Piro Travel & Piro Hover

[laoch33]

Hey Heli freaks,
couldn't find a thread on piro travel specifically, hope I didn't miss it;

I'm having trouble with piro travel and piro hovering, unless it's @ a very slow piro rate. Looking for tips and just wondering also:- When you can piro hover well, are you watching "tail, side, nose, side, tail, side, nose, side...." that would be keeping track of four points :S Or do you take your cue from nose or tail only and then stir the sticks to correct??? orr Do you wait until your brain sees which side is tilting and think ahead and stir a little (I'm guessing this is what happens when u eventually get it down.. but I wouldn't know xP ??) Or does amount of points you keep track of depend on rate of travel?

Piro circles; I read the thread on piro circles saying get all orientations down, then start piroing slowly to get them down. But I've seen video's of people piroing at really high rates and doing maneuvers.. do they cue off the nose or tail and stir too? I've read and seen countless accounts of people cueing off one point only (i.e. the tail for example) for piro FLIPS, but it seems you'd need more points to work off for a nice smooth circle?
I noticed that if i cue off the nose and tail and try to keep the cyclic tilt toward the center of my imaginary circle that it works quite well, but wondering if anyone who can do piro travel well could tell me how it works when u can do it lol .. I hope that makes sense xD This one is buggin' hell outa me. Thanks in advance guys

[clicky]

I've started it as teaching myself orientation - by doing slow pirouettes. I needed to keep them slow as I had trouble doing them correctly. With fast ones I used to wait until it gets to tail in position and try to correct it there. But with slow I had to correct it in all orientations.

And after while I couldn't do fast pirouettes at all - even those when you slam rudder stick to one side and wait it gets back to tail in. Also, after a while I noticed that I was able to get some more speed to my pirouettes and it built up from there. Now I can do them quite fast (not that fast as people in the videos you're talking about) but at reasonable speed (at least CW ones - with CCW I need some time to get to position I can speed them up).

Also, slowly I developed sense of controlling the rotor no matter where nose is in and that allowed me to start doing piro travel (as you called it) or even better piro circuits. It all come from just persistently practising those slow pirouettes only!

So - just practise it and you'll get there!

[BaconRaygun]

I'm still learning this stuff but I personally don’t cue from any particular side. I did when I first started but that got me into a bad habit so I broke it while in the early stages... I realized I was learning a bad habit when I started inverted hover; I was trying to teach myself to interoperate the helis movements differently in different orientations. For me, this made doing more confusing orientations (like tail in inverted) even harder.

Now I try to relax and fly the whole heli, when I'm practicing upright piro hover I'm thinking about the whole heli and not just the tail or nose. This way I find that I'm correcting on multiple axis simultaneously, not just correcting the tail as it comes around. When I focused on just one part of the heli I would drift around a lot more.

Another advantage (for me anyway) is timing, I was always a fraction of a second behind when I was flying the nose so my corrections would cause undesired side effects (drift).

I use the rotor disk and main shaft first and the rest of the heli second... I don’t use the skids... at all, in fact I got black sides so I would force myself to not look at them! and it helped in the long run. I guess I sort of went completely opposite of the flow when it comes to orientation training.

I know it’s sort of hard to fathom... "How the hell do you fly the whole thing?" Well, hard to explain... This is where taking cues from the main shaft and rotor disk comes in. Honestly, this part is more a mind game then anything, the more you think about what you are trying to do the more you screw up. Sometimes you need a distraction, not like you wife throwing stuff at you complaining you spend too much time with your helis... no not that kind of distraction. You need a distraction to make you think LESS and focus on flying the thing instead of how to fly the thing. I learned that one through years and years of learning to master difficult activities (such as free skiing, guitar and flying 1:1) the more you think the more you screw up! I know it sounds odd but sometimes something as simple as your phone ringing can do the trick.

The less brain power you use to think about your fingers and your tax return the more you use on coordination and awareness. Remember, you are human and you can only use so much of your brain at a time, this has EVERYTHING to do with learning. Stay cool and practice otherwise you are your own worst enemy.

