Pre-Flight simulator

Hi Colin,

thank you for your comments. I am sure the odd gallon of fuel will come my way.

Incidentally, I have been reading your beginners guide, and pretty much followed the steps outlined during my practice session with success. I very much appreciate the effort you and others make to assist newcomers to this attractive hobby.

PS: I just had a call from the hobby shop owner. Apparently the importer of JR Helicopters is unable to supply 4 Ventures until the end of June. Equally, the Raptor importer is unable to supply the V2 until the beginning of July. Wonderful example of an effective Logistics and Supply strategy ?

Best Regards
Ari

[darren_uk]

Originally posted by Ari
Hi Darren_UK,

After bunny hopping around terra firma, I started hovering and found it challenging close to the ground and wonderfully smooth at 3 to 10 feet.

Regards
Ari

You probably know this already, but here it is again for the benefit of anyone else:

There's something called ground effect in hovering (so much so that it even has its own acronyms in full-sized helis: HIGE and HOGE: Hovering In/Out of Ground Effect)

At altitude, the rotor downwash goes down through the rotors with nothing but air under the heli to get in the way.

Near the ground, the rotor downwash hits the ground and forms a cushion of air. The helicopter wants to fall off the cushion of air, hence is more difficult to control when hovering in ground effect. The more height above the ground, the less ground effect - I think this disappears to all intents and purposes around 3 feet in a model heli and around 10 feet (might be wrong though) in a full-sized heli.

This ground effect also explains why you can raise the collective to lift off into the hover, and then if the collective is kept in the one place, the heli will rise to a given height and then remain at that height. To go higher, more up collective is needed.

This is an important consideration when settling back down onto the ground from a hover: Progressive and continuous down-collective movement is required to settle back down onto the ground to "get through" the increasing ground effect.

(As an aside: The "normal" hovering height, in both hovering and hover-taxying, is around 5 feet - high enough not to strike the ground, low enough to be able to settle with minimal impact in the event of an engine failure in the hover. When hovering backwards, a hover height of 10 feet is performed to remove the possibility of a tail fin strike)

Has anybody managed to configure the Controls to use a 2-axis 1 button joystick?

the best would be if someone already has an "*.int" file for the GAMEBIRD controller from Fijitsu/Siemens.

any other help in mixing and mapping the _functions to a helicopter control (throttle, roll, pitch, tail rotor, etc.) would be outstanding.

Thanks

Robert

hi all,
attn ari in Aust, have just got preflight kit etc & can't get my hitec 7 to talk to the computer- any tips?
erndog, - newbie Aussie heli owner (the fool that i am)