5. The 3 Most Important Things

The 3 most important things about learning to fly an RC aircraft: Simulator time, simulator time and more simulator time

There is one very compelling an obvious reason why a lot of simulator time is important before ever actually trying to fly your RC helicopter. That reason is simply that your RC helicopter is not indestructible, but a virtual one is.

The Clearview RC demo in action

My personal favorite is called the Clearview RC Flight Simulator. It is my favorite because the free demo allows you to fly RC helicopters and to use any dual-stick analog game pad set up similarly to an RC transmitter. The flight model is also passable for the price. Not great, but passable.

Unfortunately, it's a time-limited demo and only allows for 45 minutes or so of flying before it expires. After that, the full version is $30 and, in my opinion, it's worth it for the price.

If spending $30 doesn't agree with you, there is a completely freeware RC simulator called FMS - Flying Model Simulator - that you can easily download online, I personally think it's worth the $30 for Clearview because the flight model seems better to me, and the graphics are much better, as well.

On the other side of the coin, there is much better RC simulator software out there than Clearview, notably a package called Realflight G3, which is incredibly realistic. The downside is that it costs about $200 for the program and a transmitter controller that plugs into your PC. It's very spiffy, but it's also much more expensive. The demo version isn't time limited, but from what I can tell, it doesn't allow you to use a game pad and only accommodates keyboards. Using a dual analogue joystick is the best way to simulate an RC transmitter with two analogue joysticks, so the keyboard-only option makes the G3 demo useless for training purposes.

If you have any illusions that flying an RC helicopter is something you will pick up naturally, I encourage you to download an RC simulator demo. I don't care how many hundreds of hours of in-cockpit PC flight-sim time you have under your belt, because when you're not in the cockpit, all bets are off. Controlling a helicopter is inherently counter intuitive and can be a painful experience. Particularly difficult is controlling the aircraft when it is facing you, which inverts all of your controls - your hand moves left, the helicopter moves right.

Like everything however, practice makes perfect. Well, practice can also make passable: passable would be the ability to lift off, fly and land without blowing your virtual RC helicopter up. After you've destroyed your first 30 virtual RC helicopters you might be getting a hang of it and things might start to click. If you can consistently lift off, fly away, turn around, fly back and land without ending up in a fiery heap, you may be ready to start thinking about flying your real-life RC helicopter.