From: johnson@charming.nrtc.northrop.com (Greg Johnson)
Newsgroups: rec.models.rc
Subject: Re: Nose-In Hovering
Date: 12 Oct 92 17:28:13 GMT


There have been several useful ideas on nose-in hovering.  Here are a couple
of thoughts on forward flight.

The first flying skill you acquire is to hover while looking at the
helicopter from behind.  From there, try to move the helicopter slowly side
to side, keeping the nose on a constant heading.  Initially, you might just
try to move it three feet or so left and right.  (Say when you start, the
nose of the helicopter is pointing north.  As you move it left and right,
keep the nose pointing north.)  After the 3-foot motions are comfortable,
see if you can slide it six feet to the left, and hover it there.  Then, go
six feet to the right and hover it.  If you feel like you're getting
stressed out, don't overdo it.

After you can move the heli back and forth reasonably comfortably with the
nose pointing north, try turning the nose just a little as you move the heli
back and forth.  As it goes left to right, let the nose go to (say)
north-northeast.  The heli is still flying pretty much sideways, but the
nose is coming around toward the direction of flight just a little bit.

You can slowly exaggerate this back and forth motion of the helicopter,
letting the figure-8's get bigger and letting nose go more and more toward
the direction of flight, and this develops naturally into a `sort-of'
figure-8 pattern.

I have found that this basic figure-8 pattern has been a staple throughout my
flying experience.  My typical landing approach for quite a while was to go
into back-and-forth figure-8's, with lowering altitude.  Also, when I'm up
high zooming around in forward flight in front of me, big figure-8's across
the sky are my normal `default' pattern.

The other skill to work on in parallel with the figure-8's is to make
circles around yourself.  First, just hover the heli, and have it drift
sideways, keeping it nose-out, so that you fly it nose-out in a complete
circle around yourself.  As you get more comfortable, SLOWLY let the nose
come around, say 20 or 30 degrees, so that the nose is going a little bit
in the direction the heli is flying.  Don't push getting the nose around
the full 90 degrees.  Let the heli drift somewhat sideways.  My first huge
crash was to let the nose go too far in the direction of the heli's flight
path while doing this circling exercise.  Suddenly, the heli was at a
90-degree angle, I was looking at it from the side in a hover, and, well,
it wasn't pretty ;-).  I've found that hovering the heli while looking at
it from the side is even harder than nose-in hovering, so don't get
yourself into that situation just yet.

You can gradually increase the diameter and height of the circles you make
around yourself.

Different topic:  yesterday (Sunday), I was having great times practicing
slow switchless inverted flight, when suddenly I ran out of gas and the
engine quit!  Oy.  My Shuttle currently has that familiar stepped-on snail
look.  :-(.  I was in an all-fired rush to get in one last flight before I
had to leave the field to get home, and didn't do my usual pre-flight.
Took off without putting gas in the tank!  Dumb!  Oh well.  Haven't
seriously crashed in a while, so the heli budget isn't sucking fumes at the
moment.  So, I should be up again this coming weekend.

Greg Johnson