How do I actually hover in a Robinson helicopter

we're just going to start rotating with the torque produced by the engine right and the main rotor mass which we don't want to do so we have to automatically apply left pedal when we're producing power hello this is alex from anthelion helicopters and welcome to another youtube video with me teaching various aspects of helicopter flying so today we're kind of starting off in the office rather than the helicopter and that's really just to talk about uh what we're actually up to today and sort of reasoning behind it so helicopter flying in all the most basic maneuvers with it is hovering it's often misconstrued a little bit people think oh the hovering looks really easy but like learning to surf hovering actually is probably one of the hardest things to learn uh when you're when you're starting out and that's mainly because it's pure mechanical control you know it's not like an air when you're actually flying or you're an airplane where you've got wind blowing over the fuselage and control surfaces giving you stability when you're in a hover you have nothing you have just you for want of a better word controlling all three axis that the helicopter is moving and when one goes out of a sink or out of whack then the other two go out of whack and then you over input things and before you know it you're all the way over at the airport at that point so yeah ironically it's actually one of the hardest things to learn and that's really why i wanted to focus on it today as part of this video now i should bear in mind that this is you know purely my opinion uh i'm not saying that i am the bill and all of knowledge of helicopter flying um yeah sure i've been flying for 20 odd years now and instructing for a long time um but a lot of these uh parts of this video are my own hints tips tricks if you want for a better word uh just how i do things and how i've learned over the years that people learn the best and and hopefully you guys will appreciate and be able to offer some input as to what i'm saying and if you agree or don't agree as a case may be then feel free to comment on it um you know i i think i have hopefully some decent experience behind me to share with you guys on on how to put hovering together and what to look for and what makes a good hover and what makes a bad hover and hopefully it will help you guys in your career so with uh with that being said let's get into the aircraft and start this off okay hello everyone we're back inside the aircraft now uh we've just uh done a traffic pattern over to pad three at long beach airport here so we're just sitting on the ground had three you'll see from some of the video that ryan shooting is the longest pad here at long beach airport it's the it's the one that we use for running landings it was especially created for that so it provides really good opportunity for that which we'll look at in some future videos but today we're going to talk about hovering so there's so much to this i'm going to just try and break it down into component parts and you know sort of best practice and uh as we're going through it's kind of like how i would teach it on a demo um but as we're going through um we'll also put in some uh some whole hints and tips and things to watch for as well now it's worth mentioning right from the offset the hovering is probably more about psychology uh than is about actually you know your mechanical ability to move the controls uh and you'll understand what i mean by that you know as we go through it and then and really you know i'm not trying to be a you know a psychoanalyst or anything like that a freudian person that's really not what it's about but the one when you're anyone who started to learn and anyone who's flown helicopters for a long time will understand you know that you could be your best friend or your worst enemy in this game uh you could put so much pressure on yourself that you could talk yourself out of things uh you can clam up rather than just relaxing and breathing and suddenly things happen a lot quicker and a lot easier for you so you know a lot of times it's about relaxing your mind as much as you possibly can and things start to flow and we'll talk more about some tricks uh that goes on you know as well as we get talking here all right so i'm just gonna pick the helicopter up into hover and then we're gonna talk about you know kind of how we approach uh hovering in general so nothing could be more true than less is more with hovering as you can see right now we're going to start from the you know the base point here this is me hovering about three feet off the pad and you can see from the controls i'm pretty much doing nothing although it looks like i'm doing nothing i should say i'm actually doing something but it looks for all intents and purposes like i'm doing pretty much nothing and in a way that's a really good place to start when you're hovering you know it's uh i always tell my students you know when it happened in the past you know start with literally doing nothing don't think you have to do something to start with you want to actually feel like you're doing nothing to find the sweet spot there but we'll get more into that later but as you can see it looks pretty easy right now you know if i bring it up to oh we're going to come up to i don't know about 15 feet off the ground that we can see here hovering now when i'm hovering up here i have to look down at the ground a little bit more outside to get more of a ground reference going on but i'm still pretty much staying within you know i guess one foot of where the point on the ground is which is pretty good okay let's start breaking this down and what goes into this hover uh luckily we're pretty calm on the wind today and so this should actually be pretty good um but we'll talk about it so basic three different controls with the aircraft we have the pedals the anti-torque pedals which control the tail rotor which are your control movements around the vertical axis we have the in my left hand we have the collective collective pitch control uh which is you know pull up and uh we go up and push down we go down and you know so it's it's generally generally in a hover it's up and down but obviously forward flight it's going faster going slower at the same time it's increasing pitch on the blades collectively both together for dulling it down it makes us go up and down in a