This guy can fly an RC helicopter

[jeffmem]

[Guest Bronker]

That's awesome. Hand / Eye coordination like I have rarely seen.

[Rightwinger]

I went on to Youtube to see if there were more and he mounted a camera on the tail boom of that thing. Talk about motion sickness central! That thing makes turns faster than video can handle for frame rates. Amazing

[kb4ns]

Dang.

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

Those 6 channel copters ARE AMAZING.

[Guest jackdm3]

I recognize the skills, but I want to see lots of severe movements whilst keeping it pointed in the direction that it would go at full scale.

[Guest Jamie]

I'm calling BS on that vid.

There's no way that heli could stay in the air while standing on it's tail and bobbing back and forth ( from about 56 seconds to 1 minute into the vid ).... There's no airfoil in the proper position to support the weight and keep it airborne. It should've slid ass-first into the ground.

So, the thing was either computer generated, or somebody's done one helluva wire job.

J.

Edited August 13, 2010 by Jamie

[wipfel]

I'm with you Jamie. When it's vertical, the rotary wing can't generate lift, and there's nothing else keeping that thing in the air.

[byrnemm]

I think that's why the bobbing is highlighted as a maneuver.. because it is difficult.

These things have so much power in such a light body, I'm sure the vid is legit.. there's hundreds more doing the same things.

I'd love to get into RC helicopters some time but, dang... life is short on hours and dollars.

I'll cross my fingers for this on my next birthday: Honeybee V2

[StumpyBeagle]

I wonder how much copter trash was generated to obtain his skills. Had to be a bunch of times he went home with nothing but a transmitter. Even a cheap RC Helicopter rig is expensive.

[TripleDigitRide]

I'm calling BS on that vid.

There's no way that heli could stay in the air while standing on it's tail and bobbing back and forth ( from about 56 seconds to 1 minute into the vid ).... There's no airfoil in the proper position to support the weight and keep it airborne. It should've slid ass-first into the ground.

So, the thing was either computer generated, or somebody's done one helluva wire job.

J.

I'm with you Jamie. When it's vertical, the rotary wing can't generate lift, and there's nothing else keeping that thing in the air.

This is very real. With the gyros these guys are installing in their RC helicopters these days, it's amazing what kind of 3D flying they can do.

[Guest db99wj]

Disappointing. Around 4:50 he got real close to the ground, thought he was going to weed eat the grass. That would have been cool!

[kckndrgn]

Disappointing. Around 4:50 he got real close to the ground, thought he was going to weed eat the grass. That would have been cool!

Yeah, I kept waiting for him to fly inverted and to some lawn mowing!

Awesome skillz. I tried RC planes, once. To 'spensive for me.

[Guest Verbal Kint]

Guess I'm the only one that was waiting for him to inadvertently take out the camera man.

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

Yeah, I kept waiting for him to fly inverted and to some lawn mowing!

Awesome skillz. I tried RC planes, once. To 'spensive for me.

Any plane is expensive when you crash it.

[kckndrgn]

Any plane is expensive when you crash it.

:whistle: me crash? no never

[Guest nosnos]

There are some amazing simulators where you actually use your rc remote, and they're exactly like flying the real thing. Id imagine he spent some time with one of those.

Its not fake. I'm sure of it...

[jeffmem]

The cost of entry is much less than it used to be but you can still crash em

[vontar]

There is some very none stock equipment in that chopper.

i am thinking in the rotors, I bet there is a control to reverse the pitch, so that when it is inverted, they can be pitched the other way, while still turning the same direction.

Couple reasons for this, At take off, look how fast he had the rotors going while it was firm on the ground. Then it shot up like a bullet. I bet he had the rotors pitched in a way to force air UP, then he reversed pitch, while rotors kept in the same spin direction and sudden air direction change, down and the chopper went up.

toward the end, when he was flying upside down, again the pitch on the rotor blades had to be reversed sending the air toward the ground. It is about the only way it could have worked.

This is assuming the lift is being provided by the rotor blades and not another internal motor that we can not see.

Still, the guy has some skill to pull that off

[Guest Lester Weevils]

There are surely multiple copter pilots on here that could splain it clearly. I'm ignerant of it.

Dunno if a model heli has a cyclic control. Seems like they would have to, but dunno.

Helicopter flight controls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The control is called the cyclic because it changes the pitch of the rotor blades cyclically. That is, the pitch or feathering angle of the rotor blades changes depending upon their position as they rotate around the hub so that all blades will change their angle the same amount at the same point in the cycle. The change in cyclic pitch has the effect of changing the angle of attack and thus the lift generated by a single blade as it moves around the rotor disk. This in turn causes the blades to fly up or down in sequence, depending on the changes in lift affecting each individual blade.

The result is to tilt the rotor disk in a particular direction, resulting in the helicopter moving in that direction. If the pilot pushes the cyclic forward, the rotor disk tilts forward, and the rotor produces a thrust vector in the forward direction. If the pilot pushes the cyclic to the right, the rotor disk tilts to the right and produces thrust in that direction, causing the helicopter to move sideways in a hover or to roll into a right turn during forward flight, much as in a conventional aircraft."

