Hovering mini tutorial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaD1AkfTwFQ

Contrary to a popular belief, this is a very easy to fly helicopter - hovering included. The only thing you have to do, is to take advantage of its characteristics, rather than trying to fight it.

0. Set up the training flight over the "zebra" on a runway end. This and the runway itself, will provide excellent visual cues, that will substantially increase your spatial orientation and make all drifts/attitude changes more visible.

1. Take note of the relative position of the end of the runway, with regards to GPS antenna and red placard between windshields. Your goal in hovering is to maintain this relative position as smoothly and as precisely as possible.

2. Smoothly add the right amount of left antitorque pedal, while increasing collective before liftoff. Center the cyclic.

3. Immediately after liftoff, apply a bit of left bank with a smooth, small cyclic move. This is to counter lateral drift to the right, created by tail rotor thrust. Hold this left bank (about 2-3 degrees) during hovering. Hold pitch attitude by visual cues.

4. Use small and smooth but very frequent moves on the cyclic, to hold the bird in a constant attitude. Immediately counter any drifts and changes in pitch/bank with small moves.

5. Try to undercontrol, rather than to overcontrol. The inertia of the aircraft really wants it to hold it in one place, all you have to do is to eliminate/counter any small instabilities that will show up. But if you overcontrol and push the bird in any direction hard, then you'll have to fight the inertia to stop the aircraft again.

6. Try to be quick on the stick, but to maneuver the bird slowly. It gives you the time required to perform all the stabilising moves on the cyclic, as well as coordinate collective with antitorque. Also, you won't overstress the bird that way (it IS possible).

7. The rather big aft cyclic movements during lowering down, were to counter nose-down tendency during descend, when I've increased vertical speed. That's an example, how you have to adjust the rate and amount of controls input, to the rate and amount of instability encountered.

8. Always anticipate, what the bird can do next and react in advance, but with a smaller controls input than it would appear to be required.

Have your eyes outside of the cockpit, concentrate on faraway characteristic terrain features.

Observe the surroundings and gauges either with the corner of an eye, or with a quick glance from time to time.

You're in control and you decide, when and where to move the bird - not the other way. Command the aircraft, do not follow it.

It will take A LOT of hours to learn it, but once you'll get it - it will stay forever with you and the satisfaction from the achievement will be great!

Also, purchase a set of rudder/antitorque pedals. While it is possible to fly helicopters with a twist-stick alone (in fact that's how I've learned to hover), it will be MUCH harder without separate pedals. Saitek's are reasonably cheap, accurate and durable. I use them and can recommend, just set the centering spring to minimum force.

In addition to the video description, here are my two posts on the topic, hidden somewhere here:

Small moves on the stick - do not overcontrol and anticipate what the bird can do next and react before it does it - stay one step before the helo and don't allow it to dictate what you should do. Famous translational lift "dip" for example. When slowing down to a hover, have an eye on airspeed indicator and when you see that the critical speed approaches, shift your attention to VSI. Smoothly add the right amount of collective at the first sign of VSI drop. At the same time, when you pull the collective, add some antitorque pedal and you'll maintain full control throughout this critical phase of flight.

Also experiment with the gross weight, for your training sessions. Some prefer it to be light, others like it heavy.

The biggest trouble with setting a helicopter on oilrig is that you have to look close to the bird, to keep an eye on all these funny metal pipes and parts, that are waiting to entangle with rotors on a slightes loss of concentration by pilot, while it would be best to look far away during hovering and nailing that pad with peripheral vision and quick looks only. Also close and relatively high walls and towers surrounding pads on an oilrig tend to mislead with regards to judging helicopter's attitude and movement relative to the pad.

In order to overcome that, try setting up in such a way, where you have only sea directly in front of you, with the oilrig itself left on one side of a helo. Just pay attention to where the tailrotor goes Wink Or try practising landing on land based helipads first, trying to put a bird right in the middle runway "numbers" will be also OK. After you're capable of landing on the numbers, try to squeeze with both skids into a "belly" of "6" on a RWY06 and after mastering that, move onto oilrig itself. The goal is to get used to tight landing spaces and helicopter's movement*, so you'll have on your head only managing the visual distractions provided by oilrig's shape.

Also try not to hover over the pad for the extended periods of time, try landing straight from the flight, with continuous slowing down the airspeed, so you can hit hover and the pad at the same time.

* for example: you're hovering and suddenly ground in front of you moves downward rapidly. Why? Does the helicopter climb rapidly or the tail went down and the bird starts to quickly accelerate backwards? Or: helo is drifting sideways. How much input does it take to arrest the movement: twice as much, exactly the same or half of what seems to be right?

Have a look at my other videos on Youtube (I've finally managed to resolve uploading issues), as all of them are dedicated to Bell 206 so far. No sound nor music (except for the first one) so play your favourite tune and enjoy Most of them were recorded "live" during Alaska Challenge 2011 event and I could post a day-by-day diary, if you're interested. 1400nm in Bell 206 over 8 days, with real alaskan weather

The engine management tutorials will be resumed, when I have more (much more, actually) time to write

Great tutorial Lukasz! Keep it up!

Great lesson. You've inspired me. I might have to put away my yoke and bust out the joystick again.  ;D

I'm glad to hear that Have fun!

Well this is the first tutorial that actually got me hovering a r22 successfully. Sure it can be adapted to most 'copters.

Thanks for the time Lukas

Thanks! Yes, it's a general purpose tutorial and it applies to other birds and even other simulators as well, provided they do model helicopter flight dynamics on a comparable level to X-Plane. There will be some additional items to remember and to look for, if you're flying anything other, than US-designed single rotor helo, but the general rules, as outlined in the tutorial, are the same.

I've just found X-plane 10 and X-pilot....

This tutorial is awesome as it answers so many question I had about trying to get it right.

Your time and input is much appreciated....

Thanks heaps

I'm glad that you find it useful

Good write up, thanks. It really helped me to have already learned to fly radio control helicopters years ago, but I am forming the new muscle memory using the joystick and pedals in XP10 vs an RC radio transmitter sticks. Hovering is time consuming to learn, but I think transitions in and out of forward flight take a long time to get right. Coming in to land after flying around in forward flight is all about the approach.

Being able to fly a helicopter and land on oil rigs in XP10 is very rewarding!

Transitions are all about pitch and collective control. I was asked about them before and I'll try to upload a video tutorial on my Youtube channel http://www.youtube.c...er/BirdOfPreyIX soon.

EDIT: The video is available Because of length and time issues, I decided to break it into two separate tutorials: transitions and traffic pattern (to be posted next week).

EDIT 2: I've posted a second video on takeoff, traffic pattern, approach and landing. As before, it's an example flight with a description highlighting what's important there and how to achieve similar results. Have fun!