Welcome to Jazzy's Flight Deck!

Are you a beginner RC airplane flier? If you are, I hope to provide valuable information to help you get off the ground! RC flying can be very frustrating, and this is quite normal, so don't let it stop you from enjoying this wonderful hobby! Once you get your plane up there, I promise you will be happy you did it! Please let me know if there's anything you'd like to see here or if you have any questions.

Aircraft listed in bold now have mini-reviews and/or videos.

Over and out!
Jasmine
jasmine2501 at "don'tspamme" netzero dot com

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Simulator is Boring

I hear this comment occasionally - "The simulator is really boring, and I can't stand to use it long enough to learn anything" - here's my response to that.

Are you trying to learn to fly? Or just pass the time? The simulator can be entertaining when your flying is fairly good, but crashing a lot can be very frustrating. This hobby is like that, regardless of simulators, it has always been like that. You do a lot of work, and it sucks and some of it is boring, some of it is difficult, a lot of it is confusing and frustrating, but then after a while, it all starts to click, you stop freaking out about the details all the time, and suddenly... you're having fun! Works that way every time.

So, maybe you just need to work through the training stage and learn to have some fun. In order to train most quickly, you need to practice every day without fail - do not miss a day. The part you will like is this: if your practice is focused and effective, you can only handle 15 minutes of it anyway, so you only need 15 minutes per day. You will improve much faster this way than if you have hour long sessions only once a week.

When you learn to fly on instinct, you'll have a lot more fun. You might not like the simulator still, but you'll be able to fly your real stuff without worrying so much about crashing. Fear of crashing is the single biggest source of stress in this hobby - get over it as soon as possible.

4 comments:

Nux said...

Hey Jasmine,

First of all i'm new to this hobby altough i bought my first RC Heli about 6 years ago. It's A Robbe Moskito sport 2. I first thought it would be easy to fly. But a couple of tries on the Sim changed my first opinion to this hobby. I try your Youtube sim Tips and i hope ik can fly a heli properly within a year, also with the help of your youtube movies. Very nicely done btw.
I have Aerofly deluxe pro simulator but unlike your sim on youtube the helis in Arofly always drift to the left. Is this nearer to a real flight or is this due to the simulator?

Greetings from the Netherlands

Nuxadder

Jasmine said...

In my simulator videos, I'm flying the helicopter, that's why it's not drifting all over the place. Left alone though, most helicopters will begin to drift left due to the force of the tail rotor. You compensate for this in flight by giving right cyclic and by keeping the helicopter leaned to the right a little bit. So if you get the helicopter perfectly level, it will drift to the left. Hovering does not involve perfectly level flight, and you must constantly adjust and the helicopter will never be perfectly level except in a strong cross-wind from the left. So, your simulator is correct, your flying is probably not.

Nux said...

Hey Jasmine,

I was giving the heli right cyclic. I was just wondering of the drifting was normal. And my flying is indeed far from good, haha. But i'm only a week on the simulator.

I set the cyclic trimmer on my transmitter slightly to the right, now it is more stable.

But is this a good or a bad thing?

If i one day fly my real helicopter i don't want to learn flying the wrong way.

Greetings

Nuxadder

PS thanks for the quick reply

Jasmine said...

We should set the trim to eliminate rolling, but it can't eliminate the translating tendency from the tail rotor. See, cyclic trim causes a rolling action, but the tail push is straight to the side, so you can't trim it away. If your helicopter rolls to the right, then you have too much trim, but if it slowly levels and then starts to drift, it's fine.