550 Maiden flight!
Well yesterday was the maiden flight of the 550. After doing some reading on the internet I decided to fit an external BEC.
It seems there have been problems with the one that is built into the ESC and I didn’t want the new heli to turn into a lawn dart. In the end I opted for the Castle Creations Pro BEC (see here at Fast Lad) and fitted it with no problems.
On to the flight. I have to say I double checked everything and then gave it a go! Well it was bloody awful, it had the tremors and then when I went to idle up it sounded like it was going to explode!
Quickly landing it I realised the pitch and throttle curves were wrong (school boy error), this would solve the insane throttle jump but as to the quiver I changed the Elevator and Aileron gain to the 11’o’clock position and tried again. This time it was much better but the tail wasn’t locked in. Spent a few minutes messing around with the gain and eventually got it pretty stable enough to fly it around. However due to the pitch/throttle curve error I had stripped a tooth off the main gear and 3G is very sensitive to vibrations so really that was as much as I could do.
Still initial impressions are very good and I can’t wait to get the new main gear on and get it in the air to tweak it further.