The dynamic angle of attack during rotation-- And apparently reversible angle of attack on this RC heli--

This dual rotor heli-- If it has cyclic then the vertical hover could be done by reversing pitch of the top and bottom rotors, and using heavy cyclic adjustment. That ought to give thrust "straight back" from between the two rotors?

[Guest Jamie]

This is very real. With the gyros these guys are installing in their RC helicopters these days, it's amazing what kind of 3D flying they can do.

Gyroscopes provide stability, not lift.

And helicopters, unlike airplanes, do not vector thrust directly to the rear of the aircraft.

After having watched this video, along with several others, multiple times now, all I can say is that if it is indeed real, unaltered and "unenhanced", then the pilot is making clever use of scale, momentum/inertia, and the fact there's no live pilot on board to have his brains slung out of various orifices by those sudden changes in direction. And also, as Vontar mentioned, pitch controls that you just can't install in a real helicopter.

One way or the other, I would certainly like to talk to the pilot, and see him fly that thing in person. Because you can not fly a helicopter straight up in a nose vertical attitude for very long or for very far.

J.

Edited August 14, 2010 by Jamie

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I was mistaken that it is a 2 rotor heli (counter-rotating blades). Just has a counter-rotating gyro or something.

Apparently the rotor pitch range can vary very large positive and negative or it wouldn't be able to fly upside down.

Once oriented in that tail-down nose-up hover position (around the 1 minute mark of the video), you COULD get thrust straight down if the cyclic has a very wide range.

Ferinstance with the rotor turning clockwise, looking from the top of the heli-- Nose at 12 o'clock and tail at 6 o'clock--

The cyclic would need to adjust to 90 degree pitch on the sweep from about 2 o'clock to 4 o'clock, and feather to a zero degree pitch on the path from 6 o'clock up to 12 o'clock. On the downward sweep the blade would act like a boat paddle or water wheel driving air toward the ground. On the upward sweep there would be no lift at all.

This would direct all thrust toward the tail (and toward the ground), but it would also want to make the heli spin wildly toward the left because all the thrust would be from the right side of the heli. So the tail rotor would need enough thrust to counter this spin.

Maybe there is some other mechanism he actually uses, but I think the above ought to work to accomplish this trick.

I used to do gas-powered model planes long ago, but the game is wondrous nowadays. Don't have time for more hobbies.

Met a fellow who makes tiny little RC planes out of sheet foam like poster paper. He uses hard drive stepper motors to drive the propeller and tiny cellphone batteries for power. They don't weigh anything and are incredibly maneuverable. He can fly it around nose up like a helicopter as long as he pleases, and do impossible looking maneuvers. They behave in the air more like big butterflies than aircraft. Amazing gadgets.

Edited August 14, 2010 by Lester Weevils

[Guest Jamie]

Lester, I would be more willing to accept that once nose-up, the pilot was using the cyclic to "bounce" the 'copter back and forth between a 30 degree angle or so, and more or less "throwing" the bird though the portion of the arc where there was no lift... sort of like throwing a ball back and forth between your hands. I can see where that would work if done fast enough. ( This is tough to explain, but I can see where angled thrust, alternating from one side then the other, rapidly, could act as a direct force along the rotor's plane. )

The reason I say this is because in the vids I've seen in addition to this one, the aircraft bobs or weaves any time the rotor disk is vertical, no matter what the orientation of it's body is.

Even for that though, there's enough other things about that video to make me suspicious of it... some of the things the shadow on the ground does, for instance.

All of what I'm seeing could just be due to camera angles and such, along with the specialized nature and equipment of the R/C helicopters, but I'll still have to see such a performance in person before I'll fully believe it.

Just call me hard-headed, but in this day and age of computer/video trickery, I'm a firm disbeliever until I see something first hand, with my own two eyes.

J.

Edited August 14, 2010 by Jamie

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Lester, I would be more willing to accept that once nose-up, the pilot was using the cyclic to "bounce" the 'copter back and forth between a 30 degree angle or so, and more or less "throwing" the bird though the portion of the arc where there was no lift... sort of like throwing a ball back and forth between your hands. I can see where that would work if done fast enough. ( This is tough to explain, but I can see where angled thrust, alternating from one side then the other, rapidly, could act as a direct force along the rotor's plane. )

The reason I say this is because in the vids I've seen in addition to this one, the aircraft bobs or weaves any time the rotor disk is vertical, no matter what the orientation of it's body is.

Just call me hard-headed, but in this day and age of computer/video trickery, I'm a firm disbeliever until I see something first hand, with my own two eyes.

Thanks Jamie

Skepticism is a virtue, fer sure.

At the 1 minute location of the video in question, the heli is bouncing back and forth rather than a pure static vertical-pointed hover, so the 'video evidence' in that clip could lend credence to your explanation.

[Guest Bronker]

...yawn...