In the last beginner rc helicopter flying training lesson we flew large and fast figure of eight in front of your position not around your position. In this lesson you will learn how to nose in hover. This can really be very difficult for so many people but there are many not one way of learning it, we will discuss here the three effective ones.

Since you may well be flying those large figure of eight loops and that will make you think that you are not required to learn the hovering nose. But let me tell you that if you did not give enough attention in learning the rc helicopter controls in all directions and orientations, you will never be able to perform advanced aerobatics. Nose facing your direction is somewhat has been practiced by you in the earlier lesson or it will be felt the way that you are relearning flying rc helicopter. However by putting little extra effort for learning today’s lesson will be more beneficial in the long run and is very essential. Because, even if you are only keeping yourself stick to just basic flying like normal hovering and basic figure of eight loop, your rc helicopter will be forced to face nose in hover. I can be caused by gusting wind or may be a result of an engine failure, radio interference or your own error. Moreover as said earlier, this is essential to learn if you ever want to perform some simple and basic aerobatics.
You must be thinking that why am I rambling to make you understand that nose in hover is very hard. Well the answer is very simple; your rc helicopter cyclic controls get reversed when the helicopter is facing you. Try doing it yourself, turn the face of your rc helicopter towards you and turn on your radio and receiver. When you give a left cyclic the swash plate moves right. So basically the difficulty is in understanding the reversed commands you will be required to give when the rc helicopter is facing towards you. Same thing applies to the tail rotor command, it gets reversed too. But if you get yourself used to taking the tail rotor commands make the rc heli move in clockwise or anti clock wise directions instead of it being turning left or right, the direction of the rc helicopter will not matter.

However, never look at the tail when you are giving tail rotor commands. Some people may tell you to see how the tail rotor swings left when you give the left tail rotor command. Keep your focus on the nose; this is the right way of flying the rc helicopter. Having said that, it is also very easy to learn the counter clock wise and clock wise orientation instead of getting used to left or right tail rotor movement. By the time you come to this point of practicing nose in hover, you must have got the command over throttle control and collective pitch. Moreover, if you just do all the exercises learned earlier with getting the clockwise and counter clock wise orientation for tail command, it will just become a part of your reflexes and you will not face any difficulty just focusing the nose.

Before we start the nose in flying lesson there are few points which require attention:

Keep you training gear on; it will save your rc helicopter from a possible ditch and also will sever as a guide for visualizing roll and pitch movements easily.

Since you are getting another aspect of the command controls, if the cyclic duel rates are set to more or are turned off, you must reset them back to the factory settings, the same when you were doing the basic hovering exercises. This way you will be controlling the radio control heli the way it is supposed to in the hover in nose exercise.

There are three methods for learning the nose in hover, and you will learn three of them one by one. We will start from the same method we are used to i.e. the ground up hover method. Then we will see the flying approach method and finally look into walk around method.

Nose tip in Hover Ground up method:
This method is almost the same as you did in earlier exercise of basic hovering when you were a beginner rc helicopter flyer, but now you already know the controls of collective/throttle and commands of tail rotor. Stand in front of you rc helicopter keeping a distance of around 10 to 12 feet and make sure that the face of your bird is into the wind. To get the feel of the reversed commands in cyclic, safely, just give a little throttle to make your heli lighter on the skids. Just make it comfortable and then hover a little above the ground, up to few inches and practice there. When you feel comfortable start doing the backward/ forward/ sideways and diagonal commands and see how the commands have reversed effect on your rc helicopter when you are standing in front of it having its nose pointed at you. Make sure the heli remains into the wind direction. Once you have got the hang of that, try doing a long figure of eight loop, just at the end of each loop you will turn the rc helicopter towards you instead of turning it away from you as earlier. When you feel that you are comfortable doing the long skinny figure of eight loop, try doing the fast and large figure of eight circuit from the previous exercise. Keep the altitude high enough to get away from any mishap. There are many situations when you see your rc heli ditching at the ground but can avoid it through increasing the collective/ throttle and climbing altitude again to gain time for getting the control over your remote control helicopter.


