Mike King

Learning to fly

May 28, 2006 on 5:17 pm | In Life in General | Comments Off

It all started with this puppy. (Actually, this a photo I grabbed from the Internet, our plane is blue.) An Air Hog Aero Ace I grabbed for $40 while on a shopping trip for a birthday present for one of my daughter’s classmates. It flies really well when there’s no wind. Unfortunately, we get a lot of radio interference or something, especially on sunny days. So it’s not that controllable when we’d most like to use it. But we did fly it enough to get both me and my daughter hooked.

Then last weekend we went to see some RC jets flying around. And a friend of ours showed us his RC helicopters. I’ve always wanted a helicopter. My daughter wanted to show off her flying too, but the Aero Ace wouldn’t respond at all to the controller. We had to give up and she was very disappointed. Which brings us to this weekend…

A trip to Hobby People over in Pasadena yielded this the Rookie ($30) and the Sabre ($99 on sale!). The Rookie flew great, but it needed more space than we had in front of our house. The Aero Ace could do okay in the limited space, the Rookie needed a field. We went to the park last night and this afternoon and got some good flying in.
The helicopter is one of the easier to fly ones. But I’m still having a tough time learning! I managed to get off the ground last night for a few seconds. And today I tried again. I lost control and crashed and broke the main rotor and popped the rotor head off its bearings. We had to go back to the hobby store for replacement parts. Boy was I upset with myself. Should have given myself more room to fly. Fixing the helicopter was frustrating because I couldn’t get the blades balanced. Only one original blade broke, so I just replaced that. The other must have been damaged too, because until I replaced it as well, the helicopter was unflyable.
A simulator would help avoid loss of control and crashes. But it’s $200! I found a shareware sim for my Mac here and while I can’t actually hook up my transmitter for practice, I’m finding it useful just using the keyboard controls and getting used to controlling the helicopter from different orientations. It’s going to be a while before I get really good at flying. It’s very fun.