Thanks for the feed back guys. It definitely puts things in a different
perspective!


"The OTHER Kevin in San Diego" skiddz "AT" adelphia "DOT" net wrote in
message ...
On Wed, 17 May 2006 18:49:54 -0400, "B4RT"
wrote:

I'm not really having a problem with it, I just posted originally because
I
saw an easy cheap way to make the lil buggers easier to fly. The other
reason I mentioned my circuit is because there was that fella in here with
helicopter controls rigged to the remote control device. Now that I have a
little experience with the RC thing I can honestly say that his device
would
be of little practical value in learning to fly a real one because of the
reversed control issue.

That's my argument as well - also if you wad up the RC heli, you're
down until you can set the thing up again and it's not as easy as
bolting on new parts and going flying.

The reason I say that is that unless you totally disconnect the yaw gyro
of
the RC and keep the helicopter's tail pointed at the pilot the experience
would share very little in common with a real helicopter, and might even
give you some pretty bad habits that would have to be unlearned. If you
used
a circuit like I describe, and disconnect the yaw gyro it would be a lot
more like flying a real one.

The only thing I dont think can really be fixed about the
heli-seat-controller is the fact that the mass of an RC ship is so much
less
and the controls are so much more quick and forgiving in the RC. It's
much
harder to get behind the power-plant and rotor system in the little RC, if
you behaved similarly in a big chopper you'd overtorque it or get a mast
bump. You might be able to remedy this by putting some fancy software
between the controller and the RC machine though.

Yep. The power to weight ratios of the models FAR exceed any real
ship. Even my little Blade CP will absolutely ROCKET skyward if I
just firewall the throttle. No way a real ship could hope to
duplicate it's performance.

One thing about it that just can't be replicated no matter how hard you
tried is that a good portion of hovering flight is done through your
proprioceptive system (aka your ass). I can feel tiny lil G's in my body
that I use unconciously use to correct drift, yaw, and height. The reason
I
know this is that I have a damn hard time hovering IGE in Bell's flight
training device when I go for recurrency. The only thing unrealistic about
their simulator is that its not full motion, and you have to fly totally
with your eyes. Because its not a full motion sim, the things its best
suited at training are systems failures and IFR/IMC stuff. They don't ever
try to teach any flight technique in theirs.

Yep. I give demos in ours and one thing I keep having to drill into
prospective customers is that's it's NOT a flight simulator. It's a
training device best used for IFR procedures training and learning the
correlations between the controls. I strongly urge them not to use it
to teach autos, quick stops etc.. It's not accurate enough for that.
It's not of much use for hover training (IMO) either. Like you said,
you don't get "ass feedback" sitting in the thing.