freestyle
Veteran
Location: Redmond WA USA
| mostly practiceYou can think that fast too - mostly it just takes practice. As a novice, you see a sequence of distinct orientation changes, but with practice you start to see the combinations, not just the individual control inputs that make up the combination.
Here's a simple example: from FFF, (1) pull back til the heli is going straight up, then (2) yaw 180 degrees, then (3) pull back until the heli is level again. We all know that's a stall turn, and after you've done a few, you don't have to look at it as a sequence of three separate control inputs.
The same kind of thing applies to more advanced flying - the more you practice, the more you think of one familiar pattern after another, instead of disjointed sequences of arbitrary orientation changes.
If you play a musical instrument you've probably seen the same thing there. I know I went through it with guitar, where at first I could not imagine how certain pieces of music could be played or memorized, but with practice I was seeing patterns (or "phrases") instead of individual notes, and it's far easier to think through a few dozen phrases than to think through a few thousand notes.
For specific maneuvers and situations, there are 'tricks' that will help. For nose-in hovering, make aileron corrections by pushing toward the low side of the rotor disc. With constant-pirouetting hovering/travelilng stuff, I make a lot of corrections with the elevator based on the angle of the tail boom when the heli is side-on. I dunno why, but when I started connecting the boom angle to elevator corrections, things got easier for me. For rolling circles, steer your way around by elevator inputs while the heli is knife-edge. For piro flips, you have to synchronize the cyclic "stirring" motion with the piro rate. For extended knife-edge passes, come in with barely more than hovering collective and slow forward flight, and 'bump' the collective to full to get a little extra 'lift' just before going knife-edge... etc, etc, etc.
Does anyone have any good hints like that for funnels? When you're learning, how do you straighten them out if they get lopsided? What do you look for, and what corrections do you make, if you want to move from stage left to stage right, or vice versa? (I'm horrible with funnels, I need all the help I can get!) |
...anyway, practice is all fine and good but jeez, this backwards flying lark is TOOOOOuuuggghhh.