hover and then we got the cyclic in my right hand uh this is the one that always gets people in the homer to start with and if you can see i'm i call it flying with my fingers i'm literally flying it with two fingers and that's really just we'll talk about that a bit more but basically it's you know the less i'm gripping it the more i can feel it i know that kind of sounds counterintuitive but i'll talk about that more in a bit so usually when we're breaking down a hover we start with the easiest bit uh ironically the bit that people forget about the most which is the pedals so as you can see right now i've actually got a bit of pressure on the left pedal and not absolutely even and that's because i'm already counteracting the torque produced by the near the engine and the main rotor to keep us in a straight line right now if i was to push these pedals where they were absolutely even look at that we're just going to start rotating with the torque produced by the engine right and the main rotor mast which we don't want to do so we have to automatically apply left pedal when we're producing power which is where we go like this [Music] counterclockwise rotating uh helicopter like the robinson of most american helicopters most european helicopters the opposite um the left pedal is what we call our power pedal it's the one that's going to oppose the torque of the main rotor when we're in a hover you know we're trying to just uh keep ourselves in a straight line again if you remember back to the days when you're learning to drive don't look right by the front of the hood of your car i call it a bonus niggler do you call it a hood but you know same thing always look as far ahead as you can so you don't over input everything for my me right now i'm gonna look at you know the c17 building all the way over there or the uh the boeing chair whatever it is just look far away and the first thing we do is i just tell people just keep us here just keep us pointing in the same direction keep pressure on those pedals and uh you know very very important with these pedals that you you actually put your balls of your feet on it do not put the flat or your arches of your feet on it again you can't feel it it's all about feel helicopter flying is all about feeling and feel you need to you know to be able to do that the only way you can do it with your feet really is is on the balls of your feet where you can constantly use both feet at the same time to feel that pressure of which what's going on and that will help you a lot in the future uh when you're trying to figure out what's going on with the wind or something else you know the pressure that you feel through your balls your feet will tell you actually a big story about what's going on so be cognizant of that always keep pressure on both of the pedals it's not one or the other it's not one on one off it's both pressure all that all the time and you are moderating the pressure that both of your feet are actually producing on those pedals to give you the desired result so with that plethora of information now we will start doing a little bit of something actually that we you know actually teach so to start with we usually just take people around in a in a left circle we break this down in the hovering with the pedals first maybe because we don't want to overload people i'm not going to say to someone if they never done it before here you go have all the controls and let's just see what happens that's not a recipe for success uh that's a recipe for being overwhelmed you know potentially i don't want to say having an accident but you know obviously the instructor is good that never happens but certainly you know the student is going to go get very very overwhelmed and you're going to get overwhelmed uh if you just get given everything all together and get told to figure it out so we start with the simplest which is the pedals and to go on a left a left circle here again what we're trying to do is we start with easing on to the left pedal [Music] pushing the left pedal left pedal keeping your eyes out front long way and then when we come about 90 degrees we start pushing the right pedal just to stop us the wind's not strong right now so you don't have to worry too much about that uh obviously when the wind's stronger then it's going to start pushing the aircraft round more you're gonna have to found out more cognizable so here we are coming into a tailwind right now again bravo just little little movements here nothing much going on eyes out front rotating around bring it around another 90 degrees get ready with that right pedal to slow us down and we're back in again again keep positive control on both of those pedals at the same time don't just use one or the other keep breathing keep breathing everyone always does this they hold the breath they hold their breath all the time and they're like this i guess what soon as you hold your breath because you know you you start to tense up your muscles start to tense up you lose that light touch on the controls and things start being like a bit you know with a bronco which we don't really want so keep breathing all the time keep your yoga breathing going on um so now we've done that left turn that's the easier way of doing it right that's the power way of doing it the power pedal we call it the more controlled way and if you ever get a chance always go with the power pedal when you're doing your pedal turns because you'll have more control over what's going on we're gonna do right pedal now uh which is essentially what we're doing is just rather than you know pushing right pedal we're just easing off the left a little bit letting the torque take over you definitely have to watch for the tail swinging a lot faster here as we start to let the torque take over and then you know if the wind catches us in one of our wind azimuth regions which i'm sure you'll all learn about lots of territory effectiveness then you can start spinning so just be cognizant of it going right it's going to be a lot more hairy thankfully it's not here not today but again the same principle you know theoretically you push for the right although you're really practically speaking easing off on the left and then when you just before you've got to where you want to go make sure you push the opposite pedal don't to wait actually to that point try and lead it by just a bit thank you here we are we're back round again so