Triguy
Heliman
Location: Nevada, USA
| After about 10 years of wanting to get into this hobby, here I am, home from my first flights, with a big smile on my face. I've been lurking on these forums for a ridiculously long time, hesitant to make the financial and time investment to learn to fly. I've been flying slope planes for a few years and having fun with that, but kept finding excuses not to get into helis...
Anyways, I've been spending most of my time over the last year in the beginner's forum, the safety forum, and the trex forum (I picked up a 450se).
Today, I went to an empty parking lot, brought the heli a pretty long ways from my truck, moved myself well out of the way, and slowly spooled it up.
Now, the heli is used, so I didn't build it. But I went over all of the standard pre-flight checks I could find on this website. Loctite seemed to be used in all the right places, bent tension felt good, nothing was obviously wrong, and I programmed my radio appropriately - the pitch settings are mild, and I'm only dealing with positive pitch.
My homemade training gear is admittedly a bit big - and I found a flaw in my design (more to that later).
I was blown away by how cool this was. I got it kinda skirting around on the pavement, and for 10 minutes split between two lipos, I slowly motored around close to the ground, getting my orientation, and occasionally bringing the heli a few inches off the ground. Once, I probably kept it 3 inches off the ground for about 20 seconds, all within maybe a 4' x 4' square. Whoah! Once, it was moving backwards and the training gear ball slipped into a crack in the cement. I didn't even hesitate for a moment to kill the motor and move the heli back into my training space - I have all the time in the world to learn to do this. I probably cut the motor 10-15 times when I probably didn't have to. Simply to be safe. That safety forum has instilled the fear in me...
Post-flight, I recognized my training gear design flaw - namely, styrofoam balls instead of whiffle. Now, for people flying on grass, styrofoam is probably fine. But for a guy learning on a parking lot, styrofoam gets eaten up pretty quick. I'll have to do some mods there.
I'm really stoked about this whole process and wanted to share my first flights with the people who have, without their knowing it, provided me most of the information I know about this hobby. So there you have it. I'm off and rocking.
One question for you all. If you keep a flight log (which I intend to), what sort of data do you include? I don't know what will be valuable to know down the road, since I'm still at the beginning of the road. For sports, obviously things like weather, HR, duration, distance, calorie intake, etc, are valuable. But what should I record from these flights? I'm thinking: duration of flights, weather, time of day, observations, how the flight was spent, what was being practiced. What else? Thanks in advance!
(...this is so cool...) |
larning to hover takes alot of time, crashing is gonna happen! keep working in the low hover until you get a feel for it, SLOWY progress to higer altitudes around 6 inches to a foot, then 2ft and so on. you will notice the heli is more stable in higher altitudes because you are out of ground effect. master tail in for a good week or how ever long it takes before attempting nose in, thats when it gets tricky! try to fly in calm conditions at first, small 450s tend to ballon alot in the wind( up and down) pick a blade cx2 so you can practice indoors and learn all the orentaions! happy flying
