You’ll have progressed beyond hovering in all its variations. If you haven’t mastered nose in hovering, don’t worry its not an issue, this is something you can practice as your skills develop. You’ll be able to fly around the field in any direction you want and this will include turning the helicopter into NOSE IN turns. You’ll be able to control the speed and height of the heli and bring it back to you under full control. In short, YOU are in control and more importantly you’re SAFE.

Early summer (2004), just after I’d bought the Raptor, Rick and I spent half an afternoon just doing approaches. This was great practice to develop positional awareness and precision. We placed a marker on the field about fifty feet out, a safe distance, flew a circuit and practiced the approach from the left and the right. The idea was to angle the approach at about 45 degrees and finish in a stationary hover about three feet off the deck and above the marker. This is NOT as easy as it sounds but is satisfying when you get it right! I began to notice as the afternoon progressed that I became less concerned about the flying as I was focused on the approach. It was becoming automatic. Are you there yet?

Make sure you’ve set your Idleups correctly in your transmitter. These days I’m using a RevMax engine governor to control the head speed but I still have throttle curves set in Idleup 1 in case the RevMax fails! Normal flight mode is used for starting, spooling up and basic hovering only. Any flying around is done in Idleup1, and aerobatics are done in Idleup2. Normal mode allows the engine to idle, providing the throttle trim is at the mid position, and the “hover point” is at mid stick. Bottom stick produces about -4 degrees and top stick about +9 degrees of pitch. Hovering head speed is about 1600 RPM. Idleup1 gives a head speed of about 1750 RPM, and -5 to + 9. Idleup2 gives about 1800 RPM and -9 to +9, with the hover point at about 75 % stick. Idleup1 and 2 do NOT allow the engine to idle.

Make sure your heli’s trimmed for hovering AND forward flight. With modern transmitters you can program different trims for each flight mode so this is simple to sort out. Make sure, when in forward flight, the heli flies level with no tendency to roll, pitch up or pitch down. Heading Hold gyros are great at keeping the tail trimmed in all flight modes.

Finally, I’ll only post manoeuvres that I can do on these pages. If I can do them, so can you! Like everything else, plan what you’re going to do and practice on the sim first. Most importantly, think about what you’ll do if things go wrong, plan an escape route!

I correspond with a lot of people about helis and one of them is Mike. He lives in the south of England and first contacted me about a year ago. His claim to fame is that he’s in his seventies and has only recently started flying helis! I dropped him a mail about a month ago to tell him what I’d been up to and my new attitude, “If I can do it on the sim, I can do it for real”. His response was amazing! He could do loops and rolls on the sim but had never dared do it for real. The day he picked up my mail he’d been out there and done it all for the first time! And no crashes!

If you’re up for it read on, what could POSSIBLY go wrong!