Thoughts on flying RC helicopters and Sims.
Everyone says get a Sim, they're right. They seem expensive, $200 for what's basically a video game, but they are worth it. Not because of the usual "savings in crash parts" argument people will use to justify it, but because it's the only practical way to get in a lot of practice over a short period.
Do the math .... Your average large electric helicopter (like my QJ8) has a battery life of <10 minutes on $150 a piece batteries. The batteries take about 70 minutes to charge, so even if your aggressive it's hard to get more than 30 minutes in any given day and it's usually less than that. That combined with even mild winds making it much more difficult on the beginner and you find you don't get much stick time in a week.
With a Sim you can just fire it up for as long as you want whenever you have time.
Sims certainly aren't as satisfying as flying the real helicopter and there is a huge leap in attempting things in real life that you already have down in the Sim. But you know what if you turn the wind up on a decent Sim, other than the depth perception, it's a pretty damn good approximation to the real thing.
For me the hard part of learning to fly has been having to use all of the controls to do even simple things, A simple banked turn requires adjusting the banking in two axis, manually turning the tail to match the heading and compensating for altitude changes (especially in wind) with the throttle. Invariably the rate at which the tail turns doesn't match the change in direction of the helicopter and by the time you've compensated, the helicopter is dropping or climbing and your chasing it with the throttle.
I've been flying tail in figure eights on my last few flights and every time I fly I get better at this, but without the reps on a Sim, it would have taken me a long time to progress to this point.
The Sim was a purchase I was totally not sold on, I ended up buying RealFlight G3.5 because the weather was crappy and I couldn't fly the real thing, I'm glad I did.
