My goal for 2008 is to become a proficient helicopter flyer. I’m starting from zero—perhaps less than zero, since I found learning to fly a fixed wing plane so difficult. But after two and a half years I’ve become a capable airplane flyer, and I’d like to stretch my horizon.

In the year 2007, I accomplished two compatible goals: I trained myself to fly lower and much closer. I’m now very comfortable with that style of flying.

I also learned how to fly inverted, another early aspiration.

As a bonus, I got caught up in combat flying with small wings, thanks particularly to Dave North, and have come to love that form of rough & tumble airplay.

Two Weeks of Training. When I asked Perry Lee of AeroMicro for advice on learning to fly a helicopter, he suggested two weeks of practice on a flight simulator, 20 minutes a day.

So that afternoon I fired up my Intel-processor iMac, booted into Windows and launched RealFlight G3.

I selected an Ion-X electric helicopter, took a deep breath, advanced the throttle and crashed immediately. I crashed about eight times in a row before I was able to keep it in the air for a few seconds.

“Slow down!” I told myself. I made an effort to keep my hand movements small, and I began to discover that I could maneuver the helicopter with little nudges and frequent corrections.

Unpredictable Directions. My first technique was to watch the disk of the rotors and try to keep them level in order to stay in the air. That sort of worked but since I didn’t yet know how to use my left hand to control the rudder, I was often flying backwards or sideways and the effects of my attempted leveling commands were unpredictable.

This reminded me of my early airplane efforts when I would make a small aileron movement to see if I was going in the right direction. Yes? Keep going! No? Reverse!

I tried flying high, lost orientation and crashed. When the helicopter got far away, I lost orientation and crashed.

After three days of practice I finally got a book and immediately learned two things: that I should practice hovering, keeping the helicopter very close, and that I should watch the nose of the helicopter, putting myself in the pilot’s position.

Makes perfect sense.

Begin Again. So I started over again, but I was already able to control the helicopter much better than when I began.

I’m now on Day 9 of practice. On the simulator, I can keep the helicopter in the air for several minutes at a time. My left hand can turn the helicopter. Every session, I crash fewer times and fly longer.

Meanwhile, I’ve purchased two helicopters. A T-Rex 450, which I’ve slowly begun to assemble, and an Eflite Blade 2CX, which is ready to fly.

Frightening Project. The T-Rex scares me. New terminology, new concepts, new techniques, Chinese manual. In fairness, the manual is very well illustrated and when I have questions I jump on the Internet and find lots of advice.

With a pair of counter-rotating blades, the Blade is much easier to fly, but it’s designed for indoor flying, or outdoor locations with negligible wind.

The Blade is big fun. I took it out to my driveway for its first real flight today and managed to hover for significant amounts of time, though I also crashed more than once.

Tomorrow I’ll walk to a church parking lot a block away where I have more room and practice some more.

Virtual Baylands. Meanwhile, I’ll keep working with RealFlight. I’m now using Frank Ronquillo’s excellent Baylands photofield and a virtual T-Rex model which I got from Perry.

I’m also studying how other people have learned to fly helicopters. Two years ago, Don Cohn, amdinistrator of BayRC, got a T-Rex after learning to fly a Coco Lama 2 coaxial helicopter.

On WattFlyer, a very funny writer named Ron documented his learning curve with the Blade.

Here’s a taste of Ron’s account:

Last night my wife got a look at the one foot square area that I painted onto a 4ft by 4 ft. piece of 1/8” Hardboard. “Why did you paint that little dinky square on the board Ron?” Well honey, this is where I’m going to learn to fly my helicopter… over the little red square…
That’s my training field… What do you think? “WHAT? ARE YOU TOTALLY OUT OF YOUR FREAK’IN GOURD? YOU’RE NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE!!” Then as she left she muttered something about stupid old men and their toys.

Ron was following some excellent advice from a guy named Radd, who wrote “So you wanted to fly but you’re stuck in hover“ (use the table of contents on the left of his page to read all the installments).

While I’m digesting all this, I’m also seriously pondering something Don Cohn found: this nice 1971 quote from Harry Reasoner:

The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Combat, Crashes, Flying, Helicopters, People, Radio Control, Wings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.