I remember when flying a remote control helicopter required almost the same skills as a real pilot. People used to practice with tethered flights to gain experience.
Now, you just flip the switch and off they go, up, down, left, right… What were all the changes they made?
Dennis
In the old days in both models and in real helicopters your controls directly adjusted the angle of the blades and the output power of the engine. Flying the machine that way is akin to juggling nerf balls and medicine balls at the same time. Challenging to say the least.
In the new ones, a set of gyros and accelerometers are connected to a computer. Which is programed to hold the vehicle stationary in 3D space and in orientation no matter what happens with the wind.
Now your controls are connected (directly or remotely) as inputs to the computer that are simply “rotate left / right”, “translate forwards / backwards”, “translate leftwards / rightwards”, and “increase / decrease altitude”. The computer figures out how to move the actual aerodynamic controls to maintain stable flight while doing your command as well.
The next meta-level is commands like “fly at 100 feet above the ground to <lat, long> to arrive there at <time>”.
Miniature electronics that sense a change in horizontal orientation and change tail rotor input to prevent rotation around the rotors axis came about in the 90s. Later the ability to detect changes in altitude and make those corrections were added. Big technology.
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As others said, it is electronics. They stabilize the craft through software and design.
That said, I have had many of them and they still aren’t that easy to fly. All of them have landed in a tree somewhere and I couldn’t get it down. My latest one is fairly sophisticated (you can try to fly it from an iPhone if you don’t want to use the controller) and it works fairly well except I flew it into the top of a 60’ foot pine tree within minutes of setting it up.
Luckily I have a gymnastics champion daughter (aka, the Snow Monkey) that can retrieve just about anything and she scaled that tree like it was nothing and brought it back down. I then proceeded to fly it straight onto a roof across the street. She got it back again.
I stick to open fields these days. I know how to fly real airplanes but those small drones are a handful. Some people get good at it but it is a specialized skill that takes practice.
It is still much better than the older types though. My grandfather took my to a remote controlled plane and helicopter demonstration near his house in the early 80’s. Some of them cost thousands of 80’s dollars and countless hours of construction. I witnessed three crashes of remote controlled planes that were not small at all. If you want to see really dorky grown men crying, that is the place for it.
Modern consumer drones are a revolution but don’t ever think that you can take a mid-priced one and expect good results without lots of practice.
I almost hesitate to hijack my own thread, but drones are close enough. I watched some drone racing on TV and was absolutely astonished at the pilot’s skill. Those things fly Fast, and the indoors course was a maze of tight turns and blind loops set up inside an abandoned factory. The pilots view the onboard camera through 3D type goggles. It required literally split-second reactions. I would have crashed and burned on the first turn.
Dennis
Having learned on the old style RC models - today’s are so much easier to fly it’s unreal. Yes, in the old days you required most of the same skills as a pilot of a full-size aircraft, and a much better understanding of the physics involved.
That said, there are still different levels of skill. While anyone can pull one out of box these days and not crash it instantly there’s still an initial clumsiness that results in landing in treetops and on roofs. Practice (and better knowledge of how things operate) does result in much higher levels of skill. There is still a learning curve.
ETA: another technology that has made a big difference is affordable flight simulators - you can get over the initial clumsiness by crashing pixels on your PC, thereby saving thousands of dollars in wrecked hardware.
I’d love to have a remote-control helicopter, but all the ones I see have contra-rotating rotors. I’d like something with a ‘real’ main- and tail-rotor system, but I don’t want to invest in a traditional r/c helicopter. (By ‘traditional’, I mean an internal combustion engine, large(-ish) size, etc.)
Are there any single-rotor (w/anti-torque rotor) helicopters out there between the ‘toys’ and the serious r/c hobbyist ones?
Probably not.
I’d locate an old fashioned hobby shop and ask then if they are aware of any such - I know a local one in my area I could recommend, but you’re nowhere near my area. If you still want to contact them I’ll send you the info in a PM, if you can’t locate one in your area.
It’s not imperative. Anyway The Wife would probably roll her eyes, and then kill me.
Amazing stuff.
I have a nephew that has one. He does use it for work, but had to buy it on his own. It’s a pretty good one I think, $1800
I was given controls when it was 100 feet away at 100 feet above the ground.
I wanted to look at the iPhone mounted to the controls, but the sun was too bright. So I just watched it. Never flew one before, but brought it right in. Took a few minutes though.
What do they sense to keep such constant and close above ground altitude (AGL). GPS would be too slow, and not that accurate (but I’m sure it is used for nav and such).
GPS actually is pretty good at this - GPS doesn’t just provide location, it provides speed as well. I have a cheap (<$50) drone that relies on an accelerometer + gyro, and a more expensive one with GPS (older model DJI). They are both easy to fly, but the cheap one drifts around in the wind while the DJI is rock stable, including altitude.
