8. Baby Steps, AKA "Bunny Hops"

The Honey Bee Mark 3 is not something you'd want to fly in your living room... unless you've got a really big living room. You could probably make due with an empty basement or garage, though. Flying outside is an option but you don't want to do that unless there's almost no wind. Wind can really interfere with smaller, light RC helicopters like the Honey Bee.

Place the helicopter on the ground, and stand behind it as far as the space allows you to, at least 10 feet or so if possible. Make sure the helicopter is facing directly away from you. This will make it much easier to control, because when the helicopter is facing you the left/right controls are inverted, and it's much more difficult.

The best way to get a feel for an RC helicopter is to perform what's called "bunny hops." Basically, you want to increase throttle until you get a foot or two of height, and then decrease throttle fairly quickly so that the helicopter lands before it gets too high. Bunny hopping repeatedly will give the pilot an idea of how responsive the helicopter is so they can more confidently fly it.

Bunny hops are also a good way to learn if the helicopter needs calibrating. For instance, if the helicopter turns right a lot when you're bunny hopping, you'll probably want to counter that by trimming the yaw to the left a bit. Ideally, the helicopter should simply hover perfectly if you apply throttle. This is never the case as you'll always have to make small adjustments while flying, but try to set the trims the best you can.

If the trims aren't sufficient to calibrate a more serious control problem, you may have to adjust the proportion or gain trimmers. These adjustment screws are on the helicopter itself, and the manual will describe how they work in detail.

Flying And Crashing

Once you've bunny-hopped enough times to get comfortable with the controls and responsiveness of the helicopter, the next thing to try is hovering a couple feet off the ground in one spot for as long as you can. Hovering isn't as easy as it sounds because the helicopter will require constant and subtle control adjustments to stay in the same airspace.

After you are good enough with the controls to hover confidently, it's time to experiment with flying. Once again, baby steps, and nothing monumental, are required. At an altitude of four feet or so, go forward 15 feet, turn around, come back and land. The tough part is learning to control the helicopter when it is facing toward you.

If you have mastered this, congratulations, you're a novice pilot!

Of course, I should mention that when practicing these steps, you will crash. Crashing is not an option, it's a guarantee. Even the most experienced pilots crash now and again. However, you can minimize the damage by staying relatively close to the ground and making sure there's not much around for the helicopter to crash into.

When you crash, it's nice to know that the Honey Bee is a remarkably resilient piece of machinery, and will take quite a few bumps and knocks without any problems. However, sooner or later, something is bound to break.

Be prepared to invest in replacement parts when you need them. I found that in particularly violent crashes, the rotor head (the part that's attached to the main rotor blades) would snap. Hobby-Lobby.com offers replacements for about $15, and there are other online vendors as well. Replacement parts are the expensive part of RC aviation, but it's an inevitable cost with any RC aircraft, so keep it in mind and make sure you know who supplies the parts you need.