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.

Stryker RED

This is my new Stryker. I haven't clocked it yet but it's in the 90mph range - not ridiculous but respectable. It's a ton of fun to fly, and I did win a pylon race with it on crappy old batteries. I'm using the 35C Hyperion 2200 3S Lipos now, and she really screams. That's the only problem with Strykers - they are LOUD!



E-Flite Six Series 2700kV Motor

2200mAh 3S Hyperion 35C Lipo

HS-81MG servos

Castle BEC

AR500 Receiver

Align 35X ESC (heli ESC, has a nice LVC feature which shuts down slow)

Custom Painted with rattle cans (Testors Metallics, Black and Ruby)

2,3,4 and 6-Channel Helicopters

I really wish the marketing department would call these what they are - the number of channels doesn't really help noobs figure out what it is. Just so you know, the number of channels is how many things you can control on the aircraft - so for example, an airplane with throttle and rudder only is two channels, add an elevator and it's three channels, add ailerons for four channels, control each aileron independently is 5 channels, etc, etc, etc....

On helicopters, there are two channel toys like the Air Hogs. They typically have throttle and rudder control only - so they can go up and down and they can spin around, usually in both directions. These are fun but they are toys.

Above that, we have the fixed-pitch helicopters. There's two types, the coaxial and the normal type. The coaxials helicopters have two sets of rotors on top, which spin in opposite directions, and they don't have tail rotors. Coaxial helicopters almost always have rudder control which is done by speeding up one or the other rotor and turning by the reaction force. These helicopters can be 3 or 4 channels - they all have forward/back, rudder, and throttle. The 4-channel coaxial also has side-to-side control. Coaxial helicopters are naturally stable and very easy to fly - they hover by themselves without pilot input usually.

The "normal style" fixed-pitch helis have a single main rotor on top and a tail rotor. As far as I know, they are all 4-channel helis. They have throttle, rudder, sideways, and front/back control. There's a wide range of these available now, from super easy (the Blade mSR) to fairly difficult (the Novus FP). These typically require a little skill to fly and they need constant management by the pilot - but some like the mSR are super stable, like coaxials.

OK that part is easy to follow - you have helis which fly by controlling throttle and direction, no problem... well, kinda. Since these helicopters change their lift by changing the speed of the blades, they can be difficult to control because it takes time for the motor to ramp up and down, and the pilot will need to be putting in throttle changes very early in order to maintain or change altitudes. Turns out, it's a whole lot better, and faster, to rotate the blades at a constant speed and simply change their angle of attack in order to change lift. This can be accomplished almost instantly. So... we want to control a 5th thing now, the angle of attack on the blades, and we need 5 channels. We call the angle the "collective pitch" of the blades, and these helicopters are more properly called "collective pitch" helicopters rather than 5 or 6 channel. The 6th channel is usually used to control the sensitivity of a gyro which assists the pilot in operating the tail rotor for rudder control.

Generally, we have people start with fixed-pitch helis, usually coaxials. To progress to collective-pitch helis, I recommend you start with a quality simulator rather than the real thing.

These are starter helis for flying indoors:

E-Flite Blade mCX



E-Flite Blade mSR



And this is a starter heli for flying outdoors:

E-Flite Blade SR 120

Is that what you are looking for?