should I persue or not.

[sing23]

I am 68 years old now and I have been flying or should I say crashing helis for the past few years. I am wondering if I just started too late. I have heard about Stick Mover, and wonder if that might help. Was going to go to Tood Bennettes 'school but he stopped teaching. Please any sugestions.

[JWeber]

You're not too old. Align has a school that they put on at fun flies. You don't have to fly Align to attend. I attended at IRCHA and it was helpful. There's also a Facebook group called Progressive Heli Learning that hosts a sim room on Next once or twice a week. That's free training. They stream it live and you can watch after the fact if you like. Lot's of good tips there.

Also, YouTube is your friend as well as this thread.

https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=531380

[Ah Clem]

Sing23,

It's been a very long time sir!

No, you are not too old. I am 62 now and still at it.

I flew your Warp a few years ago...

[mgrezmer]

The Align crew will be teaching the three days prior to IRCHA on the IRCHA grounds and they are definately worth the money.

I was in the class last year and no one was unhappy with the program. The student skills and needs varied widely. 68 is not too old but it may take longer to come up to speed.

Good luck!

[sing23]

Thanks for all who gave advice, and Ah Clem I as so flustrated have gotten no where.

[sing23]

Thanks, does anyone no where the next align school will be? I am retiring and have several helies and would like to stop fixing and fly a little.

[FrankFuss]

Hi sing23, I am 72 and have been flying helis for about four years. I was too nervous at first and here is how I was able to progress.

1. Get a good simulator, I use AccuRC.
2. Use ArchmageAU's training thread as a guide. I did not follow it exactly, but it was a good place to start.
https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=531380
3. Sim at least 20 minutes a day.
3. Get a FBL controller with Rescue, I use Spirit. Setup your transmitter so you can easily active Rescue. Rescue allows you to be much less nervous and avoid crashing.
4. Setup Rescue with the simulator so you can train yourself to activate it when you are in trouble.

Frank

[wjvail]

Originally Posted by sing23

I am 68 years old now and I have been flying or should I say crashing helis for the past few years. I am wondering if I just started too late. I have heard about Stick Mover, and wonder if that might help. Was going to go to Tood Bennettes 'school but he stopped teaching. Please any sugestions.

You're not too old but not everyone learns at the same rate. Over the years I've seen folks that seem to "get" it very quickly while others seem to take longer to see the light - and it's not age dependent.

Is it possible you are expecting to advance faster than is reasonable? Where is your leaning stalled? How are you crashing? Do you have others flying model helicopters with you?

Also, everyone seems to befit from a good sim especially while learning the basics.

[TwitchyBum]

You dont stop because you get old but you get old because you stop.Jason.

[luckyflyer]

66 yo and still flying. I'm just a big sky flyer but that grin of satisfaction is there after every landing. Don't give up you can do it, there may be a local flyer that can give you some help. Also make sure that your glasses and or sunglasses are up to date, even a little blurry vision is a bad thing with helicopters.

[Ah Clem]

Sing23,

I see from the posts above that you are getting some great advice from a lot of good people!

The simulator is probably the number one thing to invest in.

AccuRC is great, and provides the best representation of flying an RC helicopter that I have seen in a simulator, to date. FrankFuss mentioned this simulator above and he is absolutely right. You also use your own transmitter with AccuRC, which is very useful and improves your comfort level when flying actual RC helicopters.

When you start flying actual RC helicopters again, make sure that you get help from a competent pilot-not the field hot shot. You want to find people who have smooth-running, well setup helicopters-people who always bring their machines back in one piece. You want the ship set up for a beginner, not for hot 3D. The machine should fly smooth and easy like your old Warp did, five years or so ago (your Warp was a pleasure to fly).

Get a machine for which you can get parts easily (sadly, the Warp is out of production and Compass is gone). Learning to fly is a journey-you will be breaking and bending things occasionally-this will lessen as you move up on the learning curve.

Enjoy the process of learning. Take it slow and easy.

[Ah Clem]

Please excuse me, Sing23,

You did mention in a PM that you already had a SIM...

[seanh]

NO YOU ARE NOT TOO OLD. May not be able to fly the hard 3D smackdown at a competitive level...but you can still have a great time flying til you get the shaky tremors.


If you're not crashing, you're not trying to learn hard enough...don't worry about it...part of the hobby. If it takes a year or two for you to learn how to hover..so what. If you never learn to hover inverted, so what. Have fun.

[sing23]

Ah Clem, I had some old parts and I managed to put it together myself.Now Can anyone give me some tamed down settings?

[sing23]

Ah Clem, managed to put this warp back together myself with some spar parts I had. Does anyone have tamed setting for this Warp?

[sing23]

Originally Posted by Ah Clem

Sing23,

It's been a very long time sir!

No, you are not too old. I am 62 now and still at it.

I flew your Warp a few years ago...

I managed to fix this warp my self, just wondering if anyone can give me some tamed down settings

[Ah Clem]

Sing 23,

My friend, as we discussed years ago when I set up your Warp, no one can just give you settings for it.

After the other guy screwed it up for you, someone needs to go through the entire setup from scratch, then test fly and tune it. I had a good baseline as Adam had done most of it-I just did the final bench adjustments then, over the course of several flights, tuned and adjusted it so that it flew well (and it really flew well).

Someone else's settings transplanted to the machine will not work, and would only be reasonably close if they had the same servos, blades, ESC, gyro, and motor. Even then, it might not be tuned for a beginner.

The reason that Horizon can provide downloadable settings for their ARF helicopters, is that they know what settings work for their own (Spektrum) transmitters, and what servos, blades, gyros and equipment are in their helicopters.

As we also discussed, the Warp is (unfortunately) out of production (it went when Compass went out of business), so if you should crack it up learning, you might not be able to get the parts to fix it. I would learn on something else, then fly the Warp when you get to where you are comfortable.

[sing23]

managed to repair the Warp myself with spare parts. How can I tone this down for a newbie?

[JWeber]

First is lower head speed

Second is to reduce your rates (how far your servos travel when you move the stick.

When I first started I found that I would over correct. I started a method of short stabs at the sticks to see what would happen and then I could correct if necessary. It also prevented me from continuing to make a correction in the wrong direction. Once you get the hang of this, you'll have to unlearn a bit or your flights will not be as smooth as you'd like.

[sing23]

I am really doing the sim 20min at a time four or five times per day. I have put my warp up for now and I sill be using my 450x for now. Starting to see a little progress. Thanks for all the advice, sticking with the sim. Next week I will try some things in the field. Will let you know.