Flying a radio controlled airplane or helicopter is much like riding a bike. Someone can tell you all about riding a bike until they are blue in the face, but it does no good at all until you get on a bike and get a feel for the balance and control for yourself. And flying [...]

Futaba has recently released their new 8J radio, in both an airplane and helicopter version. Although at first glance it looks like most other radios in the Futaba line, it has some great new features, and at an extremely low price. This is the helicopter version which will default to helicopter settings when powered up [...]

Although radio control airplanes and helicopters have been around for many years, it has only been since the early 1990s that simulators have been available to help us with the learning-to-fly process. For those of you who are too young to remember what computers were like back then, the personal computer (pc) was very limited [...]

Skookum Robotics is ready to officially announce this coming Monday the addition of their new SK540 Flybarless Control Computer to compliment their very popular SK720.  The SK-720 is their “top of the line” unit that is designed for pilots from beginner to 3D expert. It replaces the tail gyro, mechanical flybar, and receiver on your R/C Helicopter, [...]

Helicopter flying safety is a subject that is important to all of us, but is also a subject we rarely discuss either at the flying field or in magazine articles. Although helicopters have a large spinning rotor disk, this does not mean that helicopters are more dangerous than airplanes, or any other form of R/C, [...]

In my previous blog on the pitch gauge I said the accuracy of the gauge is less important than its ease of use and the repeatability of the results. The reason I say accuracy is less important is because one of the requirements to use a pitch gauge with a flybar helicopter is that the [...]

One of the newest 3-axis flybarless control systems is the Ace GT5 Flybarless Gyro System from Thunder Tiger. As you can see in the photo, one of its greatest features is the bright LED display, with a full icon based menu touch pad that is completely adjustable without the need of a computer or an [...]

Even the most basic computer helicopter radio will allow you to adjust the pitch curve of the rotor blades once you have determined the high and low pitch end points. However, measuring these high and low end points requires the use of a pitch gauge. To put it another way, the pitch gauge enables you [...]