Flight School Part 1 - The Hover

Welcome to Flight School! This is the 1st part in a series of tips to help beginning heli pilots to:

1. Learn 3D RC Helicopter Flying with minimum mistakes
   
2. Minimum mistakes = save big bucks + more time to fly (no need to repair heli, less trips to the hobby shop!)

The Hover Foundation
The hover is the foundation of heli flying. I have heard people say that if you can hover your heli in any orientation - learning new maneuvers will be much easier and crashes will be much less often. I believe that, because I have about 400 heli flights so far and have crashed less then a dozen times and more than half of those crashes where due to mechanical faults.

When most people say they know how to hover, they usually mean they know 1/8 of a hover. Hovering is different when the nose points 1) out, 2) in, 3) left and 4) right. That's 4/8, the other 4 parts of the hover is when your heli is inverted. 5) Inverted nose in 6) inverted nose out 7) inverted nose left and 8) inverted nose right.

That quite a lot of hovering huh? Don't bother about the inverted hovering just yet, we'll get to it later, for now let's just master 4/8 of the hover first.

The Simulator is Your Wallet's Friend!
I have a rule for myself, that's I'll never fly a maneuver unless I can do it in the simulator without thinking. If you are thinking how to move your sticks while hovering - you are not ready to try it out there on the flying field yet!

So take it one step at a time, the less your rush at this stage, the quicker you'll learn later!

The Drill
Start the heli nose-out directly in-front of you (preferably at least 4 to 5 meters away from you) climb and get into a hover nose out. Keep practicing that till you can keep your heli at the same altitude (landing gear at eye-level) and at the same spot in front of you comfortably for extended periods of time.

Once you got nose-out in your bag, apply left or right rudder to get the nose to point either left or right and get it to hover at the same spot and altitude again. Every time you have mastered the nose pointing in a direction, right a new direction till you get all 4 nose orientations for upright hovering.

Fighting Temptation
Boring huh? Try to resist the temptation to fly around, because if you haven't mastered these 4 hovering orientations, there's a high chance a crash will occur if anything goes wrong. Why? If you haven't learnt to keep your heli in a place in all 4 orientations that means you do not have the skills to put the heli exactly where you want it to be, that means if you start flying around, your heli might just fly too far away, you can't see it, crash.

A Whole Different Ball Game
You'll also notice that a heli flying around behaves differently from a heli sitting in a hover, that's because when you have some airspeed, the rotor disc acts like a big circular wing! That means that it behaves more like a fixed-wing airplane and a whole different set of dynamics and skills needed to control the heli come in. It's complicated enough to learn how to hover, why complicate things more?

Hope this helps! Stay tuned for the Part 2 - Sideways/Forward/Backward Flight. Meanwhile keep it fun and keep it hovering!