R/C Helicopters
 

Just wanted to start a thread on anyone interested in R/C Helicopters.

Thinking about venturing into the foray. I've flown R/C airplanes for years but have recently become intrigued by the helicopter thing. We shall see...

I flew airplanes for over 20 years and got into helicopters about five years ago. I started off with the Blade CP with flat bottom blades, it was one of the hardest helis to fly. Since I have flown alot of electrics and Nitros. If your interested a good first heli would be a Raptor 50, Trex 600 or even the Hirobo SDX (very stable). As far as Electrics a good one would be the Trex 500. Be careful though, helis are addictive!

I had a blade cp for a bit.. Its a pretzel now..

Oh man I hate addictive. Always seems to cost me a lot of money...

Yeah I hit the dirt brakes on mine many times, the end finally came when i got real good with it, I tried doing a loop, the loop turned into a figure 9, almost pulled it off though if I had another 25 ft of air, simply it was the limit of the flat bottom blades, and a case of feeling stupid at the time!

I don't know anything about RC helos...but this looks hard

It takes practice, Jason Krause is one of the top heli pilots in R/C...

YouTube - raptor 90 Alan Szabo jr
This is a great video of Alan Szabo with the Raptor 90, it is several years old (note the long 72mhz TX antannae) but it is still very impressive!

Like many (most?) everybody starting as a little kid had the 2 stroke .40 size airplanes for many years, got pretty good at aerobatic R/C planes before I was old enough to fly the real birds.

I recently was introduced to r/c helicopters as they seem to be everywhere due to the better electronics / batteries / reduced cost. Totally different beast from the bigger gas r/c planes I was used to, but is a fun learning curve. I started with the Falcon 40 (exceed) as I didn't want to spend a lot of money. Buy some additional blades from the start. Took me almost two weeks of occasional flying before I could master hovering, but once you get the feedback routine into your brain you will be fine.

My single biggest advice is to fly in a *big* room. I kept on wondering why after 30 seconds it would go wild and I couldn't control the thing anymore, but those little things create severe wake turbulence and make it difficult to control unless your room is big enough to dissipate the vortices.