This is a step you MUST take to progress and nobody but you can decide when to do it! Let's take a quick look at what's been going on in your flying career to date and see what you have to do to move on.

You'll have started off either under instruction or on your own, but now you'll be at the stage where you can hover confidently. This might have happened quickly or, as in my case, over some time. You'll feel at one with the helicopter and be able to control it in all circumstances. If the helicopter wants to run away from you or indeed if it's got further away than you would like, you WILL be able to bring it back without any problem. You probably won't have had any crashes in recent weeks due to pilot error and you'll probably have put some time in on the simulator. In the virtual world you can probably already fly eights and circles! You can control the height of the model when the wind rises and falls. When hovering you can turn the helicopter sideways in BOTH directions and maintain a stable hover. (This will help in orientation when you go into forward flight).

That's about where I was before considering the next step. How many of the above match you?

One of the biggest problems with moving on from hovering is psychological. Up until this point, your pride and joy has been flown close in. Now, you've got to let it fly further away, and higher than before. (In altitude there's safety). This is quite a step to take but you can build up to it gradually.

What I did was identify a couple of markers on the field approximately ten meters away and at about forty-five degrees to where I was standing. In other words, I was standing at the point of a triangle. Then, I'd fly the model out to the right hand marker and back, then out to the left hand marker and back. This is also a good test of your control as you need to keep the speed low and it's difficult to stop exactly over a marker! Having done this for a while I'd fly out to one of the markers, stop, then turn the nose to face the other outer marker. Next, I'd apply a bit of forward cyclic so the model was flying/hovering slowly across in front of me to the other marker. At this marker, I'd stop, turn tail in and bring it back to the start point. Then I repeated the exercise in the opposite direction.

After much practice I developed this into flying out to the left, turning right and over to the right marker, turning left and so on, whilst staying in a hovering mode. This makes the turns easy as all you do is lift the nose slightly to bleed off any excess forward speed and turn by using the rudder on it's own. It also took a while to realise that my feet weren't planted in position in the field and that I could turn myself to make parts of the manoeuvre easier! It's not cheating!

So far, no nose in practice in the real world. That would come in the next phase. After considerable practice of the above which I used to call S's, it was time to move into proper forward flight.