Flight Journal for August 5th 2009

Only had time for 1 flight. Set the timer on my transmitter for 9 minutes and got her in the air, just hovering. All these kids from the neighborhood want to watch and they were all around, at a reasonable distance thankfully. I warned them that if it comes at them to RUN AWAY, not to try and block it. RUN! I didn’t mean to scare the kids, but it put them on edge a little, that’s good. On edge means one is ready to RUN if they need to.

Anyway, got her up and realized that I had not started the timer. So I started it anyway and guessed I was in the air for about a min, hoping I would get 10 minutes like last time. Hovered around a bit and decided I would try to fly 90 degrees nose left. I tried this before and could not do it, but I was determined, never mind if I had like 6 people watching me. I turned her nose to the left and it got unstable, or should I say, I did. I got the tail back in centered low only like 6 inches off the ground and tried it again. Better, but I noticed I was holding my transmitter almost in the same orientation as my bird. So I just did that for a bit then she started going backward (to my right to me, but backward to the heli). I was having difficulty with the orientation so I dropped onto the training balls but kept it light, got the tail in and flew it back to low center in front of me. On about the 4 or 5th try I was able to hover one foot off the ground pointed left for a few min, it was mainly because my timer was running low. The Heli always seemed to want to go backward in 90 degree flight. I think it had something to do with the wind, but I got better at dealing with it. I did some diagonal left and rights where I would nose the direction I would drift over too at a 45 degree angle, bring it up tail in and stop way to my right, then nose 45 degrees in the other direction and drift over there. Did that a few times got it back to low center in front of me, tail in hovered there for another 30 sec or so and gently set her down. I would say I got about 10.5 min flight time, or at least rotor time. There would be spots it was on the ground for a sec.

Thanks for reading,

- HeliDragon