Thought Flying forwards has hard

[DaveJones]

After many weeks of practise I can fly around in reasonably controlled circles and figure of eights forwards on the Sim and in the real world how difficult can doing the same thing flying backwards be?

Dammed hard is the answer, all my brain wants to do is fly forwards. One mountain climbed and another one to go.

This helicopter hobby is going to keep me entertained for years..............

[dillwhacker]

Mee too - as soon as I try flying backwards my brain cell thinks of the tail as a nose, and it all goes very wrong....
You are not alone!

[iceuk]

Here is how i learn. I only teach myself one way say clockwise once i get really good clockwise then ii switch to anti clockwise the reason i do this is my brain has a reference point ie clockwise then i just mimic the sticks but opposite sides. I find it to hard for my brain to learn both sides at once.

Good luck at remember 30minutes a day on the sim.

[bigpops]

No matter what you might think, flying forwards, backwards, upright or inverted are all as easy or hard as each other.

It's just a matter of training your brain to input the correct commands.

[dillwhacker]

My brain only has one cell, but it is connected to all three of my thumbs...
So if I'm OK on the cyclics and rudder, the collective is all to pot...
And if the cyclics and collective are OK, the rudder is all over the shop...
More sim required, methinks...

[DaveJones]

I just sit back and remember how impossible keeping the thing in one place used to be, then the scary idea of nose-in, the crazy concept of actually moving off the spot and then the madness of circuits.

All once seemed impossible but now I do them without really thinking too much. Have a feeling the first loop is not too far away and that seems like a really crazy thing to do, but a piece of cake on the sim.

[waveydavey]

It's an old addage but practice does make perfect. We were just talking about this last week, it's easy to forget how difficult all 4 modes of flight direction are, Forward Upright, Backwards Upright, Forward Inverted and Backwards Inverted. I personally found backwards easier than forwards for some odd reason but they all just click, when they do it becomes second nature. Backwards inverted was my hardest orientation and only hour after hour on the sim gave me the cahoonas to try it at the field.

One thing that helped me was to visualise that as long as you use thumbs on the sticks that the right thumbnail is the canopy on the heli and no matter which way up this remains true. So imagine pointing your thumbnail forward IE forward elevator whether upright or inverted the canopy will react the same way, same for aileron, move your thumb to the left and the cano will react the same. Takes a bit of seeing but once I started to use it, it really helped.