What the hell was I thinking?

[kuroguy]

Got good at hovering my cp heli nose in so figured I'd give FFF a shot. It happened in slow motion. Main blades and main gear damaged. I'd never used a sim. Tried hover training with heli x and couldn't make it a full rotation without crashing.

Way to set myself up for failure. I realized that if I couldn't hover a full rotation, how the hell did I ever expect to fly one? From now on the rule is if I can't consistently do it on the sim, I won't try it on the heli.

By the way, 2 days on the sim and I can hover controlling cyclic while rotating for 10 minutes at 65% speed. Slow and steady wins the race.

[wab223]

Its easy for some of us to get ahead of our selves. We can start out in control but the excitement takes over reasoning and we push ourselves too far. At that point its over in about 500 milliseconds.

Its like the heli causes you to lose inhibition. Riding Motorcycles has a similar effect except with toy helis there are no orthopedic pins and plates.

My best guess it to try to stay one step ahead on the sim to IRL. Easier said than done.

[macdad]

My most successful method is to be able to perform a technique flawlessly for at least 10 minutes on the sim before applying in real life. This is at 110% speed on the sim.

This is what I did when learning backwards upright as well as inverted flight. I don't follow that rule with stationary piros and half piro flips, though. I am rolling the dice with the flips.

It is hard to be patient, but the sim will save you some money and a lot of frustration.

[gitbse]

Welcome to helis. We've all been there.

I've had a bunch of friends who thought it was really easy while watching me, and never having tried themselves. "How hard can it be? It hovers on its own..." Or my favorite "Are you going to upgrade to drones eventually? They seem alot harder."

I tell everybody, it's like balancing a marble on an upside-down salad bowl, and not being able to touch the bowl.
Of course I don't let them fly my real machines, but I'll give anybody a go on my sim. They crap their pants when they realize how difficult it is.

Keep it up, you'll get it. The more you progress the more you will push yourself to progress faster. It becomes really fun once you get onto the initial steep learning curve.

[forton]

I learned the other way.
For me flying slow circles was much easier than slowly pirouetting a hover.
And slowly pirouetting a hover was easier for me than holding it still in all directions.
Maybe it's something in my brain, if it doesn't move I don't feel it as much.

Tail in inverted hover still freaks me out after 2 secs, but it's getting better every day.

[learnedthehardway]

Thanks to micros and YouTube videos I never used a sim until I had my upright orientations, figure 8s, circuits, flips, rolls and tail forward inverted hovering down pretty good. Once I started trying to learn my other inverted orientations and inverted 8s the sim became a must.

Started tail in, then on a 45°, side in, 45° towards myself and finally nose in. Being able to bailout back to tail in was the key to my success. If I messed up and crashed thanks to micro magic I just picked it out of the grass and tried again.

A heli that can take a hit will help you progress much faster at a fraction of the cost and was alot more fun than a sim which I still find extremely boring to this day. Plus it eliminated the sim to rl transition, was just a heli to heli transition which was much easier for me cause it helped with nerves. I knew if I had something down pat on the nano doing it with the 180 would be easier not harder. Opposite of the sim to rl transition where most things seemed harder to do in rl than they are to do on the sim.

Being able to bailout to your strongest orientation/s before you crash is the most useful skill you'll ever learn. I'm not afraid to try new things in rl because I know there's no orientation I can't recover from.

Personally didn't like hover or reaction training in the sim. Did my own slow piro training but in the regular simulation mode so it didn't make me crash for leaving the little circle. That way I could get all out of whack just like it would happen in rl and do my best to recover without crashing.

My reaction training was going buck wild flying in my own particular style and recovering from the situations that my style of flying creates. Flying far beyond my skill level in the sim and recovering virtually eliminated crashing in rl.

There's many different ways to learn, have to experiment to see what works for you and is fun enough to motivate you to do it. The standard sim training was more like a chore to me so I flat out wouldn't do it. Being confined to a little circle or waiting for the heli to magically appear in the sky in a goofy orientation seemed unrealistic and kinda stupid to me. Trying to emulate rl situations as much as possible worked much better. YMMV

[Cliff Chmiel]

I like they way buddy answer, are they easy to fly, he said its like trying to light his pipe with one hand, and balance broom stick on one finger on the other hand, while on roller skates.

[Waxxingibbous]

welcome to the heli world!
bnf, crash, rebuild, crash, rebuild, swap electronics to different frame, crash, rebuild.

if you have a wife there are a few steps i missed in there.

[utahsaint]

Oh so understand... I have a sim and it's very boring. Still use it and have a few heli's. Collective pitch is a bit much to wrap my head around at times. Just crashed my new 300 cfx this last week. I was doing okay with it then took it out in the wind. Everything went great till I decided to rotate it in a full 360. It shot off like crazy toward the neighbors house so I over corrected. It then shot over my head and crashed behind me. I was lucky and it only broke the landing gear so it wasn't a bad crash. So not good though. I am on a time out for a while from flying that one. Next time I fly it just going to work on hovering in all orientations again...

[peteski]

Sim may seem boring, but the end result is certainly worth it. Makes real flying so much more rewarding.