Beginning forward flight.

So I have not posted here in a while but I have logged a bunch of flights, mostly hovers, but moving around more and more. Really just what I have been doing, pointing left and flying left, but bringing it back over to my right, tail in. Well yesterday I managed to fly right pointed right, would carefully turn my bird around and fly her the other way. It was really windy but I did it anyway. It was challenging and fun, but I had this problem where I could not maintain my perceived orientation of the heli and twice I almost crashed, once was out in the field and the other time was much closer to me than I would have liked, there is a chance it could have hit me. SCARY. Anyway I just did the post below over on the HeliFreak forums:

http://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?p=1543580

(I have also pasted it below to stay in this journal. )

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OK I am trying to make the transition to forward flight. Basically just trying to fly from right to left and left to right pointed in the direction that I am flying. I managed to do it yesterday several times during my last 2 flights of the day but I am having a lot of trouble with keeping track of my orientation. I have apparently developed a bad habit of using only the skids for orientation, but I should have been looking at the whole heli. As she fly’s the kids looks like they transpose on me. Then I loose orientation and can’t tell if she is leaning away or toward me. If I move the aileron the wrong way, she will of course tip badly on the wrong direction and could result on a crash. But my 450 is so small compared to the 500 & 600 heli’s.

What can I do to help maintain my perceived orientation of my heli? I am currently planning on using a sharpie and carefully paining in a thick black stripe about a 3rd out, another 2/3’s out and a bright red tip on the underside of the rotor blades, maybe on the top too, but using different colors. Was also going to get the solid molded landing skids and paint the left skid red and the right skid green. Also want to get a more visible canopy. I was thinking about paining a canopy some bright colors or just picking up a fiberglass one that has a bright align paint job. I may also paint my vertical stabilizer some other annoying bright color, one color on one side and another color on the other.

Maybe I am going overboard here, but even after a recent mechanical failure, I have 42 flights under my belt and no crashes, yet. Everybody says I will crash eventually, but I am doing my best to keep it from happening for as long as possible, and don’t want it to happen because I could not tell what direction I was pointed. I mean I am only flying like 50 feet away at most. It was also suggested that I fly on my simulator without the “binocular” view, keeping it as real as I can. Meanwhile I am still using the orientation trainers in my simulator as often as I can.
Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

- HeliDragon