Piro Flip help!

[jakeaheli]

Hey guys,

Just put together a video of me practising some piro-flips. This is a move that took me some time to get together. I began practising half-piro flips which slowly turned into full ones once my brain understood the pattern and finger memory kicked in.

I want the 3d experts to chime in please. How or what can i improve on in order to get this move looking really good?

Piro Flip Practice (2 min 30 sec)

Thanks for any help!
Jake

[jakeaheli]

So i presume I'm doing them correctly and am on my way to getting them down

[P@reez]

Yes they are looking pretty good! Congrats! To continue to improve and clean them up even more, you can try keying off different elements. Right now it seems you enter your upright to inverted flip with a forward elevator and the inverted to upright with backward elevator (Exactly how I started mine btw). So you can now try entering the flip in other orientations (say left aileron, right aileron etc). This will help when you transition to doing the continuous flips.

There's really an infinite ways to go in mastering pflips. Stationary, moving around, disc tumbling towards you, to the left/right, piro pogos, piro rainbows, piro tictocs.... And then all of this with rudder in the opposite direction...then reversing rudder direction mid flip....

[ic-racer]

I just taught myself this spring. The difference between that and what I see in yours is I do the first stir like you (when the tail comes around) but I do the second stir when the nose comes around. When done this way both stirs start at the top and go around, so you can just keep stirring in a full continuous circle of the stick with no pauses. Maybe what I am doing is not a real piro flip but it is fun.

[jakeaheli]

Originally Posted by P@reez

Yes they are looking pretty good! Congrats! To continue to improve and clean them up even more, you can try keying off different elements. Right now it seems you enter your upright to inverted flip with a forward elevator and the inverted to upright with backward elevator (Exactly how I started mine btw). So you can now try entering the flip in other orientations (say left aileron, right aileron etc). This will help when you transition to doing the continuous flips.

There's really an infinite ways to go in mastering pflips. Stationary, moving around, disc tumbling towards you, to the left/right, piro pogos, piro rainbows, piro tictocs.... And then all of this with rudder in the opposite direction...then reversing rudder direction mid flip....

Thanks! Good to know for starts that I'm getting the hang of them. I see what you mean. I have tried entering the pflip left/right aileron and gotten confused lol Is there a video you could point me to to demonstrate this?

Yeah for now i think i'll stick to left rudder although i don't think it would hurt to slowly start implementing right rudder moves too.

Originally Posted by ic-racer

I just taught myself this spring. The difference between that and what I see in yours is I do the first stir like you (when the tail comes around) but I do the second stir when the nose comes around. When done this way both stirs start at the top and go around, so you can just keep stirring in a full continuous circle of the stick with no pauses. Maybe what I am doing is not a real piro flip but it is fun.

I watched a couple of videos and noticed that i was doing them slightly different. Now that you explained this to me it makes sense lol. I'll have to practise entering when the nose points to me and in conjunction with what P@reez said too (Enter from different orientations)

A clear video would help me with this.

Thanks guys

[gstoneberg]

Originally Posted by ic-racer

I just taught myself this spring. The difference between that and what I see in yours is I do the first stir like you (when the tail comes around) but I do the second stir when the nose comes around. When done this way both stirs start at the top and go around, so you can just keep stirring in a full continuous circle of the stick with no pauses. Maybe what I am doing is not a real piro flip but it is fun.

Sorry, I had to re-edit this as what ice-racer describes is correct. The OP is putting an extra half piro in the flip while inverted that is not present in first half. So it's a little asymmetric. It's not a big deal while you're starting, but you may want to see if you can change it now before it gets too locked into muscle memory.

Another thing to practice is doing a full rotation between each half flip working to make the disk absolutely flat. Also incorporate full rotation half flips into your flight routine. Many of us use half piro's half flips every time we go inverted, but you can also use full piro's half flips for transitions and it will help your piro flips. It does change the orientation you exist the flip though, so be ready for that.

I did not learn both directions of piro flips at the same time but am working on right turn piros now in the sim. I have not done one in real life yet, but hope to at least start using right turn full piro half flips soon. I'm not sure if it would be better to learn both at once, but it was very hard to force the stir to go the other way for me learning them later.

