Of broken blade and bruised ego

Today I decided to bring the helicopter out of the living room and to the Indoor basketball court located within my apartment estate. Finally for the first time the Helicopter hover! For once, I thought that this contraption will never make it of the ground. You see, I have been training mostly through ground run and skiing around the mini-golf course behind my apartment, the Helicopter skid is touching the ground all the time.

Hooray!!! Life off! The birds is in the air! And now I learn the most important lesson of helicopter piloting... controlling the helicopter in the air is like balancing a marble on a convex surface. Its so hard to keep it in control and not flying about wildly. Sometimes the helicopter even threaten to cut my head off when it fly towards me. This thing seems to have a life of its own and that life is short lived with a loud crash to the walk...BANG!!!

Its not dead, its crippled... In Air Force context, this crash is an operator error and it happen in flight so the crash report is call FAIR. Don't just take the meaning by the word, FAIR= Flight Accident or Incident Report. In my case, its an Accident. UCFIT accident, Un-Controlled Flight Into Terrain (the wall in this case).

The bird was salvaged in one piece. Still have the out of the box look to it.

The impact was so great it rip off the tip for one rotor blades. The tip of the rotor blade is usually the part of the copper that hit any obstacle of terrain, that applies for both RC and real life helicopter. An aircraft can sometimes still be airborne and remain in flight with 1/4 of the wing blown off but a broken rotor blade is going to seriously cause the entire helicopter to lost its balance. As though controlling it was not hard enough to begin with, controlling it while its damage is a daunting task for any pilot.

Just watched the Animation "Flushed Away" yesterday at the cinema. One of the bad guy mouse said "Keep you leg straight when falling into water". The helicopter in my case kept it leg straight during the final plunge to destruction and promptly knock off one of the 4 landing skid legs.

Not seriously damage, just 1 blade and 1 landing skid to be replace. The rest of the parts are still intact. However my confidence level and ego sure is seriously bruised. Looks like its gonna be a uphill climb to even fly like a ameuture.