#38 CYCLIC HOVERING Struggles HELICOPTER FLIGHT CONTROLS for students!

Are you struggling with using the cyclic? We're going to talk about the cyclic for just a minute. Coffee with Kenny today is coming from the airport because I wanted to use the cyclic that we have and I like the F28F that just came home. So we get questions all the time from our members. I recently did a video on the pedals because I believe it was Clarence with his struggle was the pedals. And we get a lot of questions about the cyclic. So what I want to tell you is for me, this one is the hardest one for me to teach someone. And for me, this was the hardest one to learn. If you're struggling with this, put them in the comments down below. We want to hear about your struggles with it. If you came up with some kind of a technique to help you learn a cyclic, put those comments down below. Or if your instructor told you something good tip or trick. So what I want to tell you is I had a coffee cup for this today. It said use the Force, Luke with a picture of Darth Vader on it and I forgot it at home. But that's the point. Use the force, Luke. When we do these videos and we're talking about it, we're always over exaggerating the movements of the cyclic. The real trick is once you learn how to really master the cyclic, you can literally hover with a finger. I mean, your touch could be just so slight and you're actually moving it. Just a tiny, tiny pressure change. Rarely are you ever making big inputs with the cyclic. When you enter an auto, you do a small aft pull. When you do a quick stop, you're gently pulling it back a little bit. Most everything that we do is going to be a small minute movement, a very small change. Again, why we say use the force, Luke, So what gets people into trouble, I think most is when you start doing this, okay, pendular effect, pendular action. So when you start wobbling around the helicopter, pretty soon you're doing this number. So to try to describe this the best, let's say you're in a hover, you have it going kind of decent and the helicopter starts going to the right. You're going to have to counteract that with a little bit of pressure opposite. What happens is helicopter is going to the right, student pushes back to the left too much, so then they pull back to the right and then pretty soon you're swinging back and forth. So I kind of call it going back to neutral. If you start moving to the right and you want to counteract that, it's a small pressure back to the left to stop that movement. And then you almost kind of go back to the right again when it stops, to what I call neutral, if that makes sense to you. So the common problem, and this could be forward, it can be this way, it could be whichever way. But for the, you know, explanation in the camera, I thought this would be the best way to try to make you understand this. If you're going to the right, you're going to counteract with pressure back to the left. When it stops, you're almost going to have to go back to the right again. Otherwise, pretty soon you're just going to be doing this and you're going to be swinging out of control. So no matter what you're doing, remember you're always counteracting and then going back the other direction just a little bit to stop that movement and hold you in place. And then I want to mention the trim here. Many of you fly helicopters without trim. Many of you flying helicopters will have a trim. Enstrom, Schweitzers. You move into larger, more expensive aircraft. When I went to the BK117, I was thankful that I was used to using a trim. Same thing in the EC135. Being comfortable with that trim made the transition a real easy. A real easy transition for me. So just to explain trim a little bit, if you're in a helicopter and let's say you were in a hover and the wind's pushing this way, so the helicopter wants to go to the right, so you're pushing back to the left to hold the helicopter from below in this way. So because you have that pressure on there, we use the trim and what we do is we bump it with our finger. So if the aircraft wants to go this way, pushing the cyclic this way to hold it, to stop it, eventually my arms going to get tired. So you can use that trim and you just go bump like that, or a little longer if needed. And you'll learn the touch. When you do that, it takes the pressure off of that cyclic and then you can get to that point where you're actually hovering with the finger. So when you have trim and you learn how to use it, it's awesome. I do something with students by only showing one time. I can do it in either one of these instruments. I can fly the entire pattern with the trim, with the exception of during takeoff and during the ending of the landing. But once I get through etl, I can control the speed, the rate of climb, the turns. I can take all My hands off the controls. Take your feet off the pedals and it'll go into trim. If you have the power set, you only have to change power a couple times throughout the pattern. Just maybe a little bit up or a little bit down. And I can fly the entire pattern with that trim. Now, we don't fly helicopters, we don't fly around with our hands on the controls. When I show someone that, I tell them I'm only going to show you this one time and I'm never going to do it again. But I want them to understand when they're struggling with that cyclic and they're struggling with pedals and struggling with all these pieces and parts inside the helicopter, they quickly realize, wow, I'm fighting the aircraft. Everybody does it. Everybody struggles with over controlling, that's the problem. So the sooner you learn that it's just gentle touches. If you have trim, use the trim to release those forces on the cyclic. And once you get it, you'll be amazed at how smooth you can be in those tiny movements. Their key, you have a passenger with you and you're showing them what you're doing and they'll say, well, you're not even moving that. And you'll say, yes I am. They literally the movements on the cyclic are so minute that a person beside you cannot even tell that you're moving it. So I hope that helps. Put your questions down below about cyclics, collectives, pedals and want to bring up real quick. I am Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter and Line Art Ground School. Put a link down below for our Ground school. We have two Amazon number one best selling books. Four years ago I released that pretty dang popular Stays in the top 100 all the time. Did this one with Taz Christman. 2018 Flight Instructor of the Year. Top 10 checkride tips. We bought a whole pile of these books. We bought them for you. We will ship you one or the other. You just pay shipping. So I'm gonna put those links down below as well. So if you haven't subscribed the channel yet, click that little yellow thing over in the corner. Click the bell after you subscribe to be notified of our daily videos. Every day we're covering topics, all kinds of things about learning to fly, trouble with ground school, helicopter pilot careers. We're covering all those things that don't come up in your normal course of training. We have helicopter on lane Ground school that helps you of course all the way through every rating, written test, oral test, flight test. But there's all these things that come up that not necessarily are covered in training. So we cover those things along with normal training subjects. So do us a favor. Subscribe to the channel, click that bell, and we will see you in tomorrow's video. Hell, yeah. And actually, I'll probably move up closer and show the coffee cup and this to get started, so. And we can. I will edit this because it's on a card, so.