How-To: Rolling Circles with Video

[Rªzª]

The rolling circle. This is a pretty intimidating maneuver to see, but when you get down to it you'll realize its just a repetition of just a couple of transitions that really are not too hard to do.



Prerequisites:
You should already be very comfortable with inverted forward flight. And I mean COMFORTABLE. You should not have to think about how to fly inverted at this point.

Circles can be done forwards or backwards, cw, or ccw, and rolling left or right, but I will explain ccw forward circles that roll left into the turn, but these steps can be used to learn any orientation or direction.

1. Start by flying a normal upright ccw circuit
2. When the heli reaches 3 o'clock on the circuit (if 12:00 is the furthest away from you) do a 180 roll to the left (into the turn) so the heli is now inverted ff. Try to continue with your ccw circuit. Note: If you've never done this before it will be very odd to do at first (your rudder, elevator, and cyclic all reverse as you are now inverted), and you'll probably end up needing to reset (or crashing ) and starting over. Just take your time learning this transition and keep trying until you can do this and continue with your ccw circuit.
3. Continue your circuit and maybe go around a couple of times until you are comfortable and back in sync.
4. When the heli reaches 3'oclock again roll to the left back to upright, then continue your circuit. As before go around a cpl times if you need to get your head together.
5. Repeat this over and over as many times as needed to get to the point that you can do this transition back and forth (once per circuit) relatively seamlessly without losing or gaining too much altitude, and your circuit remains a constant and even circle. Just stick with the 3 o'clock position to do the transitions at first and don't try to progress until you have this down.
6. Once your very comfortable with the 3 o'clock position, start doing the same transitions at 9 o'clock instead and start over. At 9 o'clock the heli will be nose in so you'll want to work just as hard at getting a good transition in this orientation.
7. When comfortable with the 9 o'clock transition start doing them at 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock.
8. When your are comfortable with that add two more transitions at 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock. If necessary just work on those two transitions for a while, then start trying to do all 4.
9. As you can see at this point you are basically already doing a rolling circle. If you get good at the 4 transitions you probably have enough of the timing down to start trying constant rolls.That's about it. Just break it down into a single transition one per circuit then start building from there. You will figure out the stick movements you need as you go. It's actually a very complex coordination of stick movements between the elevator, aileron, rudder, and collective, but the more you just play with it the easier it will become and you won't have to try to memorize what to do ahead of time.

As always try new things on a sim first. It's really easy to get disorientated when learning a rolling circle so make sure you are comfortable on the sim before going for a real try at it.

[Aonaen]

Many Thanks!!!