Learning to fly - timeline?

[Ninjaboy]

Originally Posted by clank72

But isn't buying a "bigger heli" an excuse for not learning basics on a smaller heli? (So it flys for you?)

I hear a lot of advice on "go big". But if one is not able to perform well with a 450, then how would "going big" solve the problem.

So when you switch from your 700 and go to a 250 you can't fly it?

Just curious .

The way I look at it. If I can do everything on a 450, then I could fly anything right?

Bud when I learnt to do auto's I could never get it right on a 500... I used a 700, got the auto right first time. From then autos became a piece of cake on the 500. My point is, bigger helis are more forgiving. If you learn something on a bigger heli it easily translates to a smaller 1. If u can fly a 700 u can fly 250

[truefranco]

I've been playing video games since i was a child. I'm sure that's the reason i learned to hover in 1 hour after build my first heli. Learned forward fly in 2 hours, and backward fly in 3 hours. Or maybe i just born to do this :-)

[Down Low]

There is certainly some very good points in martin_05's methods.

In my very early stages of learning one of the first things that came to me was the simple fact that hovering a heli and flying a heli are two different things.
For me, hovering was BORING!!! So naturally I wanted to actually fly around as much as possible, and began focusing on that.
Now, obviously hovering in all orientations is a needed and valuable skill, but in my learing experience it was not nessesary to "master" hovering to learn to fly, and in fact learning to fly around and control the heli inharrently made me better at hovering. I also learnt to flip and roll long before inverted hovering. Inverted hovering did indeed happen as a by product of slowing down flips and rolls and eventually stopping them, but even more than that inverted forward and backward flight actually helped me master inverted hovering even better. If I was attempting an inverted hover and the heli started to get away from me, I could now just fly out of it either forward or backward, bring it around and stop it again.

Now, due to circumstance, this was all done on the sim. Phoenix is all I had to sate my heli addiction for almost two years. It felt like an eternity. However I am now glad for it, for now I knew how to completely control a heli in any orientation before ever taking my first flight. All that waiting and training paid off.

Here is my 18th flight on my first heli. The sun was is my face here so I had to bail on a couple of orientations but no biggie.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DjJyz0uTJc[/ame]

In the end, for me, my real heli learing time line is going to be pretty fast, but only because I was forced to take the time to learn completely on the sim first. Now instead of crashing a 600 size heli every flight or two, I can instead buy more heli's becuase I will not crash my 3D Plus often. Not even close.
Realistically though, few if any people will spend 200+ hours on a sim before flying a real RC heli. But if you do... You will likely save a crap load of money in the long run.

[martin_05]

Originally Posted by Down Low

There is certainly some very good points in martin_05's methods.

Thanks. I am glad to learn that someone took a similar approach and had good results.

-Martin