I’m looking at heading to some remote regions of the planet in the near future, and I want to do some aerial shooting. Unfortunately, in one location, getting a helicopter costs $100,000 for a week, and a hot air balloon costs $50,000. That’s more than I can afford. Instead, I’ve started to look into using RC helicopters to do some aerial shooting. With wireless video downlinks (so that you can see what the camera sees) and features like GPS hold (which will cause the heli to hold itself exactly where you put it in the air), it seems like the time’s right to use these guys for serious work. I’ll try to post what I learn here, as there’s a lot of info out there!

Step one was to go to my local hobby shop and pick up a copy of the Phoenix RC flight sim with transmitter. Phoenix and RealFlight (both Windows only, unfortunately) seem to be the top flight sims, and I’ve heard Phoenix has a better helicopter sim. It also comes with a Spektrum DX5e controller that you can use both with the flight sim via USB and with a real helicopter. I was also told to slow down the flight sim to 60-75% of its normal speed both to make it less twitchy and because it’s better to learn the right finger movements slowly. I also picked up a small, Blade mCX2 helicopter to learn to fly on. All of this came to about $300.

Why a flight sim, you might ask? Mainly because RC helicopters are ridiculously hard to fly. I’d much rather crash a virtual model where there’s no cost than a real model, where I’m having to pay to fix my helicopter after each flight. Plus with a flight sim, you’re not limited by battery life when learning to hover and fly.

The next question is what to do with the flight sim? First, pick your helicopter model. There’s a Blade mCX you can start with, or try a bigger helicopter (I’ve been using a TRex 500) that’s a bit harder to fly. Step two is learning to hover. Phoenix has some useful tools to help. There’s a training mode that will handle the rudder controls (which controls elevation) for you so that you can just focus on keeping the helicopter steady. The training modes also let you control just one axis (or multiple axises) so that you can focus on keeping it stable side to side, front to back, or the nose pointed a certain way. Try practicing with the nose pointed away from you, to the left, at you, and to the right. It really messes with your mind when you reverse the orientation!

Once you’re ready to try putting it all together, leave the training mode and turn the landing precision target on (it’s under Site options). That’ll give you a ring of concentric circles to practice hovering over.

Spend time just hovering your helicopter, touching the controls as little as possible. Also try having the heli’s nose at different orientations. This will take you a while to learn! If it doesn’t, I’m jealous.

While working with the flight sim, try reading around the Internet and looking at ads to see what’s going on. Two great sites I’ve found are Helifreak and AP Landing. Helifreak has great info about flying and building, but keep in mind the people there are more interested in the hobby (building and 3D flight) aspect of their helis. I’m interested in using it as transport for my camera, and AP Landing users seem to skew more towards that mindset.

While doing all this, I’ve also been looking at what helicopter I might want to purchase to really use with my camera. I’m starting to think that a quadcopter of some sort (which has 4, 6, or 8 sets of blades) would be the best choice, as they’re supposed to be more stable and a bit easier to fly, and they have decent lift ratings while still being electric (much easier to deal with in remote locations than gas/nitro). Quadrocopter and RC Hobby Helicopter sell Droidworx frames (including ready-to-fly ones), and RC Hobby Helicopter builds their own carbon fiber frames, too. The current Droidworx heavy lifters can lift a Canon 5D MkII, but they’re coming out with a cinema series soon designed to lift the RED Epic. There’s also ones like the Draganflyer, but those seem incredibly expensive and don’t lift as much. The iPhone-controlled Parrot Drone is also neat, but it can’t lift a real camera.

I’m pretty sure that once I’ve spent some time flying my little Blade, I’ll purchase a Gaui 330X quadcopter kit (about $400) to see what flying a quadcopter’s like.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 4:31pm and is filed under RC Aerial Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.