You will be doing the nose in hover exercise in an open area, preferably a ground. This is good for whatever method you try for learning it but having plenty of room around you will give you enough chances to correct your skills incase you get disoriented. One more tip which is usually overlooked but is very important that choose to do fly in hover lesson in an overcast day. This way you will be able to avoid the scenario when your rc helicopter passes in front of the sun and your position. On that very instant you wilt blinded by the bright sunlight and those few seconds may cost you the expensive rc helicopter. Because losing sight of your heli will make you disoriented and by the time you will acquire the position back, your bird might get the blow of its life.

Nose in Hover Flying Approach Method:
This is another way to get the taste of reversed controls. In this method, the beginner rc heli is already flying, you just turn it slowly towards you to let your brain learn the reversal of controls when the nose is pointed towards you. The more you will practice the approach of rc helicopter towards you, the more you will get comfortable with the reverse control and the time will come when you be able to hover the heli having the nose pointed towards you. There are two advantages learning nose pointed to you while hovering. One is that your rc hlei will be flying high already so, you will be safe even if you make any mistake and the other is that the heli will already be in a forward flight which will make it easier for you to get the hang of it because rc helicopter is more stable in forward flight than in the hover.


The disadvantage to this method is that you get very less time practicing the nose is hover because most of the time the rc heli is flying and the only time you get to practice nose in hover is when the heli is coming towards you. The other disadvantage is the instant when the beginer rc helicopter comes towards you in the first few instances, those are the moments when you can get it or lose it completely, if you didn’t prepare your mind for the reverse control commands when the heli is approaching towards you. This way of learning is good for you if you are in rc airplane flying already. Since rc helicopters behave the same way as rc airplanes when they are in forward flight, it is all natural for an rc airplane flyer.

Walk Around method:
This method is a lot easier to learn nose in hover because you will be standing behind the heli when you start, the same way it was during the basic exercises. You will be at ease doing it just put the rc helicopter into the wind and stand 10 to 12 feet behind it. Start hovering 2-3 feet off the ground and gradually walk from left or right of the heli to come in front of it. This way will give your brain the gradual learning chance and you will be able to learning a better way this way. When in front, practice your left cyclic/ right cyclic/ forward and backwards.

During that practice whenever you feel disorientated, just move your position to a more comfortable one even get behind the heli to be able to control it the way you are used to. You will have to act fast for getting orientation back or you will ditch your rc hlei to ground and that will cost you moolah. And yes, try to be careful when walking to get in front of the rc helicopter because your focus will be on the heli and something may get you trip over. So make sure you clear all the hurdles you can come across. When you get comfortable being in front of the helicopter, practice all the controls i.e. backwards/forward/ sideways and diagonals.

If you have a good flight simulator for rc helicopter, make use of it because it will help you learn faster. The walk around method will not work with the simulator because your position remains fixed in a simulator. However other two methods will work just fine. Whichever method you choose to go for, just stick to it with the rc helicopter simulator too.

Here I will call it the end of the basic rc helicopter flying training lessons. With the last one being nose in front of you hovering, you are now open to some advanced aerobatic maneuvers and are even able to handle large rc helicopters. Look at you! You are now a skilled rc helicopter flyer who is able to fly in whatever direction, in other words you have full control over your rc heli. No more rc helicopter training gear needed for you, great flying there you rc helicopter pilot!

In the last lesson we discussed and learned how to hover and fly in a figure of eight 8 with nose always pointing in the direction of wind. The idea was to not to keep you flying like that till this point for the ease of flight but this was to keep you oriented from the view point of rc helicopter body. When you are able to keep yourself oriented, you don’t crash but the changing view of the rc helicopter body is what makes the flyer disoriented and crash. This disorientation is not only the problem with beginners in the radio controlled / remote control or rc helicopter hobby, it happens with the pros too they get disoriented and crash and it requires just a miss from their usual comprehension since flying rc helis of single blade rotor are large rc helicopters and flying them specially during training is like balancing on the ball, you put attention away for a second and game goes away from your hand.

