Since I was a boy I was fascinated by RC air planes and a few years later by RC helicopters. Back then flying such a helicopter was one of the most challenging thing one could do in an RC hobby. There was no gyro, the helis were heavy and expensive and the remote controls were not computerized as they are today. Because of the high costs I never started to think about building and flying such a heli until a few years ago where I finally bought a kit.
Unfortunately I never found time to start building it until a few weeks ago where I finally decided to buy a new remote control: Spectrum DX7 and I made pretty good progress. After some help setting up the heli I was able to fly it. A few tries later disaster stroke when my heli caught some wind pushing it up a yard or so and until I cut of the power the heli already flew backwards and hit a chair with the main rotor. Eventually I decided that this heli is too advanced for me and so bought a plug-n-play heli: Blade 400-3D. The instruction showed detailed how to plug in the RC receiver, to test the configuration and to configure the RC transmitter. After charging the LIPO battery I was good to go. Luckily from the first heli I had the attachable Training Gear which is a extended cross with hollow balls on the end to widen the heli's stand so that when it tilts or land hard that it will not damage the heli as much. I took them an attached them to the new heli.
In the first few flight attempts I was mostly busy getting the heli to hower as stable as possible so that I did not have to focus on too much. Every time the heli was behaving unexpectedly I just cut off the power and it will land nicely due to the training gear. Eventually I got everything configured right and I could actually try to fly it. The challenge flying a RC heli is due to its unstable nature. Like this little toys where one or more metal balls have to move around by tilting the frame they are in. If a heli is told to move to the left it will keeping on doing that and one has to move to the right to stop it. The same for moving forward. This makes flying a heli a constant struggle to keep it stable. Eventually I got accustomed to it and that leads to smaller corrections and so to a smoother flight.
Another unexpected problem was that when I was standing behind the heli that I did try to move the back with the rudder because it was closer to me. It took me some time to understand that the rudder will turn the heading of the front.
Now I am able to fly my heli standing behind him and keeping it quite stable even with some wind. The next thing I need to figure out is how to control the pitch better because only one tick on the RC transmitter makes the heli move up from the ground to over my head with makes it very hard to control.
The next steps are to control the RC heli when it is facing me (standing in front of it). There all the controls (except the pitch) are reversed meaning to make the heli go left that I need to move the stick to the right. Remember that the heli is unstable and a wrong correction makes the problem worse. Now I guess I need to setup my old PC heli simulator to get used to it before trying it out on the real thing.
Have fun - Andy