Flying Your RC Helicopter: Practice!

Practice doing left / right turns in front of you while flying your RC Helicopter back and forth. Almost like a figure-8, but always keeping the RC Helicopter tail in a little. Basically, just fly the RC Helicopter sideways to the left and right, in front of you, then start adding rudder so instead of flying sideways back and forth, the nose leads the turn a little. The helicopter will never turn with JUST the rudder or JUST the cyclic. You need to use both the same time.

Do not force the RC Helicopter back down, lower the collective a little bit at a time. If it starts to sink rapidly, raise the collective slow at first and slowly raise it faster until it stops falling. Start lowering it again and do a slow, controlled descent. If you descend to quickly you will enter your own down wash and the RC Helicopter will pull itself into the ground and need considerable collective to compensate. This is a bad condition.

Get used to how responsive the collective is. Give it a few SMALL taps. You want to get used to NOT over-correcting with the left stick. This is hard, most people want to move the stick all the way down when they get in trouble, this is bad, this s lams the heli into the ground. Get used to merely lowering the collective 1/4 way down or so.

Practice walking the RC Helicopter around. Follow at a safe distance behind it and make it go places slowly. Be careful not to step in any holes. Practice turning the heli a little bit to the right and left. Get used to the perspective in real life. The sim experience only helps. � Practice flying the heli out and back (tail in both ways) Practice a little side to side slow-flying

Practice turning the RC Helicopter towards you a little more. Practice doing small, very slow, circles. This is difficult. Flying left to right is easier than flying in and out. Start doing this. Do not fly with the sun near the horizon. It gets hard to see the attitude. Practice hovering a little bit higher, say 10 - 20 feet.

Practice subtle 180 stalls and figure-8's. Practice going faster and slowing down. Practice transitioning your RC Helicopter from fast forward flight to landing. Practice in a little more wind... wind really makes a 30 size jump around, be on top of it! Practice controlled flight. Try to make the RC Helicopter go exactly where you want it to.

Practice doing a little bigger circuits but keep the speed down. Your ready to take the training gear off. They are slowing you down and you are probably developing bad habits by using them for visual cues. After you take the training gear off, start all over again, because it is much more responsive now and much more difficult to see, however, it will fly much better.

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