[P@reez]

Originally Posted by jakeaheli

Thanks! Good to know for starts that I'm getting the hang of them. I see what you mean. I have tried entering the pflip left/right aileron and gotten confused lol Is there a video you could point me to to demonstrate this?

I've not found a video specifically teaching this but I did find a slow motion pflip video where the very first flip is started with right aileron. I hope it helps.

RC Heli Piro Flips Slow Motion How To for Reference (4 min 28 sec)

[jakeaheli]

Originally Posted by P@reez

I've not found a video specifically teaching this but I did find a slow motion pflip video where the very first flip is started with right aileron. I hope it helps

Thank-you for this video yes it did because this guy shows it in slow motion in different spots which is useful. Everything helps me at the moment lol
I think I'm gonna focus on left rudder for now until i get the stir down packed.

If i do practise the right rudder at the same time i think this would get pretty confusing.
Regardless, thanks for all your help people. I hope to get this down soon and put another video up with my progress

I found this video here which has helped me understand how to stir off the nose when inverted -

#2 HOW TO - PiroFlip - Mode 2 (1 min 5 sec)

Cheers
Jake

[Mitch Booth]

I can not for the life of me seem to get the collective timed!!! I can get the feel for a half piro flip that Nick Maxwell explains in his video and can do the halves with no issues but when I actually stir the cyclic and pull left rudder my brain can't seem to get the collective up and down.....? I'm beginning to think my brain is just not wired correctly! Any thoughts or opinions on how to improve or progress?

Mitch

[gstoneberg]

For me it just takes time. I would say I had 12 months of work in the sim before I began to control the collective even passably well. It was some time (months) later when I began to master being able to go to zero pitch on demand (in general) and it revolutionized my piro flips. However, I'm still mastering holding the flips in one place. I just am not consistent enough to risk bringing them down low as I still lose it from time to time. Getting there slowly.

[Mitch Booth]

Okay. I appreciate your response. I'm brand new (10 months) to RC helis and just now able to do figure 8's on the sim inward and outward in the 4 orientations. Not even close to trying that IRL with my Blade 230 yet. That's one thing the learning curve to fly these things takes forever or maybe I'm just more dense than the average guy. I literally spend hours a day on the simulator.

Mitch

[gstoneberg]

Mitch, this hobby is hard, and we all learn at different rates. Don't be too hard on yourself and don't compare yourself to anybody else. Enjoy the journey. If you haven't already, take a read through the first few posts of the all 8s and funnels thread, https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=531380, as it describes a great way to structure your practice for maximum effect. Before I started following that approach I wasted a lot of time goofing around in the simulator and not making a lot of progress. To be honest, I still goof around a fair bit in the simulator. The slow piro training in that thread is the thing that radically changed my flying and reduced the amount I spent in repair parts. Good luck, you'll get there.

[Raptorapture]

There's good news and bad news. The good news is there's a silver bullet. The bad news is it's time

To get where you are in that time is better than most. However, you are going to need to translate that to the field. I'd be careful if spending so much time sim'ing that negative reinforcement is not happening.

The issue of getting collective in the right direction I find takes a long time. It seems to be more difficult than just whether skids are facing up or down. For some reason orientation of the tail also manages to confuse the mind and needs to be learnt.

I believe it is very difficult to teach the mind more than one thing at a time. So you need to get to an almost unconscious level on all inputs other than maybe the one you're wanting to learn or adjust/fine tune. It can be quite difficult to vary an input beyond what is learnt for a move once ingrained.

Collective is in my opinion the most challenging of all for two reasons. Firstly, it has the least feedback. It causes little orientation change and has a visual delay factor compared to the others making it much more difficult if not impossible to fine tune as input is applied. Secondly, it has the highest probability to cause a crash if direction is incorrect. The delay factor for feedback compounds the crashing risk.

I'm currently working on learning collective for all orientations. I'm almost there on learning aileron and elevator for all orientations. Still working on tail but it's become much more reliable with time. I'd say this has been about a one year journey for this stage of my learning. I've promised myself not to finish piro flips without first mastering all inputs in all orientations thereby freeing myself from the timing trap.

Without doubt collective is the most difficult of all in that journey.

Wishing you success