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A few words about simulators....

There are a number of RC helicopter simulators on the market today, each of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. I have personal experience with only two of them so far: the CSM 3-in-1 simulator (hereafter, CSM) and RealFlight Deluxe (hereafter, RFD). If you are considering purchasing one or the other please read my review and comparison before you part with two hundred hard-earned dollars.

Why you want one.

When I got that giant box containing my helicopter, radio, engine, simulator, and tools, I was stoked. I was determined to build the thing and go fly it as soon as I possibly could. I spent a long night bolting parts together while the radio battieries charged, caught a couple hours of sleep, went to the office, came home and got back to it.

But wait... the radio was charged! I could spare a few minutes with the simulator. So I did. After about two minutes with the simulator, I was no longer in any hurry to get the chopper built. Heli flying is not easy. I could barely keep the heli off the ground, let alone keep it in one spot. After watching the simulated heli crash into the (simulated) ground ten times in five minutes, I figured building could wait.

It took many more hours with the simulator before I felt comfortable taking the helicopter itself out of the safety of my living room. There's no question in my mind that the simulator paid for itself completely during just those first few minutes. I crashed repeatedly before I figured out how to trim the transmitter to fit the simulated helicopter. I crashed a few more times adjusting the revolution mixing. I hadn't even finished building the helicopter, and yet I had saved hundreds of dollars' worth of rotor blades (and possibly whole helicopters, too).

Why you really want one!

After about a week of building and practicing, I took the heli to the field. Some friendly local heli flyers examined it, trimmed it out, test-hovered it, set the mixture, and handed me the radio. Oh boy. I bought it up to about 2-3 feet, and could barely keep it within a 10 foot box. I had to land a couple times to drag it back to the middle of the pad. It was a struggle every second just to keep it from zipping off into the bushes or the wild blue yonder.

After the fuel ran out, I carried the heli back to the pits and tried not to look too frazzled. One of the locals asked me something like, "you have a simulator, don't you?" I replied in the affirmative, "but why do you ask?" The answer surprised me. "The only people who do that well on their first day are the ones with the simulators."

There I was thinking about how far I was from having control of this thing, and this guy is telling me I was doing really well. I figured he was just being polite.

Some time later, a guy came to the field who had been flying for a couple months, and I realized he was just being honest. Learning to hover a real model is an exercise in patience. It takes 25 minutes to get 10 minutes of flying time because every 15 sections you're setting the heli down and dragging it back to the center of the pad. Not to mention the fact that he was spending anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes between flights, depending how crowded the field was. Not to mention the expense if something goes wrong. I felt really sorry for the guy. It took him several weekends to get in the same amount of practice that I got in a few evenings.

That sealed it. Ever since then I've been espousing the virtues of simulators to anyone who will listen. Especially you, the one reading this. If you don't have one, get one.

And they remain useful for as long as you continue using them.

Don't assume that simulators are just for beginners. There's almost nothing that you can't learn faster with simulator practice. Once you've mastered hovering in the simulator, you can move on to sideways and nose-in, then inverted hovering... then inverted sideways... forward flight, loops, rolls, stall turns, tailslides, death spirals, hovering tumbles... as I write this I'm using the simulator to learn pirouetting rolls and pirouetting hovering tumbles. I can't imagine trying this kind of stuff at the field without simulator practice to back it up!

Autos are a bit of a stretch in the simulator, but if you practice flying around with a small fuel tank, you'll at least be able to train yourself to hit throttle hold when the engine dies unexpectedly.

Fun things to do with the simulator:

  1. Set the fuel tank size to one ounce, and fly around as usual. Do surprise emergency autos every couple of minutes. This is not only fun, it can save you a lot of grief if your engine stops when you least expect it. Been there, done that, and (as Scott said on the h-list) "it put a little swagger in my step."
  2. Set the flybar paddles to 10 grams or less, and learn to fly that way. Set them to 50 grams and try again. Go back to your regular setup, and think. Would you rather it was a little faster? Would that make it easier to recover from botched maneuvers? Would you rather it were a little slower? Were you more impressed with the stability that came with the heavier flybar setup?
  3. Practice new orientations. See how long you can stay inverted (not stay in one place, but just stay off the ground!). Or side-on. Or pirouetting. See how long you can fly figure eights in your new orientation. See how long you can hover in one place in your new orientation.
  4. With a "standard" (not heading hold) gyro simulation, fly around for a while at 3/4 throttle without touching the left stick. Get the feel for gradual and sharp uncoordinated turns. Then start using the rudder to smooth things out.
  5. See how long you can pirouette (slowly) in as small an area as possible. Learn to compensate for the tendency to hover with a slight lean to the the right - it makes the heli want to wander if you just yaw without some small cyclic corrections.
  6. Practice with a machine that has twice as much cyclic response as your own. Then, upgrade your machine. You'll be ready for the extra power, so you won't have to fiddle with the dual rates or exponential before you can fly your upgraded machine comfortably.
  7. Attempt maneuvers that you'd never be able to pull off in the real world. Starting with hovering. Then nose-in. Then loops and rolls and stall turns. Then inverted flight. Asynchronous loops. Continuous hovering tumbles. Death spirals. Funnels and Tornados. Rolling tailslides. Rolling circles. Rolling loops. Pirouetting circuits. Pirouetting loops and rolls. Chaos.
  8. Invent something new. If you mangle one of those beyond-your-ability maneuvers, but without hitting the ground, ask yourself what when wrong and how you could repeat the "wrong" version. If you can do it consistently, surprise your friends at the field.
  9. Adjust it until you can fly the simulator without making any changes at all to your model's radio settings. Besides making the helicopter a better training tool, you just might learn a thing or two about how to adjust your real helicopter's flying characteristics while you're adjusting the simulator. More on this later.
  10. Above all, take the simulator seriously. If you're not fliching when you crash, you're not getting all of the benefit from it. It's easy to just let the simulator "crash" every time you get a little bit disoriented, but you'll be better off in the long run if you get in the habit of fighting it to the bitter end.