there in a nutshell is the pedals the second one we go through is the collective which is the up and down so right now we're pulling about 21 inches 21.5 inches of power singing here in a hover and what we're going to do is we're just going to just pull it a little bit until we're i don't know 15 feet off the ground we just sort of squeeze it up you don't yank it you just squeeze it and you just go up a bit and here we are we're up here and then to come down to the ground we just ease it down a little bit and guess what we come down and then when we come about three feet off the ground we just lead it by pulling up just a little bit so it's worth noting with this as well you start to see some of the interactions between the controls as i pull the collective guess what my nose wants to start moving to the right like that right you see that the nose is moving to the right if i do nothing with the pedals here becomes a lot of the skill with helicopter flyer we've got to look at these interactions so as i pull up on the collective to go up i gotta push a little bit more left pedal to keep my nose straight you know creating more torque and therefore i need more pedal to keep you straight and as i come down guess what if i don't do anything i'm gonna start rotating the opposite direction like this right so now i actually have to use a lot of right pedal when i'm coming down less power all these little nuances and subtle nuances are really really important so as we go up left pedal and we're up as we go down a little bit of right pedal and as we come down to the floor we just lead it and we're up here again right cool all right so then we just put those two together we're gonna do a left pedal turn and we're gonna keep ourselves about three feet off the ground power pedal remember ease into that pedal a little bit of a push again keep your eyes a long way in front of the aircraft always always do that and as you come around here just anticipate any wind if you know any so you have to come into the pedals and anticipate that so you don't start swinging you know certain points as well we're going to have to fiddle with the collector a bit to make sure we maintain a good level above the ground all right here we come back round to the center all right now the fun and games really begins so hopefully you guys got a bit of understanding of those two controls you know a bit of the pedals but in the collective i don't want to do this for three hours in the aircraft of course we'll run out of fuel here on the pad so i'm trying to condense this into a you know relatively short uh time span uh there'll be more opportunity to to expand on it other times all right the cyclic so the cyclic is the big one that causes most people a lot of problems and again i the first thing i say is essentially do nothing right you know i say do nothing because you want to feel what the aircraft is doing or trying to do and again like i said fly it with your fingers make sure that your wrist and your forearm are on your leg or your right leg this is mainly to do the fact that if you don't and you're holding it like this your propensity will be to start stirring the pot i call it and you can feel what happens here you're going to over input everything forcing your arm down on your leg will stop that you'll only be able to move your wrist and your fingers which will minimize minimize the chances of you over inputting um on the controls so big big big big point again when we're on the control make sure that you fly it like this with your fingers don't put it in a death grip like this you can't feel what the aircraft's doing you have no idea you want as much information as possible if you can from the control so fly it with your fingertips put your fingers on it like this don't be worried to start with your instructor will always have it for you i know it feels a bit weird but you will learn so much more by flying with your fingers than you will by gripping it really really hard so once we're in this position here like i said what we want to do is is do nothing to start with the big problem we're going to have is that we're going to react too much to something so what's going to happen is if we if we don't just start with it this helicopter's going to start moving one direction like this and then you're going to over input you're going to correct the opposite direction and it's going to go oh that look at all god i'm going to do it more over input again and before you know it we've got this huge pendulum effect going backwards and forwards that's called over inputting and which gets worse and worse and worse and that will happen the same way forwards and backwards i mean you know we'll start doing this and then you'll think you're dead center you're not you're starting to creep forward so you'll pull back and god hopefully don't pull back too much or the tail will go in the ground then you'll start going backwards but oh god that's too much push forward and again oh okay too much forward and you know before you know it we're doing the same thing forwards and backwards which is not going to be too good so same effects you know and then the main the real key point about this is be light on the control and then you'll be able to feel what's going on far far more than if you have a really hard hold on it so one of the you know one of the things i encourage with students to start with is you know with a lot of robson aircraft a lot of helicopters there's kind of like a dead spot right in the middle uh especially the r22 you know you you do you can't move the the cyclic like in a little circle on a sort of width of a dime i guess or a quarter and it won't do anything what i encourage people to do is kind of this is just my own personal thing is just move it a little bit to see just how much you don't you can move it without actually doing anything you know you'll be able to do this like i'm doing this now with a cyclic on the 44 if you can see and nothing's actually really happening there is a bit of a dead travel here right in the center and that's kind of useful to know so that you can know you know by keeping your keeping your hands a little bit mobile moving your hands and fingers around a bit it will also let you make you so you don't tense up to start with by just moving on purpose but you'll also know where the limits of that movement are i know that i can move it here and i'm like okay i'm not