21 thoughts on “Teaching Hovering”

  1. Wonder if model helicopter pilots have an easier time. We have to fly in 3rd person, with the ship pointing in every direction & sometimes the cyclic is reversed. We use left stick rudder instead of pedals.

    We do have configurable stability. Decreasing a software gain can make it require constant inputs & be very hard to hover. Increasing a software gain can make it stable enough to let the cyclic go for a few seconds without it moving anywhere.

  2. I always like your writing. In this case, I’d recommend a little more on how you teach and a little less on why the way other people do it is wrong.

  3. Calif: RC helicopter pilots are usually able to hold a hover pretty quickly as well. Definitely flying an RC helicopter is tougher than flying a real one.

    Mike: Thanks for the feedback. I dwell on the way other folks teach because it is standard and it also results in a lot of crashes. I can probably add a bit more on my technique.

  4. That’s an interesting piece — I never knew that hovering instruction was so accident-prone.

    I notice you twice describe the easy-to-teach student as a proficient instrument pilot. Is there something specific about instrument flight that teaches attitude awareness at the one-degree level, or do you mean “instrument pilot” as a proxy for “experienced pilot?” Seems to me that the attitude awareness is primarily developed in VFR flight.

  5. You’ve written eloquently about the power of attaching outside perspectives to a piece of content, for example through comments. You even dubbed sites equipped to do so “multiple truth” websites since they reflect viewpoints other than the author’s.

    But now all your community features seem to be gone, even commenting. And there are ads, which surprised me. You wrote somewhere once (can’t find it) about this email template you drew up for people who suggested you attach ads to your website; it listed the costs of publishing vs the possible income from ads, and the ads were clearly piddling in comparison.

    I’m not in a position to complain about content I’m getting for free, but just curious about the changes in your attitude toward Web publishing w/r/t both community and ads. Do you figure people will just respond here or via their own blog posts, since it’s now much easier to self publish than in 1998?

  6. Ryan: Thanks for pointing out that the “add a comment” link wasn’t there. I had not sync’d the RDBMS with the file system (remember that I’m using my own software from the mid-1990s when it didn’t make sense to store all of the static content in the database). The lack of a comment link was not intentional. The “add a link” feature probably has to go. 99.9% of the links added are spam. And a huge percentage of comments are link spam of some sort.

    My attitude toward ads has changed due to the advent of Google Ads, which often puts in interesting and/or relevant stuff (also a friend of mine was a principal developer of Google Ads). I try to keep Google Ads only on the pages of my site where I think someone might have an interest in commercial stuff, e.g., product reviews or aviation. I don’t have them on most of my essays.

    Eric: Hovering instruction is probably the #1 or #2 way that trainer helicopters get wrecked. The other big one is autorotations. Instrument pilots pay more attention to very small attitude changes than VFR pilots. There are VFR guys with 2000 hours who aren’t all that precise because they’ve never needed to be.

  8. Your article was very interesting. It would help if you could elaborate on why instrument pilots notice change in attitude. For instance, I immediately thought of JFK Jr’s problem and wondered if his plunge into the ocean was an unfortunate example of a non-ifr pilot NOT noticing the same change. Such a description would parallel your Navy pilot example and clarify the differences in the two types of training.
    Also, I wonder if the last paragraph of the summary dilutes the impact of the essay and would be better off either removed or placed between the 1st and 2nd sentences of the first paragraph the the summary.
    Just suggestions. I enjoy your blog – thanks.

  9. Heather: JFK, Jr. had quite a bit of instrument training, though not the IFR rating (a painful checkride for relatively new pilots!). And being in a graveyard spiral (30 degrees of bank) is not subtle, though you’d have to be looking at the attitude indicator to perceive it.

    Thanks for the reorg idea. I’ve adopted it.

    Chris: typo fixed on the dev server.

  10. Interesting article. As a private pilot who would like to but never has flown a helicopter, I like reading your essays on the subject.

    One unrelated question. I watched a helicopter messing around over the SF bay a few months ago and thought “this looks odd…I think this guy is going to end up making a run under the golden gate bridge.”. Sure enough, 30 seconds later he was headed for the pacific.

    Is that an FAR violation? Clearly it is in an airplane, but in a helicopter?

    Note that there is a small typo in one of the last paragraphs: “As the…” should read “Ask the…”

  11. Rob: I’m too much of a chicken to fly under the Golden Gate Bridge, but I don’t think it violates any FAR. There is no requirement for a helicopter to remain 500′ from vessels, structures, or people. The FAA can still bust a pilot for being “reckless” but as many people have flown under the bridge before it probably can’t be considered reckless.

  12. The secret to being a good instrument pilot is to first stop things from changing before applying corrections. And then apply very minor corrections to observe small changes. Even the instruments that lag in the actual readings show motion immediately. I believe this is true of the visual situation in the helicopter as well. I have also discovered that with the idea of being able to stop changes you can quickly adapt to any kind of controls. Take for example flying a flight simulator on a computer with just the keyboard.

    Learning to fly a RC model helicopter is another example of the statement above. The controls are different but the task is the same. You just have to learn the visual clues that indicate change in whatever situation you are in and train your muscle reactions to the control set that is available.

  13. Would it be a benefit to maybe teach students to hover a small electric RC helicopter first before trying to hover a full size helicopter? This way they at least get used to the sensitivity of the controls. One idea maybe to give every student that signs up for flight lessons a small electric RC helicopter and tell them to learn to hover it in their back yard first 🙂

    One interesting note in the article is that you teach hovering after the student has flown the helicopter around, when I learned how to fly my RC helicopter one of the first things that I learned was that every helicopter flight begins and ends in hover, so hovering is what you learn first before attempting any other maneuver.