Practice, Practice, Practice! AT LEAST 1 hour a night on the sim!

[laoch33]

Haaha! Thanks you two. This was actually what I was hoping to hear believe it or not I'll do that, practice practice practice! Piro hovering is my new meditation ... I said that to my girlfriend at the weekend.. wonder if she bought it

[BaconRaygun]

Dude, it really is meditation! If you know anything about meditation the technique you would use to induce a meditative state is identical (minus the eyes closed part) to what you need to do to help your mind learn more efficiently. It’s just done in a different way... learn to clear your mind and the rest will follow.
And that’s the attitude that will help you learn!

Heli phylosophy 101 LOL

[DKS_ONE]

I'm definitely gonna start doing more slow piro's to gain better understanding of orientation. Perhaps just letting go of alot of tension will be the ticket. Will try alot more on sim first, but eventually for real. If you take cues from disc and main shaft first, how do you know what inputs to make? You still need to know where nose is if you're making inputs If your technique works real well I just wanna know how to do it so I can make it work for me

[clicky]

Shame my last post didn't get in, but in general it was like this:

Yes - I used slow piros for meditation! I've been flying for about 2.5 years before I decided to give them a try. And for whole season or even more was practising them. While others did fly on big field, wide and high, I would take a corner and just practice slow pirouettes - 1-2feel of the ground (being scared and knowing that I can always just slam the throttle stick down to settle it to the ground if something goes wrong). And even didn't fly bigger heli than 450 just to practice it some more! And, as laoch33 said it was really relaxing.

Anyway - I started them as a tight, slow circuits (both directions) and slowly progressed to doing circutis at all. And it all helped me a lot! It improved my flying in all orientations, learned backward, pie dishes (shallow funnels) and piro circuits.

Even now, each time I feel bit depressed or that my skills are slipping down - I would dedicate a battery or two and do some more pirouetting!

BTW - pirouetting with a bit of a wind helps too - it forces you to constantly correct it against the wind!

And - now, the next thing for me is more slow pirouetting - inverted! I have already started with slow CCW circuits at 3-4m altitude

[BaconRaygun]

Originally Posted by DKS_ONE

I'm definitely gonna start doing more slow piro's to gain better understanding of orientation. Perhaps just letting go of alot of tension will be the ticket. Will try alot more on sim first, but eventually for real. If you take cues from disc and main shaft first, how do you know what inputs to make? You still need to know where nose is if you're making inputs If your technique works real well I just wanna know how to do it so I can make it work for me

Well... It works because the heli isn’t invisible. I take cues from the disk and shaft but I still see the whole heli as its merely inches below my actual focus point. I also don’t just stare at the disk, I look at the whole heli with a bias towards the top, I glance at the tail and nose as well as other parts of the heli... You gotta understand that this is all happening a few times a second, that’s why it works.

Honestly the bigger part of it (at least I think so) is not where on the heli you look but what's going on inside your head. I wish I could explain this better.... Did you by chance see that movie 'love guru'? I know, it sort of sux but oddly enough they explain the 'distractions' that I was talking about in my original post about 100 times better than I can.

IDK how much this next bit is gonna help but here goes.

When I was trying to nail all 4 upright orientations I would hover tail in then side in then the other side and finally nose in. I was trying to fly the heli in all 4 orientations.

Then I tried piro hover... at first it was hard as hell, even though I could hover in all 4 all day long I couldn’t piro slowly without being all over the place. So I did something un-conventional... I basically hovered tail in and relaxed my eyes, went into sort of half a day dream and started again, I stopped thinking about slow piro hover and started just doing it... without thinking much.
I was now flying the heli tail in... but I was Piro hovering. WTF? Yeh man, if it makes any sense at all, I stopped trying to fly the heli in all orientations and convinced myself that its all the same thing (because it really is, it’s your perception that changes, the controls always do the same thing). Once I was able to overcome my instinctual tendency to try to hover the heli in all orientations (thinking, 'ok I'm hovering side in' instead of 'OK, I'm just hovering...') I was able to actually do it.
Confusing as hell? You bet... But it’s the best way I can explain it.