    Which mind-set do you want to be in when you slip up in real life? Do you want to be standing there like a spectator thinking, "oh darn" as the helicopter augers in, or do you want to be doing everything you can to save it? The habits you (don't) form with the simulator will (not) save you in real life. It all depends on how you approach things when you're practicing at home.

Simulator Tuning
Note that until Knife Edge and Great Planes release a truly realistic version of RealFlight Deluxe, the following is basically a waste of time with that simulator. See this other page for more information. And be patient. They're working on it.

Simulators some supplied with 'models' that fly well enough to teach you to hover, so if you're just starting out, don't worry about this stuff. But if you've been at it for a while, you might want to practice with something more like your real heli. Fortunately, it's not all that hard to set up the simulator until it flies almost exactly like your real helicopter. It takes some time to get it right, but the results are worth the trouble.

Cyclic Response The roll rate is a big part of what makes one helicopter "feel" different from another. The easiest way to tune this in the simulator is to vary the 'flybar paddle weight.' Higher weight, slower rolls; lower weight, faster rolls. Getting the perfect balance between hover stability and roll rate is a bit of a chore, but you can try increasing the flybar paddle pitch range to alter the roll rate without altering the hover stability too much.

Collective Response (and the engine too) It's my opinion that simulators usually come with more horsepower and pitch range than is really realistic, but fixing this is a no-brainer. Adjust the collective pitch range until the rate of climb, is what you're used to. Turn on the main rotor speed display and vary the engine horsepower until it can just barely handle full collective without losing speed. You'll notice some slowing when you apply cyclic (maybe more slowing that you expect) but that's probably just normal - don't lose sleep over it.

Tail Rotor Response The biggest parameters here are the gyro gain and tail rotor pitch range. If you use a heading-hold simulation, you can also use the 'maximum yaw rate' to vary the peak pirouette speed. If you can't get the simulator to pirouette fast enough without giving up some gyro gain, turn up the ATVs or the dual rate percentages in the transmitter.

Autorotations The biggest factor here is the main blade drag. The more drag you have, the faster the head speed will decay. Less drag is a good idea for practice though, as it gives you more forgiving landings.

Not happy?The guidelines above should get you 90% of the way to a perfect matach with reality. If you're willing to invest ten times that amount of effort, you can probably get the last ten percent too. I had my CSM simulator dialed in so it used the same trim settings and the same revo mix as my Concept 30 (this was back before heading hold gyros were available). I flew both with the same transmitter program! Was it worth the trouble? Not really.

Making the most of your simulator.

The fear factor. The most obvious difference between simulated and real-life practice is the fear factor. When you don't have a motor screaming away, belching exhaust, and spinning a five-foot rotor right in front of you, it's just not the same. But remember - the difference is in your head, and helicoptering is a mental game. The fear factor doesn't mean the sim is inherently different from reality, it just means that you approach the sim with a different attitude, and different mind-set than the one you've got at the field.

Depending on your state of mind, the fear-factor difference can become pretty small. I try to fly the sim without crashing. When I start to lose it in the the sim, I struggle til it's either crashed or in control again. When I do crash, I usually flinch just like as I do in real life. Fly it without crashing it. Make it a matter of pride.

Vision. A big part of heli flying is hand-eye coordinating, and simulators help with that a LOT. But your hand-eye coordination is useless if your eyes can't make out which way the heli is oriented, and you can set up the sim so it's like flying with perfect eyesight. In fact most sims probably come set up this way by default... No matter how "far away" the heli gets, it will show you a nice big clear picture of the helicopter.

Very few people have eyes that good, so try setting up the sim so that when the heli gets further away the picture becomes so small you can barely make out which way it's heading. That's a bit more realistic. Both CSM and RFD have settings for this, I'm not sure about any of the others.

Setup. I think sims have a lot more potential than many people suspect. Part of the problem is mental, and part of the problem is default settings that don't show the full potential. That's why I wrote the setup section on this web page.

A word about limitations...

Of course, there are a few things that the simulator will not teach you...

What to do at the field.A simulator won't teach you to turn on the radio before starting the heli. It won't teach you to pull the fuel line when you make that mistake. It won't teach you how the heli handles on the ground - CSM appears to have been written by someone who flies over a Velcro(TM)-covered helipad, with Velcro(TM) on the helicopter's skids; RFD appears to have been written by someone who flies over an ice skating rink. A simulator won't teach you to remove the Ni-Starter before you hit the gas, either (but your snickering friends certain will). In short, it won't teach you anything other than how to use the sticks, and there is a lot of stuff to learn about what you do before lifting off and after setting in down.

One-on-one help from an experienced flyer at the field is still indispensable.

Turbulence. One thing neither CSM nor RFD demonstrate very well is settling under power. A slow vertical descent at the field might not respond to a little extra collective - you have to give it tons of collective to clear out the turbulence below the heli. This is something I'd like to see them model in the future. Unfortunately, it's a rather complex phenomenon so it will be a real challenge to get it right. Still, one can hope. :-)

But still... That said, words cannot express how glad I am to have bought CSM when I was starting out. Before risking my investment, I had a chance to learn a lot about the different adjustments available with my transmitter (a Futaba 8UHF - most computer heli radios will have similar features). I learned loops and barrel rolls in idle-up zero before learning to hover; I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it's kind of funny. I experimented with different idle-up 1 / idle-up 2 settings and learned to loop and roll quite well at about the same time I was learning to land without crashing in the real world.

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