented, you can come sideways to the remote control heli and turn your face left so as to keep the RC helicopter within your eyesight. This way you will be able to regain your confidence and feel like almost flying the heli from behind. Fly your RC helicopter this way in clockwise direction and then give yourself and your RC helicopter a break.
Okay, enough break; do the same exercise in the counter clock direction, circuiting it to the left around you. You will have to hold in left tail rotor control to keep RC helicopter nose always pointing in the direction of flight i.e. circle. Doing the circuit to your right may feel more difficult to you as compared to left because doing it to the right requires more tail rotor to the right as compared to left circuit which requires very little left tail rotor for keeping the RC helicopter nose pointing into the direction of circular flight.
This phenomenon is experienced because the main rotor of the RC helicopter is most usually rotate in clockwise direction. This is why the torque generated from main rotor blades force the helicopter body to turn to left all the time and if the tail rotor is there to counter that torque. If you have counter clock main rotor, you would want to start this exercise from right hand side otherwise from the left hand side.
Now, you should keep practicing the clockwise and counter clockwise circuits around your fixed position. You will soon find that one of the directions becomes easier, only then you would want to switch to the other direction to practice it more. This the way you will make yourself more into the habit of getting over the fear of not trying the harder things in RC helicopter flying.
It is not experienced with all the people learning to fly RC helicopter that one circuit seems harder than the other one but if it happens to you like it with me, try to get the harder part done more so it doesn’t become your habit, like it is with me. For me rights are more comfortable than lefts and this habit of mine has grown firm so much with time that I am unable to get over it.
It will be a good idea if you practice your earlier circuit of RC Helicopter Training Figure of Eight Circuit exercise after getting enough of this one. But get cent percent comfortable before calling it a day for this one. These exercises are very important because the next lesson we are going to practice will be fast flights and large circuits and this will be the part where adrenaline will start to surge, which will in turn increases the risk of making some big damage to your RC Helicopter if you skip on necessary steps to take and make a mistake. This is why you must take as long as you want to get comfortable with earlier two lessons.
Happy Flying!
Tonja
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