I'm working on doing all this stuff inverted now, it aint easy but I'm getting it. Still fighting myself every step of the way.

Also, tell yourself what you are doing wrong verbally while flying. I know this also sounds weird but here is a fact for you. (Yes, there have been scientific studies that proved this, that’s why I say FACT)
-When you try to memorize something by simply reading it to yourself you are stimulating only 1 sense. That is your sense of vision...
-When you try to memorize something by reading it out loud you are stimulating 3 senses... you are reading it, saying it and hearing yourself say it. This is a MAJOR studying technique that works, it works because you are literally amplifying the data that your brain has to interoperate. When you do this you are receiving the same message in 3 different parts of your brain as opposed to one. 3 times the neurons for the same function... trust me, just try it!

When I learned inverted nose in hover I would point out the mistake to myself verbally, as if I was the flight instructor telling my body what to do. I mean I did curse and get mad at first, once I tamed it a bit then I started talking to myself like a crazy dude…
When I started drifting away I would say "Get that nose up!" just like my instructor would when I was coming in hot learning to land a Cessna 10 years ago. Now to your brain "get that nose up" looks like "put that nose down" right? But, if your in the heli hovering inverted (use your imagination LOL) and you start to drift backwards what do you need to do? you need to get that nose up, right? Same thing with piros except you are rotating so it confuses your brain more.

So, tell yourself, or get a friend to sit with you and announce EVERY mistake you make and how to correct it! It works!

Sorry for the long post guys...

[DKS_ONE]

Confusing? Mmmm... only a bit. Believe it or not I get what you're saying and I understand why you think it may be confusing because indeed, there's no other way to explain it really lol! Good explanation, and I agree with the "self-verbal" cues. I'll try that for sure. Thanks very much for your input, very helpful!

[BorgeBorge]

Originally Posted by Vicovaludemero

The less brain power you use to think about your fingers and your tax return the more you use on coordination and awareness. Remember, you are human and you can only use so much of your brain at a time, this has EVERYTHING to do with learning. Stay cool and practice otherwise you are your own worst enemy.

Practice, Practice, Practice! AT LEAST 1 hour a night on the sim!

[kutyafal]

Some say piro hover and travel are one of the most difficult maneuvers. I'm not doubting them. However, practicing them regularly really does open up things in your head and fingers. I've been only simming for 4 months and now working on inverted piro.

However, I have a question. I started - then quickly abandoned - correction by keying off the tail or something. As it was said, I was always late. What I started to do instead is incorporate the stirring move from piro flips but in very small amount. Also basically I'm trying to "fly the disc" instead of looking at parts of the heli. Is that a better approach?

Maybe we could do an online session on this in Phoenix...

[Rªzª]

eventually you'll just learn to key off the helicopter itself. regardless of orientation and tail direction, you'll be able to naturally control, and stirr to make the heli do anything you will it to do.

Just takes LOTs of time to get there. Key off anything you like that helps. I've keyed off the tail myself. Whatever makes your mind click into the orientation and make you able to control it. Eventually you'll just "get it". Just keep working. This takes years.

[kutyafal]

Originally Posted by Rªzª

... This takes years.

Thanks for the encouragement!

This takes some serious dedication and daily practice. Being a musician for over 20 years I understand it well. And the sound of blade farts are music to my ears!

[AcidDrink]

Originally Posted by kutyafal

Thanks for the encouragement!

This takes some serious dedication and daily practice. Being a musician for over 20 years I understand it well. And the sound of blade farts are music to my ears!