But in addition, many high-end drones now have ultrasonic sensors to sense altitude and to avoid obstacles. Some also use downward-looking cameras to detect horizontal speed, so they can stay stationary even when there is no GPS signal (e.g. indoors).
It is amazing the number of sensors that can be crammed on a chip or two these days. Like this thing, which is still less sophisticated than the versions you find in modern cell phones (but can be used to build your own drones, if you have the skillz.)
Let’s differentiate between R/C helicopters and R/C "drones."
R/C helicopters are still pretty much just like the real thing, you control the rotor speeds along with the cyclic and collective. I have a small one (Blade CX-2) which has twin counter-rotating main rotors, and is still pretty challenging to learn to fly.
“Drones” have many rotors-4, 8, etc.- which don’t change pitch at all. By and large you just use the controlller to tell it where you want it to go and the control software varies the speeds of the individual rotors to get you there.
Ultrasonic. Then ‘radar’ using sound waves? A type of echo location? I can see this. Much like a bat does.
Would then, even an expensive one use dead reckoning using accelerometers and ultrasonic for immediate location input, to be updated by GPS? GPS is good, but sub-meter stuff takes a little time. I’m guessing it’s down to a few seconds now. I just wonder if that would be fast enough.
There’s about a dozen actual designers/brands worldwide, and for better or for worse, several (usually Chinese) clones of every model, varying greatly in quality compared to the original. There’s many hobby-grade models available that won’t destroy your home or your wallet. Between brushless motors and LiPo batteries, electric has all but taken over the RC helicopter world; there aren’t many internal-combustion models left on the market (outside of a large-scale niche with costs that can easily reach five figures).
I started with a Syma S107G (fixed-pitch coaxial rotor), based on hundreds of recommendations on nearly every RC helicopter forum on the internet. I spent probably 5hrs flying this around my living room & kitchen, in 7-8min flights, mostly learning how to smoothly control altitude with collective. This model is very well-known for it’s durability - I bought a spare parts pack with it, and even after I passed it down to my 7yo daughter, I haven’t used any of the spares.
I then upgraded to a clone of the WL Toys V911 (fixed-pitch conventional rotor), again based on many forum recommendations [specifically, this one]. It’s another very durable model, with flight control authority that can be both electronically and mechanically altered for both beginners and more-advanced pilots. This one has pitch, roll, and yaw controls, and also needs a bit of mechanical set-up before flying; it’s not as simple as unpacking, charging, and flying like the S107.
Both the S107 and V911 are “palm sized”, so they are limited to indoor flying. I did attempt my V911 outside once, on (what felt like) a very calm day; there was still enough air movement to overpower the low-authority control settings I was flying on, and nearly put it into the side of my house. Their small size is what allows them to be so durable - they weigh so little that even a power-off landing from indoor heights doesn’t cause much, if any, breakage.
Costs and skills/space/maintenance requirements start getting pretty high once you get much bigger than these two models. Bigger models are far less tolerant of “ham fisted flying” and hard impacts than the small ones. I’d love to end up with something like an Align T-REX 450 or a good clone, but the cost and space requirements are likely to be show-stoppers for me.
So is it fixed pitch, or does it have pitch control?
That’s more like what I’d like to have! But you’re right about the cost. I might get away with $40 for the first one, but I’d be murdered in my sleep if I spent $500 to $600 on a ‘toy’.
What you want is a small-ish collective pitch (CP) RC helicopter.
And they are available - here’s one for $200. Inexpensive versions would be electrically powered, so much quieter, cheaper and less troublesome than “nitro” versions, at the cost of less power (e.g. for inverted flight) and shorter max duration.
Price doesn’t include a radio. That’s another $200.
Yes; the two terms mean two different things in the context of helicopter flight controls:
“Pitch, roll, and yaw” refers to the three flight control axes. Pitch is nose-up and nose-down, roll is left wing up/right wing down and vice versa, and yaw is nose left/tail right and vice versa.
If you really want to dig into the subject, I recommend you check out rcgroups.com, and/or helifreak.com, and spend some time reading up on the beginner heli forums. There’s tons of good info there from folks who have been in the hobby for decades, and are far smarter about it than I am (that’s where I did most of my research).
You know you’re talking to an actual helicopter pilot, right? 
If the main rotor blades are fixed, then they do not have collective control. I surmised that thrust and lift are controlled by changing the speed of the rotor, but this is not pitch control. So it sounds like the model in question does not have pitch control.
FWIW, the collective doesn’t really control ‘rotor speed’. Ideally, the rotor speed is kept to 100% of rated limits. In a Robinson R22 for example, the main rotor is kept between 97% and 104%. Raising the collective increases drag (and lift/thrust), which tries to slow the rotor; but there is a throttle correlator that compensates by increasing power, to keep the rotor speed within limits. Similarly, lowering the collective automatically reduces engine power with the correlator. You can turn the correlator off, BTW, and adjust the throttle manually.
