Directional Hover and Hover Taxi

If you have practiced the hover well, you should be able to lift you helicopter off the ground and hold it in a fairly stationary position at this point. It is now time to put the hover to work. We'll be covering using directional hover technique and hover taxi to get us around. We will also be covering the Hovercontrol hovercircle, a helipad especially designed to help you practice and demonstrate your hover and hover-taxi skills.

Starting Position

Before we begin flying, let's put the JetRanger on the center of a Hovercontrol hovercircle at Hood River. You should have a heading of approximately 160 degrees. Make sure the helicopter is fully powered up, and that the altimeter is calibrated.

Changing Heading in a Hover

Holding the stationary hover will only get us so far, in order to make the helicopter a useful platform for completing a wide array of missions, we'll need to be able to move our helicopter around a little. In the first Hover lesson, we learned to eliminate unwanted motion by minimizing the amount of pitch and roll angle we allowed to occur while hovering. In this lesson we'll use some of that pitch and roll input to move the helicopter as we choose. The first thing we'll need to become familiar with is how to change our heading in a hover, while remaining in a stationary position. As you'll soon learn, when you begin to use the anti-torque controls to turn your helicopter, it will cause you to have to make additional fine inputs to maintain correct pitch and roll attitudes. The only prescription for turning this into an easy task, is practice.

Bring your helicopter up to a 10-20ft hover, at a heading of 160 degrees, and slowly begin to increase the anti-torque to the right or the left. At first it will help to turn the helicopter very slowly, the slower you turn, the more stable the helicopter will remain in the hover. Continue to turn the helicopter in either direction until you have turned a full 360 degrees and you are back at your original heading.

Practice this until it is second nature. Gradually increase the speed at which you change heading until you can easily turn the helicopter around completely. Remember that as you change the helicopters heading, it will build up momentum, and you will have to occasionally input opposite anti-torque to keep the spinning from getting out of your control. You will eventually get to the point where the small adjustments to pitch and roll attitude will become natural to you, you should not even have to think about them. Make sure you become fully comfortable with this manouver.


Lateral Movement in the Hover

Now we will begin moving our hover laterally. Visualize this as the helicopter sitting in a stable hover about 10ft off the ground, then without changing heading begins to drift to the right or left. In order to establish this lateral drift, we will have to roll the helicopter slightly to the right or left to gain some velocity in that direction, paying attention to increase the collective as necessary to maintain our hover altitude. Your cyclic input for the roll will be so small at first, it should almost be undetectable. Just enough to notice your movement by seeing the ground move. If you tip more than about 5 degrees to either side, your chances of losing control of the helicopter, or falling out of the hover will increase rapidly.

As we begin to drift laterally, building up a small amount of lateral velocity, the helicopter will naturally want to turn into the direction of the lateral movement. The faster you drift to one side, the more the helicopter will want to turn. It will be up to you add the appropriate amounts of anti-torque control to maintain your heading. If you attempt to fly laterally in a hover at more than about 8-10 kts, you will likely lose control of the helicopter.

When you are ready to stop drifting laterally, or want to begin drifting in the other direction, you will have to begin rolling to the opposite side. Remember, when you change the roll, the helicopter will want to climb a little in the direction of the movement, you will have to use a mixture of collective and cyclic inputs to maintain your hover altitude as your laterally velocity in one direction decreases, and begins to increase in the other direction.

This will require plenty of practice before it becomes natural. Practice maintaining the most precise control over this type of motion.

Forward and Aft Movement in the Hover

The last type of movements we will cover here will probably be the easiest for you to master. Moving forward in the hover will most likely not be new to you at this point. Forward movement is achieved by simply dipping the nose slightly below the horizon until you have built up the desired amount of forward velocity. In order to preserve the hover, it is recommended that you periodically bring the nose back up to the horizon level to keep the velocity from ever-increasing. After all, if your forward velocity gets higher than about 10kts, then you are no longer hovering, but are transitioning to forward flight. As always you will have to make adjustments to the collective and anti-torque to maintain your hover altitude and heading. When you are ready to stop your forward velocity you will have to begin raising your nose just above the horizon to bleed off the forward momentum, your helicopter will want to climb at this point, so you will have to make the appropriate collective adjustments to maintain your hover altitude. Lower your nose back to horizon level at the point where your forward velocity is gone, but before the backward velocity begins. You should be back in a stable stationary hover at this point. If this isn't second nature already, practice it until it is.

Managing Aft movement in the hover will be a little more challenging and dangerous. Essentially, backward movement is achieved the same way that forward movement is, but a couple factors keep it from being as simple, or safe. This first is that your helicopter does NOT want to fly backwards, every principle of its design make it want to fly forward. The second important factor in backward movement is the fact that you have greatly decreased visibility, increasing the chance that you will strike ground objects, and or lose control of the aircraft.

Practice moving backwards for short distances in the hover by lifting your nose slight above the horizon until you begin to see the ground move below you just slightly. You must keep your velocity from building too high, or you will crash, or be violently flipped around. As always, using your anti-torque and collective inputs to maintain your hover altitude and heading will be very important. You do not want to lose altitude while moving backwards and push your tail into the ground. This will most certainly cause the destruction of you and your aircraft. The key to successful backwards movement, will be slow controlled flight, and lot of practice in safe conditions.

Backwards movement is not a manoeuvre that is very practical, it will rarely be used in a useful way, but is one of many skills that can come in handy when called for. Under most circumstances, instead of flying backwards, you would simply turn around in the hover and/or re-approach your manoeuvre all together. You should never land backwards or with backwards movement, as this will certainly cause loss of control and/or aircraft and passenger damage.

The Hovercontrol Hovercircle

The hovercircle training helipad will help you master your fine-tuned hover manoeuvres. If you have not downloaded and installed the Hovercontrol HQ scenery by this phase, please do so. It will be required for your future tests. The hovercircle features a large circular pad, you should be able to hover indefinitely without going outside the inner circle (the one with the "H"). You should be able to perform the stationary hover even in realistic wind conditions. There are also 4 squares, each with a directional arrow. You should practice landing in each square in a counter-clockwise order, for each square you should be aligned in the direction of the arrow. Practice these manoeuvres until you are completely comfortable performing them. Your Hovercontrol instructor pilot will expect you to demonstrate the same.



Hover Taxi

Once you have mastered the above skills you can begin putting them to use right away. For the JetRanger and any other helicopter designed with "skids" instead of wheels, the hover taxi will be very important. Any time you need get around at an airport or work site, you will likely be utilizing the hover taxi. Hover taxis are usually at an altitude no higher than 30ft and less than 20kts speed. You will be combining all of the hovering techniques you have learned so far to perform a hover taxi. You can easily practice your hover taxis at Hood River, by taxiing up and down the taxi ways. The only new challenge will be to negotiate slow, low altitude turns as you go from one taxi way to another. Practice the hover taxi until you are completely comfortable with it, and are ready to demonstrate it successfully to an instructor pilot.

Summary

You should now understand the basic concepts behind low altitude movements in the hover. These skills will make up the foundation of your ability to turn your helicopter into the workhorse that it was designed to be. All of the popular virtual organizations will expect you to have your hover skills mastered before flying real missions. For Hovercontrol, your instructor pilot will expect you to demonstrate your ability to perform all requested directional hover manoeuvres.

Apply what you have learned in this lesson and PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!