Flying a Circuit Figure of Eight:
Now coming back to today’s lesson; when we flew rc helicopter always pointed into the wind, it was like flying the machine while sitting in it. When you want it move left you just had to move the cyclic to the left, when you wanted to move it forward cyclic moved forward. In this scenario it was very easy to keep your orientation and fly the bird with focus on one thing at a time while the view of the rc helicopter remains the same for you. But if you were to fly in this way it will look very odd and silly that your rc heli remains in the direction of the wind which cannot put its face in the direction it was moving and it also affects the speed this way of flying has decreased speed.

We will now change that and start flying (putting our nose) into the direction of our flight path. This is going to be a bit difficult because you are up till now are in the habit of seeing your rc helicopter form one orientation, now you will see it from many and for doing that you need to keep your focus onto what we are going to learn today.

You must know that this the point when few of you will be crashing your rc helis and I believe you do not want yourself to be one of those. They crash not because they didn’t practice the earlier lesson of nose pointed into the direction of the wind but it is because they get puzzled when they see a changed image of their rc helicopter flying in front of them and give a wrong input and make it crash. To avoid that you just need to go slow today and keep your head cleared from other thoughts while flying and do not get distracted. This way you will not have any problem making it a great flight lesson day without a mishap.
Flying checks are a normal practice so you must perform that before taking your hands on flying your rc helicopter. Choice for the ground type is still soft grassy ground and do not forget to put your training gear on, it’s a must.

Now start your rc helicopter on the reference point and you should be standing 10-12 feet away at the back of your rc helicopter, the nose is pointing in the direction of the wind. Increase your throttle or collective slowly and bring the rc heli at a 3-4 feet height, hover and hold it right there at the reference point for few seconds to get yourself comfortable. Now start moving it to the left of the reference point for 10-15 feet and then bring it back to the reference point not stopping there but continuing towards the right side of the reference point. Perform this for few times to get yourself comfortable in seeing your rc helicopter in the way you are used to i.e. nose pointing towards the wind. Keep it slow and in control before you make the next move. Now while you make the rc heli move left from the reference point and make it come back towards right, give a little right tail rotor while it passes over the reference point in front of you. This will make the rc helicopter move into the flight direction of right and if you get disoriented because of the changing view of the rc heli body you can just get behind the moving tail and keep the view as same as was before. Once you get 15-20 feet away from the reference nose pointing into the direction of the flight, get it hover back into the direction of the wind and bring it towards the ref. point. While passing by you and going right to the ref point give a little right tail to move the nose in the right direction of the flight. Repeat it few times and you will feel yourself getting comfortable with the exercise. When you feel confident with this, start turning the nose into the direction of the flight as soon you move back your rc heli towards the reference point.



A heading hold gyro feature in your rc helicopter will make life easier for you while pointing into the direction of flight. If you have heading hold gyro, you can just put the yaw rate feature on and your rc helicopter will not require that much of tail commands. The weathervane effect which comes out of yaw rate gyro; makes the nose pointing into the direction of flight with tail following when control is given to move rc heli in any direction.
When flying in the direction of flight movement, it is noted that one tends to fly rc helikopter with more and more speed, I know this is tempting. You need to limit yourself from this temptation of flying fast till the time you clean your hands completely through practicing these exercises. You need to keep it going nice and easy on your nerves and just keep flying back and forth keeping the remote control helicopter not more than 3 feet off the ground. You will be certainly start making turns at every reach without stopping when you will get comfortable with turning it at the end of every reach through enough practice. And soon you will start flying figure of 8 in long loops with nose always pointing into the direction of flight. This is called flying a circuit- bravo you deserve this thrilling moment.

