Irene

As promised, here are some pictures of my newest time killer. After buying the Picco Z, and flying that around for a while, I realized I needed something with a little more power. I did some research and found just the bird, the Blade CP. It is a 6 channel collective pitch helicopter, which means that it will fly forward, backwards, side to side, and up and down. It will also fly upside down, although I'm light years away from doing that.

Here is a pic with the old helicopter.

The controller. Lots of buttons and switches.

The canopy with a few additions.

The only negative so far is that I don't have a great place to fly. I use the Tomahawk range in back of our building, which is good unless it is windy. So I can only fly a few days a week. I'm done with ground school and have moved on to learning how to hover. It is quite difficult but I'm learning. Someone compared it to balancing a marble and a sheet of glass, which I think is accurate. The controls are very sensitive and you are constantly adjusting to what the helicopter wants to do. Good times!

I've only crashed once (at least once hard) so far, and I bent a piece that I had to replace. Other than that, things are going pretty good. Hopefully soon I'll be moving past the hover stage and doing some real flying shortly.