freestyle
Veteran
Location: Redmond WA USA
| synchronizing cyclic commandsI started out by thinking in terms of 90 degree increments, as you described above. With practice the transitions get smoother (both in my mind and the helicopter itself). I also reduced my pirouette rate so that it's the same as my roll rate. This feels really slow at first, but it makes everything easier to coordinate.
start tail-in, flip forward with left rudder and ease it to right cyclic
the heli goes to knife-edge, skids in, pointing left, ease to aft cyclic
the heli goes inverted, tail-in, ease from aft to left cyclic
the heli goes knife-edge, skids out, pointing right, ease from left for forward cyclic
the heli gets upright and tail-in again
The start side-in or nose-in, etc.
The idea of using full rudder stick deflection with low rates is an idea that Curtis Y shared at a fun-fly a couple years ago. He was (maybe still is?) gradually increasing the rudder ATVs (and thus the pirouette rate) over time as his comfort level increased, with the goal of eventually getting the piro rate up to where the heli is a blur. There's a couple advantages to holding maximum input. With modern gyros, it means that the piro rate will always be consistent, so the cyclic movements will always happen at the same rate. There's no need to adjust the rudder input, so you effectively have only three controls to worry about (collective, fore/aft cyclic, lateral cyclic). Turning up the ATVs over time (or the dual rates, same difference) provides a nice way to push up the difficulty level at whatever pace you're comfortable with.
The only drawback to matching the piro rate with the roll rate is that I've built up some mental reflexes that are triggered by the angle of the heli's rotor disc (which is not the thing you want to be getting your cues from) rather than the heli's heading (which IS the thing you want to be getting your cues from). The reason this is bad is clear when I try to do pirouetting loops where there's multiple pirouettes during a single loop. The orientation cues I was relying on in flips don't help in that case. The heading cues are still there, but without the same orientation cues, it ends up feeling very very different from pirouetting flips. (I hope that made sense....) I had hoped that flipping practice would carry over into looping more than it did. I'm sure it didn't hurt, of course, but I think I'd probably be better off if I'd gone to a higher pirouette rate sooner, so the pirouette rate and the roll rate would not be identical. I have a hard time moving away from that crutch now.
For pirouetting loops, I tend to fall back on 180 degree increments, pulling back while the heli is pointing forward, pushing forward while the heli is moving tail-first. I sometimes make corrections with left or right cyclic, but I mostly avoid lateral cyclic commands during piro loops. This is cheating, but you gotta start somewhere.  |
