Yesterday I began the process of learning to hover my RC helicopter inverted and made a video of the good parts of the 4 flights. I’ve been getting a lot more flying in lately with my Thunder Tiger  Mini-Titan e325.

About a month ago I was flying a bit late and lost orientation and crashed the helicopter. You’ll probably see lights on the rc heli here and there in the video, that’s another things I’m working on and you can see it in my Mini-Titan e325 Night Flying Setup post. The lights do help a lot when the sun goes down and it’s hard to get perspective.

The video below shows my progress with inverted hovering over four flights. A RC heli can fly inverted or upright it if is configured properly for full positive and negative pitch as well as a proper throttle curve set for the Idle Up modes.  I have practiced inverted hovering only for about 10 minutes on my Phoenix R/C flight simulator, but the sim just never feels right compared to the real thing, so I just decided to practice with the real thing.  The first and second flights are pretty rough but you can see a slow improvement over the duration of the video clip.  My goal is to be able to hover a complete flight (4:30 minutes) inverted.

My accumulated RC heli experience before attempting this is quite a few years of semi-sedate stuff. I’m competent with hovering, fast forward flight. I’m comfortable flipping the heli forwards and backwards, as well as side to side. I’ve rolled the heli while pulling up into a vertical climb (kind of like a stall climb with a plane) and while not totally comfortable with it I can hover nose in alright.

Last week I spent about an hour practicing inverted blow-outs where I flipped the heli upside down and then hammered negative collective to push the heli up into the air to try and get a feel for the Mini Titan’s collective when inverted and the responsiveness, as well as trying to remember the right way to punch the collective when inverted.

Overall I would say in less than 20 minutes of flying (4:30 minutes x 4 flights) I’ve made quite an improvement on inverted hovering.  There is plenty of room for improvement of course, but I think at this rate it will come quickly. The biggest part of learning new skills when flying models, and in fact doing most things is to find the time to put into actually flying or doing those things.

Once I get good at hovering inverted nose in, then I will spend some time working on hover inverted nose out as well.  Hopefully in a couple of months I’ll feel comfortable in all positions of upright and inverted. This is a great hobby and it continues to keep me interested and occasionally really cranks out the adrenaline. It takes a while to learn how to fly a full collective pitch helicopter and isn’t really anything like flying a fixed pitch micro helicopter like the Blade MSR but those smaller ones will help you learn the controls and RC heli basics.

The video is uploading right now, and I’m about to go test out my new FPV Glider. I’ve set this post to auto-post at about the time the video is complete.

Feel free to share below if you’ve recently been trying out some new moves with your RC heli or airplane.

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