Model Aircraft Piloting Made Easy - Crash As Often As You Want While You Learn


by Tara Soonthornnont - Date: 2007-03-10 - Word Count: 694 Share This!

Flying model aircrafts rates as one of the most intriguing hobbies. Very few things can compare to the experience of seeing your first RC airplane or helicopter take flight. For non-pilots, seeing someone else fly an RC aircraft is extremely captivating. So captivating that often times it makes you want to learn to fly!

Then the story starts. You spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy your first airplane/helicopter plus a few more hundred for the radio, fuel, batteries, gyros, glow plug, flight box, charger, fuel pumps, engines, starters and a hundred different things that the shop tells you is a must. Just when you thought that the cash spill finally ends, it doesn't!

New RC pilots quickly learn their first lesson - that it's hard to fly! So what to do? Easy, get an instructor! Well, this also means more money and a few hours of lesson time. No matter! In for a penny in for a dime! You take those lessons and learn everything you can from the (expensive) instructor. Pretty soon, you can fly "half" the time! Great!

Then eventually the lesson time runs out and you're on your own. That should be ok, since you are now "half" a pilot - or so you thought. On your next flight, you take the RC airplane / helicopter out and attempt your first solo flight. Suddenly for some reason that you don't understand, you loose control and crash. Unrelenting, you fix the craft, spent (much) more than a few dollars and hit the flying field again. You finally realize why you crashed last time, and you overcome it. Wonderful! But this time there's another hurdle, you turn the aircraft in to face you, you get disoriented and then - yup - another crash. You fix it; try again, crash again, and again and again - and yet again. A few months, a dozen crashes and thousands of dollars later you finally learn how to fly! Wow! Great ending!

This story repeats itself over and over with every new pilot. No matter how careful, a new pilot will crash more than a few times as they learn. In doing so, they will have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. Sadly, this fact "was" absolutely true - before!

No More!

Nowadays new pilot can learn to fly without having to pay for expensive instructors. Even better, they can crash their aircraft as often as they want without having to spend any money to fix it! How? The answer comes on a CD Rom, the Flight Simulators!

To be fair, RC flight simulators are nothing new. In fact, they were around since the 80s. However, early flight simulators were extremely unrealistic and so expensive that it might be cheaper to actually crash your model a hundred times.

Luckily, competition and technology changed all that. Modern flight simulators' realism rivals that of the latest computer game - in other words, extraordinary. Some versions come with an exact replica of a real radio controller as a joy stick, others will come with a connector cable that allows learning pilots to plug in their favorite RC controller, really good versions will allow for both options.

The physics engine that come incorporated in these flight simulating are also the very best modern programming technology will allow. Simply put, everything that can and will happen on the real airfield can and will happen in the simulated flight at 99.99% accuracy. And that is not an overstatement.

Price of these RC simulators is dropping too. Really good and well branded simulators costs around $300 dollars. Others that are just as good are available for just under a hundred bucks. The best deals come even cheaper than that, they are free! Don't think that free RC simulators aren't up to scratch; they offer features that rival their high priced counterparts. Still, even the most expensive package will pay for itself on the very first simulated crash you make (and you will make lots of them).

So there you have it, the best way to learn to fly an RC model today is to crash, crash, crash, and crash some more until you got it! Of course, do the crashing on a flight simulator where it won't cost any money.


Related Tags: rc helicopter, rc, rc model, rc flight simulator, flight simulator, rc airplane

Interested in the amazing hobby of Electric RC Helicopters? Tara Soonthornnont is an Electric RC Helicopter enthusiast who maintains a website dedicated to it. Check Out: http://www.electric-rc-helicopter.com

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