Gravity plays its part

Flying Radio Controlled Helicopters used to be one of my main hobbies, taking most of my time pretty much every weekend until about a year and a half ago, when I joined the ranks of the employed. Unfortunately that took up pretty much all of my free time and hence I shelved the idea for a while... Until this past weekend, when I decided to revisit the past and fire up the beast that is my 3DNT. .

The 3DNT is a german helicopter and a pretty high performance machine. Considering I hadn't flown in a year and a half I was slightly concerned before I took off on the test flight. Anyway, after a minute or two of hovering it seemed that all was in order, and it appeared as if I hadn't forgotten how to fly. I flew around for a bit, landed and fuelled my baby up for the second flight, where I was going to stretch her legs.

The second flight started well - after about two minutes I realized, after flipping the heli inverted, that I could still perform an inverted hover. I flipped the helicopter back upright, and clearly as the purr of the engine came to an abrupt end, the 3DNT did not enjoy the inverted hover as much as I did.

I attempted a downwind nose in autorotation (Landing the helicopter successfully without an engine!) which unfortunately ended unpleasantly as I think i flared and added pitch too soon... Check the video to see how it should be done properly, so guess who's ordering some RC parts from Hong Kong...