Alright! Now you are officially an RC Helicopter pilot if you have gotten this far. You can fly a helicopter around and keep it in the air for a whole battery pack. So, what’s next? Your rotor blade has been flat this whole time. How about we get into some banked turns? Yeah, I thought that would get your blood pumping lol. It’s time to take the helicopter about 20’-30’ up and let her rip. You are not going to be going at full speed, but will going to be going fast enough to get the heli to bank in the turns. For this, and again you plane pilots will like this, you have to get going in a line, we will say from your left to right, and you will have to give the helicopter some left cyclic, left rudder, and you will have to pull the nose up all at the same time in the turn. That’s a lot of stuff to do in a single turn isn’t it? Don’t worry; this is again where the sim comes in. Practice going straight and banking a turn. Unlike a plane you will have to use the rudder to slightly bring the tail around, but the left cyclic while pulling back is pretty much the same as a plane.
These figure 8’s will be just like the ones we did in the last lesson, only faster and the 8 will be bigger. You can start by warming up and just slowly fly your helicopter around and get into your figure 8 pattern. As you are flying, start going a little faster and a little faster. You will notice as you are doing this you will have to put in more and more rudder, left & right. You will also have to pull back on the cyclic more, but you will be throwing the helicopter around in the air, banking the turns, and have full control while you’re doing it.
As you are doing these, you will notice the little thing we talked about earlier. It will be even more pronounced with higher speeds and more pitch. What is it you ask: Translational Lift. You will notice as you are flying into the wind, you will have to lower the collective to keep from climbing. When flying away from the wind, you will have to give it more collective to keep it off the deck. By now, you should have a pretty good handle on how to control it.
