beginner ???

Actually, I'm a rank beginner at helicopters and I pulled the Blade CX out of the box, charged the batteries, and proceeded to hover it in my living room. I just lifted it off, observed what it wanted to do, and dropped it back onto the floor. Then I adjusted the trim to compensate. I've flown it outside some, and it does not handle even a whisper of breeze. It's still nice and stable, it just gets blown away and the amount of cyclic control you have is not enough to make any forward progress in anything but a dead calm. Of course, this is just what it is advertised to do. It seems a pretty good training tool. I need to unlearn some automatic reactions from flying fixed wing RC. My reaction of "when in trouble, hit full throttle" does not work when flying a helicopter indoors. Think about it.

Larry

Steve R wrote:

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Larry
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| I need to unlearn some automatic reactions from flying fixed wing | RC.

Yup! I too have gone from fixed wing to helicopters, flying the CX among other things.

| My reaction of "when in trouble, hit full throttle" does not work | when flying a helicopter indoors.

Strange ... my reaction has always been `if something goes wrong, cut power' -- unlike many of my other fixed wing instincts, this one has served me very well with helicopters. There's been a few cases where it's not the ideal thing to do, but overall it's quite effective at preventing damage.

Reply to
Doug McLaren

hehe, makes me wonder if you're flying those helis in idle up... I've seen quite a few low-time heli guys (me included a couple times) slam the throttle "closed" while in idle up and drive the heli into the groud with full negative pitch.

I fly both fling-wings and planks and I've always subscribed to the "increase safety with altitude" school of thought.. If the helis getting squirrely down low, I punch the collective, climb out and get into forward flight.. Of course, if something has failed and it's going in, I flick the throttle hold prior to impact to try and minimize damage..

With planks I firewall the throttle and try to gain some altitude. Of course, this is worthless if you've dumb-thumbed something close to the ground - which was the end of my last plank flying session. :)

Reply to
The OTHER Kevin in San Diego

A low time heli guy shouldn't be using idle-up ... AT ALL ... EVER

At first, the normal curve shouldn't even go below 0 pitch, so that you CAN safely dump it (from a foot or two altitude max) by instantlly totally dumping collective. use this to learn to hover, moving around (tail in) and even as you start to learn forward flight. As you get more experience, you want to learn to dump it gently.

Only once you start to become comfortable with forward flight, should your emergency response change from drop it to the ground to climb and forward flight. Even at this point you shouldn't be using idle up at all yet, although you will probably have changed your most negative pitch in normal mode to a few degrees down.

By the first time you ever engage idle up, you should be well comfortable with forward flight in any direction, and your default bailout should be to get into climbing forward flight. By this time you would no longer be considered a "low time" heli guy.

My default plank behavior was to chop throttle and pull a lot of up elevator (yes, I know: not good inverted) I quickly obtained a modified extra long tail fin for the helicopter so I wouldn't accidentally kill my tail rotor until I unlearned it.

Martin

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Martin

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