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As you may know I have been out of the sport since the start of 2009.
Things have changed a lot in the years since then. Electric is not just a viable alternative to glow, its actually better giving more power if still lacking a little duration compared to nitro
the extra powered combined with the accuracy and drag reduction of flybarless has not basically made one skill redundant.
"collective management"
5 years ago with nitro you couldn't point the nose in the air and wave the collective and cyclic around and "do" ticktocks. it took finesse to get the speed of the ticktoc up and a perfectly tuned engine, never using too much cycling or collective at the same time. get it wrong and the headspeed would drop and it would fall out of the sky.
also the torque vrs speed curve is different for electric and nitro. With nitro we used to run at a little over peak power, which meant that the torque would increase a little bit when you loaded up the the rotorhead. However load it up too much and the torque would drop and you would have to back off the cyclic and collective a lot to get the headspeed back up.
with electric the torque increases as the rpm drops. All the way to zero rpm.
Yesterday phil hubble kindly let me fly his Logo 500 and his mental logo extreme with 800mm blades. Its huge but flies "small" nothing like the turbines I have flown in the past which were the same size although im sure they were a lot heavier.
It used to be when buying a heli you would, for me at least fly a friends heli and see how it flew. Head geometry was a big part of the choice for me. The low flybar input of the knight, ease of tuning, choice of leading or trailing edge control all affected how the model responded.
These days the flybarless controller takes care of all of that and an awful lot more.
once you remove the rotor head from the equation a helicopter is pretty much just an expensive gearbox!
In this area atleast clubs have changed a lot, flying at smaller fields, electric has opened up a lot of sites that you could never fly with a nitro model.
enough rambling, im off to scrape some pennies together for a heli!
Things have changed a lot in the years since then. Electric is not just a viable alternative to glow, its actually better giving more power if still lacking a little duration compared to nitro
the extra powered combined with the accuracy and drag reduction of flybarless has not basically made one skill redundant.
"collective management"
5 years ago with nitro you couldn't point the nose in the air and wave the collective and cyclic around and "do" ticktocks. it took finesse to get the speed of the ticktoc up and a perfectly tuned engine, never using too much cycling or collective at the same time. get it wrong and the headspeed would drop and it would fall out of the sky.
also the torque vrs speed curve is different for electric and nitro. With nitro we used to run at a little over peak power, which meant that the torque would increase a little bit when you loaded up the the rotorhead. However load it up too much and the torque would drop and you would have to back off the cyclic and collective a lot to get the headspeed back up.
with electric the torque increases as the rpm drops. All the way to zero rpm.
Yesterday phil hubble kindly let me fly his Logo 500 and his mental logo extreme with 800mm blades. Its huge but flies "small" nothing like the turbines I have flown in the past which were the same size although im sure they were a lot heavier.
It used to be when buying a heli you would, for me at least fly a friends heli and see how it flew. Head geometry was a big part of the choice for me. The low flybar input of the knight, ease of tuning, choice of leading or trailing edge control all affected how the model responded.
These days the flybarless controller takes care of all of that and an awful lot more.
once you remove the rotor head from the equation a helicopter is pretty much just an expensive gearbox!
In this area atleast clubs have changed a lot, flying at smaller fields, electric has opened up a lot of sites that you could never fly with a nitro model.
enough rambling, im off to scrape some pennies together for a heli!
and a platinum star 
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