Kenny Keller walks through the main helicopter instruments: airspeed, altitude, attitude, RPM, and vertical speed. He says beginners should spend 75 to 80 percent looking outside and only 20 percent at the panel, because staring inside makes you over-control and lose the feel of the aircraft.
In the beginning you can get overwhelmed by the instruments. And in reality, for VFR flying, for learning to fly in the beginning, you don't have to get overwhelmed by this. The main things we're going to be looking at is our airspeed indicator, our altimeter, our attitude indicator, rpm. We've got a little ball right here we call stepping on the ball. That's for trimming into the wind. We have a vsi, which is a vertical speed indicator which tells us how fast we're climbing or descending, and a manifold pressure gauge. A lot of people in the beginning focus way too much on the inside of the aircraft and looking at these different instruments. The key is to really learn to be able to look outside 75 to 80% of the time and spend 20% of your time looking inside at the instruments. And it really is kind of tough. We all want to. In the beginning, we all want to focus inside. And when you focus inside, that ends up causing you to over control the aircraft. You really want to learn to fly the helicopter by feeling.