One important tip for you before I leave you to practice in the field, keep a rule in mind for initial training of turning radio controlled helicopters into the flight direction. That is when turning right take a right and when left take a left. This seems very logical and obvious, but with rc heli machine you can easily forget the basic rule when in the thrill and can take a left 180 degree turn to reach a right even when the right was 180 degrees on the right side. This may also be remembered by always turning your rc helicopter away from you not towards you as turning towards may make you disoriented easily in the beginning. This was a large rc helicopter flying training not the toy one, so you need a big pat on your back for making it a success and flying it back safely in one piece.

Happy flying

Tonja

As I had discussed in my last post that we will get to learning rc helicopter flying step by step from next post onwards, so here it is. In today’s post we will get to the first lesson of flying your new radio controlled rc helicopter and that is Learning cyclic control. Let’s begin:
There are few checks which you need to make before get your hands on flying this machine. If you have an instructor with you, he is going to help a lot and check things for you, he will even save you from doing a disaster, if not; you are required to be very careful in following the steps in learning the cyclic control. You need to check if your rc heli is setup the way it was defined in the instructions manual came along with your rc chopper.



Although rc helicopter or regular helicopters can be moved/ tilit through tilting the propeller or rotor but in cyclic controls our rc helicopter controls do not tilt the rotor to achieve the moves but they do something advanced and that is called “Cyclic Control Pitch”. It is done by changing the angle of pitch of the rotor blade on every revolution it makes depending on where you want your rc helicopter to tilt. This is why it is called cyclic pitch control. Elevator (pitch) and aileron (roll) is controlled through cyclic pitch control.



For instance if we want to move our rc helicopter forward, we will have to lift our rotor on the rear half than the front half. So what we do, we give more pitch on the rear half of the rotor disc or in other words the blades will get more pitch when they get to the rear half of the rc helicopter. In fact due to the gyroscopic precession principle, the change starts happening on the blade 90 degrees before it reaches the rear end to cater for the gyroscopic precession. This whole cyclic change in pitch of rotor blades is called cyclic control of rc helicopter.
All these changes in pitch of rotor blades are possible because of swash plate and the rotor head. The swash plate is a mechanical linking to the non rotating parts of the controls and rotating parts. Hence forward cyclic will tilt the rc helicopter forward, rear will move it backwards, right will move it right and left will left. I hope you have got the idea how cyclic controls work, now let’s fly it step by step:

1. Making sure that all the gears are connected and intact is a must.

2. You need to spool up your rc heli and check the controls in spooled up condition. If instructor is with you, let him test fly the rc helicopter so he can make sure that all is well and running good.

3. You can well understand from your training manual that your rc heli can be slowly landed while it has the sideways or back/ forward thrust. You can ask your instructor to demonstrate you what is a sliding heli. It will definitely increase your confidence that slowly decreasing the collective if you lose control. Controlling pitch will require bit of a practice in the beginning, an instructor can guide you in that too.

4. You need to rehearse in your mind what you will be doing practically. It’s always recommended that you put your rc helicopter into the wind. Position yourself at a little distance from your heli to the right or left.

5. Lift your radio controlled heli to a safe height of just 0.1 or 0.2 meters. Yes that is a very little height where your landing gear might touch the ground because of the vibration of your hand when it tries to get familiar with feel of the control. This is all good; when you are able to stable your rc heli at this safe height, lift it to 1m.

6. When you have stabilized the hovering at 1m, give very small inputs and practice sideways only to a distance of 1meter, stop for a hover and then come to your center position. Practice the same for the opposite direction and come back again. This will give your hands a proper feel of the controls.

7. Do the same exercise for forward and backward moves.
Congratulations, you have learned the cyclic controls of an rc helicopter. One thing before ending this post; you should stand at the left of your rc helicopter if you are using right control and vise e versa.

Till next post for the next learning lesson,

Happy flying