Mike's Helicopter Page

Click here for a page on Eco Piccolo electric micro helicopter	Click Here for a page on Thunder Tiger Raptor IC powered 30 size helicopter

Flying model helicopters is a fantastic hobby. Helicopters are very complex, both mechanically and aerodynamically. They are very difficult to fly and very, very expensive to crash, which lends a certain element of exiting risk to the process of learning to fly them. It takes a lot of fiddling about to get them set up and flying well, which occupies the long dark evenings.

The basic difficulty with helicopters is that every control input has an effect on all the other controls, so that you have to learn to use throttle, collective pitch, cyclic pitch and rudder together.

To help you do this the helicopter has a gyro that stabilises the tail, and is flown by a computerised radio that allows you to mix the throttle and pitch servos to keep the rotor speed constant, and mixes the rudder servo to compensates for the changes in torque on the fuselage as the collective changes the power output to the rotor.

So, playing with model helicopters involves risk, expense, flying, a high level of skill and good co-ordination, mechanical ability, messing with computers, driving a car that always smells slightly of nitromethane and spending lots of time in the great outdoors expending very little physical effort with likeminded technoheads messing with slightly dangerous machines with lots of switches, buttons that make beeping noises when you press them and flashing lights whilst making lots of noise and smoke. What could be better.

How I got into it:

I've always been fascinated by helicopters, and as my theory on life is that you shouldn't get old wishing you'd always done something, I decided to have a go at flying one. First I looked at the How Stuff Works website for info on how they work and how to control them. Then I went to Tiger Helicopters, who are based in Shobdon Airfield near Leominster for a trial lesson. This costs about £100 for a briefing and a 20 minute flight. You get to fly around for a few minutes and then have a go at hovering. It was excellent fun and I would reccomend it to anyone.

The Briefing	Hovering

The downside is that it costs about £200 per hour to learn, and you need 40 hours to get a licence, I think £8000 is a bit steep, especially as I already own a glider, and I can't see that flying helicopters can possibly be as much fun, and gliding is much cheaper.

Around this time a friend of mine told me he'd got into radio controlled model helicopters, and I thought that sounded like a much cheaper and safer alternative, so started to look into it. I had made and flown models as a kid, but helicopters had always seemed like an impossible dream.I finally got round to this in July 2001following a pneumothorax, after which I was banned from flying gliders for 6 weeks.

There are a lot of fantastic websites out there about RC Helicopters, and I don't intend to replicate the information in them, but here are the links to the best information I found.

There are a large number of excellent sites on the web, R-C Helicopter Fever covers just about everything, also this excellent site for beginners that mainly covers the Kyosho Nexus. These articles by Colin Mill were very useful.I also got this Free Simulator, which was a good start, but eventually I took the plunge and went to Rotorsport in Ledbury and bought a JR Radio and a CSM Simulator. This allows you to plug your radio transmitter into an interface that connects to the parallel port on your computer, so that you can practice using your radio to fly the helicopter and setting it up using all the various settings on the radio transmitter.I practiced on this for a few weeks before buying a helicopter.

I now own 4 model helicopters, 2 Thunder Tiger Raptor 30 size Helis, an Eco Piccolo electric powered indoor Heli and a Bell 222 Scale Model Helicopter.

Click on the links below for further info:

Eco Piccolo	Thunder Tiger Raptor

This is the latest addition to the fleet, a Century Bell 222 with Century Hawk mechanics, complete with retracts

After 18 months of flying whenever weather permits, I can hover proficiently, fly it around and do figure eights as long as it doesn't get too far away, and do something that looks a bit like a circuit if you squint a bit. I can fly nose in and do pirouettes as long as it's not too windy.

I recently bought a radio controlled plane. Someone from the club put me on a buddy box, took it off and checked it out, then gave me control. I did a few figure of eights, a couple of loops, did a couple of circuits and then landed it. Compared to a helicopter, flying a plane is as easy as falling off a log.