Fly without Gyro?

[Raisintoe]

My friend just picked up an old Kyosho Heli from some guy. I am not sure how old it is. I don't know if he can get parts for it or not; I took a look at it, and noticed that it did not have a gyro installed. It does seem to have everything else though. Now my friend just wanted to see if he could get it up and working, we don't exactly want to spend the money on a gyro if we don't have to. I wondered if anyone has set up a heli without a gyro before; is that even possible?

[babyuh1]

My question is why? Gyros are pretty cheap nowdays and even the most basic one can make a heli flyable. Anyway, when there were no gyros or they were poor performers people had to program mixes into their radios to help control the tail when you made power changes.
It's just not worth it!

[J-son600]

Go for it without a gyro, back in the day "1980's" I'd trim my heli-baby to slowly rotate right.
Knowing it would always rotate right I got used to adding left tail pitch when flying/hovering to compensate, not that difficult just practice.

[Raisintoe]

Cool, I have heard that not long ago, helicopters were almost too complex to fly by radio control. The pilots had a way to fly them anyway. Like you say, the tail can just be set to have a slight drift to the right.

It really is worth it now days, of course, to buy a gyro, but I wanted to know how possible it would be to fly without one. In my case, I just had a friend who bought a helicopter for cheep at a garage sale; it was the first heli he ever had, and he only needed to learn how to hover it around to see if he liked it. Gyros are still expensive when you are new to the hobby. I imagine that you can't possibly do all of the 3D flying without one though.

[Ah Clem]

I used to fly without a gyro all the time (back in the 1970's and early 1980's).

Not sure I ever want to try it again, but that was the way you did it, back then.

[Raisintoe]

How much were you able to do without a gyro?

[Ah Clem]

Swiss Hovering Circles, Shovel, figure eights, cruise around, Split S, loop and roll, auto.

There was no 3D at the time.

Of course, no backwards maneuvers, either!