doing anything but if i move it a little bit out of there oh then it's actually doing something now and i know not to do that right so well there's no hard and fast rule with how to keep it in the middle the best way i always found is you know just move it a little bit so you can actually start to feel this is all feel it's all feel so move it a little bit and actually start thinking okay what is enough to move it versus what's not enough not to and like i said inadvertently that will make it so that you're actually not uh you know tensing up on the controls and moving anyway at the same time you know this is the cyclic is so much this where this psychology bit comes back in now so what we're talking about here with psychology is you know make sure when you're when you're actually doing it that you're breathing right just breathe and that'll make you relax then your muscles won't tense up which really really helps you know that your instructor might try to distract you well what you'll find is that your conscious mind is not actually fast enough to correct things sometimes by the time you realize that oh we're going too right you're going to be like oh correct we're actually too late because now we're penduluming around right what we got to actually really get to a point is that your subconscious mind takes over and corrects it without you even thinking about it to start with and really how you do that is literally just relaxing and being slightly distracted by your instructor actually talking to you and you know you're thinking about other things and you know doing everything together um and so you know a lot of times relax just intuitively feel out don't overthink it you know and then over time your subconscious will take over and you'll do it without even thinking about it which is ironically what you want to do obviously if you do want to move in a hover then you can move left or right backwards forwards but to start with we're just trying to do nothing and then usually at the end of the demo when you know some of the students got the the you know the cycling down reasonably and we're not bronco all over the airport and we're just you know we're sitting here and you know i could start to see the the student actually subconsciously sort of twitching the cyclic in the opposite direction that the helicopter is moving before it does it then we actually go on all three controls together and actually really help as it helps as well because that divides the brain into all these different controls and then you don't overthink one of them and that can actually help so you you put them on you know cycling the pedals and the collective together and suddenly before they know it they're doing you know all three without even thinking about it because that like i said their brain is big split between all of them and that's actually a good technique to do as well rather than over focusing on one of the particular controls which can lead to that you know over focus over pressure and then you know it doesn't work as well as it should so really you know the big takeaways from from this um i would say you know with the controls number one relax right don't tense up breathe checking with your breathing be light on the controls when you're relaxed you are lighter on the controls you'll be able to feel the controls more you'll be able to you know anticipate a little bit more you know flying with your fingers enables you to feel the pressure and where the where the control is actually with all of the balls of your feet on the on the pedals you know use your fingers with the collective as well so you can to squeeze it rather than pulling it all of these things will help you at the same time always look far out with a helicopter don't look right by the aircraft when you're hovering you know take each control individually to start with and put them together once you've done about 10 minutes of it go and have a break you know go and fly a traffic pattern go and have a rest you know your brain will need that rest go and just decompress do something else collect yourself come back don't just hammer on it hovering and oh i'm gonna get this i'm gonna get this i'm gonna get this because that pressure and what that fatigue will enable you know you'll start to tense up you'll make mistakes so know yourself have a break from it you know uh talk to your instructor he'll he or she will you know talk to you calm you down and before you know it your subconscious are taken over and you'll be like well i'm hovering you know usually let's say four to five hours to start with to get proficient at it and suddenly it'll click don't get frustrated at yourself that's never gonna that's never gonna help just relax say this is all part of the process this is what happens you know we have to go through these these little games with ourselves to get there but you will get there i trust me you will get there we've all been there we've all started this whole game and we've all had to work through the nuances of hovering and not overthinking things and relaxing and suddenly it will come trust me it will come so i hope you guys have enjoyed uh this video today i hope it's been some use and this means some subtle things there that you picked up again you know i'm not the be all and all of helicopter knowledge um you know a lot of these things i've just uh picked up from years and years of teaching and i've worked for my students and quite frankly worked for me so everyone be safe out there happy flying and we'll get back in touch with you soon and ready for the next video and uh please subscribe if you like the video and show some comments about uh what you'd like to see next time what other maneuvers you want to see and we'll go on from there alright guys stay safe happy flight [Music] here [Music] you

Channel: Anthelion Helicopters

Views: 29,442

Keywords: Anthelion Helicopters, Helicopter Flight, Aerial Photography, Los Angeles Helicopters, Helicopter Flight Training, Helicopters, Long Beach Airport, LGB, Los Angeles Helicopter Tour, how to fly a helicopter, learn to fly, Helicopter, Gopro, helicopter pilot, flight training, helicopter training, long beach, helicopter flight training lesson 1, pilot training, flight school, private pilot, Robinson R44, Aviation, robinson helicopter, flying, helicopter jobs, Helicopter license, Fly

Id: ztht9YKkrIM

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022