    An interesting comparison would be “Ray’s Helicopter Manual” (a good instruction book for RC pilots) to equivalent full size helicopter manual.

  14. The thing that I found a problem when learning to hover was to lose the “gorilla” grip. No matter how hard you squeezed the control, it did not make the helicopter stable but it made it impossible to feel the control input. I have found many beginner instrument pilots have the same problem. You need to fly with a light touch. Sometimes it take a pencil woven between the fingers to realize how hard you are gripping the stick.

  15. Additional typo: “Do you getting a stronger attitude reference by looking close or looking far away?” s/getting/get/ or s/Do/Are/?

    Pavel, and others, I’ve seen at least one full-sized stick and pedal chair for RC pilots marketed with the notion that learning with those makes learning to hover the full-sized craft a two or three minute affair.

    To the larger issue, with no illusions that it actually maps to the real thing I’ve only learned to hover in two flight simulators, FlightGear and Microsoft Flight Simulator, the former with a full-sized although fairly low resolution (8 bits, probably less ’cause $20 for the 4 axis joystick I disassembled doesn’t buy high quality pots) stick/pedal combo I built. In both cases, high frame rate was an absolute necessity, and I’ve wondered if the lack of seat feel was part of why that was so challenging.

    Well, okay, two flight simulators and one indoor dual contra-rotating rotor R/C helicopter, but there’s enough onboard processing on that that it doesn’t really count…

    I do want to learn how to fly the real thing, when I can make the time commitment to getting out there, but my overall experience was that it’s a lot like balancing a stick on your finger, except with two additional axes. And that if ground-effect was semi-reasonably modeled, most of the collective control only matters if you’re falling off the side of the air cushion.

  16. Phil, I read your article and I agree with all of the points that you raise. I’m an Army helicopter pilot and concur that the ability to notice small changes in attitude is essential to success as a helicopter pilot. The Army places particular interest in creating attitude sight pictures in addition to the hovering flight attitude changes for for all modes of flight and for specific situations like autorotation or max power takeoffs.

    I was an fixed wing guy before I went to flight school with the Army and I thought it was interesting when the put an emphasis on not looking at your instruments and instead wanted me to focus on the biggest attitude indicator of all, right out the windscreen. I did my primary helicopter training in a UH-1 and I initially had a problem with autos. I was always chasing something, whether it be airspeed, rotor RPM, or my intended point of touchdown. I will never forget the day my instructor had me pull in just enough collective to get the aircraft light and then pull aft cyclic until it settled on the tail stinger. He had me put the collective full down and we sat there bouncing away sitting on the ends of the skid tubes and the tail stinger and I was praying that the tail rotor wasn’t going to touch the grass. He says to me, just sit here and look out the windscreen…. This is what you should see when you enter autorotation everytime. Get a feel for where the top of the instrument panel is to the horizon and when you can make it look like this, all of the airspeed and rotor RPM numbers will just fall into place. Sure enough, once I was able to get the right attitude autos were a piece of cake and we were having contests to see who could paint them on the smoothest.

    To emphasize how important minor changes in attitude are we utilize a HUD when we fly with NVG’s. The HUD has all of the typical stuff you’d espect in a HUD system like an airspeed tape, radar altimeter tape, and torque values, but the most important part is a drift vector indicator that visually displays any change of attitude more than about .75 degrees in any direction. I can’t begin to tell you how helpful this system is once you learn to fly with it, especially during zero illumination flights over desert areas and during brown out landings where you have no external visual references.

  17. Have you discussed with your insurance agent whether they’re interested in offering a discount to flight schools that use procedures like this to reduce the risk of expensive (for the insurance company) crashes?

    Also, does Robinson have recommendations for training procedures that cover these issues?

  18. Joel: What’s the difference between an insurance company and Osama bin Laden? You can negotiate with Osama. I would still like to negotiate a by-the-hour rate with an insurance company so that we could compete with flight schools in California and Florida that have perfect weather. We pay the same rate as a school that flies 1200 hours per year per helicopter even though we were lucky to get 500 hours/year BEFORE the Collapse of 2008.

    Robinson does not have any specific recommendations for teaching hovering beyond staying 8-10′ above the ground (not possible in an R22 in the summer time due to lack of power, unless both instructor and student are 12-year-old Japanese girls).

  19. Have you ever instructed a heavy equipment operator? I’m curious as to how their sense of feel and awareness compares with that of helicopter pilots.

  20. When I got my CFI-H years ago we were specifically told that we must let the student get way out of control. To not do so was cheating the student. I only gave a little over a hundred hours of instruction but I did notice students being disheartened by my my easily bring a wildly swinging helicopter back under control. Maybe you are onto something, I think you are up against culture of doing it the old tough way.

  21. These are some good suggestions Philip. One of the frustrations I encountered in my training was that most instructors didn’t know any way to teach other than what they learned, and often what they learned wasn’t the best way to teach a maneuver. On several occasions I got to discuss training techniques with high-time instructors and got suggestions for teaching hovering that I’d never heard before. That experience was part of the inspiration of the web site that I’ve developed (wikiRFM.cyclicandcollective.net). The idea is that instructors and students can easily access the experience of a community of flight instructors outside those at their school.

    On the Private Pilot Syllabus page, I have 3 lesson plans that break down hovering. One of the suggestions I got was that the instructor not introduce hovering until the student has learned the control effects in flight, because, as you say, small changes in attitude are not so important at 60 KIAS and 500 AGL. Control isolation is the other part that you also point out. The other suggestion that I didn’t see you mention was to further breakdown the maneuver–instead of hovering over a point, teach the effect of the controls in a slow forward taxi, or transition from a relatively stable configuration (eg, a normal approach) to the unstable one (hover).

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