You will probably notice soon that helis are piece of cake comparing to getting proficient at a musical instrument.
It takes 2-3 years on average (with dedicated practice) to be able to do most 3D (based on what my friends are doing). 2-3 years will barely get you above beginner level on most musical instruments (as you probably know).
I treat practicing slow piros in place like practicing scales at low bpm. It's pretty much identical learning process, building muscle memory and precision.
Hope it helps

[laoch33]

Thanks for all the replys guys, I didn't expect so many ! I've been doing average an hour a day on phoenix the past couple of months. Was on a free sim for a cupl of months before that. Getting hurricanes better now {not piro hurricanes btw!} as well as all my figure 8's getting more level, getting metronomes now, stationary flips getting more smooth, and messy piro flips for fun ... It's been stormy the past week in Ireland. Between my chronic fatigue and the weather, I've ballss all real flight practice. I havn't flown for bout 10 months now, when i just started with 450's. It's making me so curious as to what I'll be like when I actually get out for real, after all the sim hours One of my last real flights was about a year ago - crashed my hirobo nitro beginner heli when i was practicing piro hover {before I had a simulator} boom strike, exploded heli = new kit. All I have to say is !I love Phoenix!

I'd love to try a phoenix session when one of you guys are on! Not so sure how much phoenix would want to let me connect with America tho it seems to be choosy bout which {non passworded} sessions I get to join :S

All suggestions lead to practice practice practice I totally agree and wish to add my two cents to this after reading a post where someone wanted to practice to get REALLY good;
Quality!- Quality is up there with quantity when trying to learn quickly and efficiently to get really good. It seems to be the same with whatever skill you're learning. I was on the national track squad for sprints and junior squads for hurdles and long jump before my chronic fatigue syndrome. I've done all the decathlon events which were quite technical at times, also did guitar and played lotsa super nintendo which helps with the fingers lol ANYWAY... point is-

- If you TRY hard when doing EACH and every move during practice sessions, you'll get there faster and better I'm gona shut my trap now :#

[kutyafal]

I'm in Europe also if you want to get online with someone in the same time zone. Shoot me a PM and we can hook up. No guarantees though about being able to connect. For some reason it seems to be hit and miss with Phoenix. I could never figure it out and I'm an IT guy now.

[Rªzª]

Originally Posted by AcidDrink

You will probably notice soon that helis are piece of cake comparing to getting proficient at a musical instrument.
It takes 2-3 years on average (with dedicated practice) to be able to do most 3D (based on what my friends are doing). 2-3 years will barely get you above beginner level on most musical instruments (as you probably know).
I treat practicing slow piros in place like practicing scales at low bpm. It's pretty much identical learning process, building muscle memory and precision.
Hope it helps

Oh hell yes. Helis while incredibly difficult to learn in the short term, are very easy to master in the longer term. Compared to music or just about any sport, learning to master helis takes at least 1/5th the amount of time and dedication.

There's the famous 10,000 hour rule to truly "master" a skill. In helis I believe that number is really not more than 1000 to 2000 (hours of real stick time that is) Depends on the person and dedication level of course, but a motivated person can achieve the highest level in this hobby easily in 2000 hours or less

[AcidDrink]

Originally Posted by kutyafal

I'm in Europe also if you want to get online with someone in the same time zone. Shoot me a PM and we can hook up. No guarantees though about being able to connect. For some reason it seems to be hit and miss with Phoenix. I could never figure it out and I'm an IT guy now.

I am in the UK, look for "UK heli fun fly" session, I always make one if I feel like fooling around . Everyone is welcome, but sorry, no planes. I am usually online between 7-9pm GMT, random during the weekends
Would be great if we could get voice chat running, never had too much of success with it in Phoenix.

[kutyafal]

You can always just use Skype for the voice part. It worked well for me. I'm usually on under my username Kutyafal, but tend to be after 10 pm. Just shoot me a PM when you're planning to go online.

[Stillakid]

Slow pirouettes are the one part of the basics I have been putting off, until I read this thread. I have now spent hours of sim time with the rudder trimmed left or right trying to maintain a steady hover. It is getting easier & I hope to start inverted pirouettes next week.
It is actually getting to be fun, if there is any drift I can now manoeuver back to to a given point.
Thanks for the thread.