March.27th, 2002
FIRST FLIGHT
All gassed up and ready to fly...
There she goes..........the first flight!
I flew the Hughes 500E today for its maiden flight. I thought I would be more nervous than I actually was when it came time to fly it. It was a rather uneventful first flight, fortunately everything worked. I had a new set of blades to break-in as well. The new MS Composit 680mm FAI blades (210g) and all the extra weight and drag of the scale body. So I was expecting it to fly very different and it did, I could feel the weight and the balance problem in flight.
The wind had picked up and was a little gusty by the late afternoon when I got to fly. I knew before the heli was a little tail heavy but now I know that to be a fact. It feels tail heavy and a little uncertain at hover in the wind. I expected it to be more stable than it was today . I had no problems holding a nice steady when facing into the wind but when I facing downwind it wanted to swim around a bit more that I would like. I'll see if I can move my battery further forward, I really don't want to add any more weight if I can avoid it.
If I can't improve the hover performance I may modify the dampening by going to a harder inside O-Ring, I'm currently flying with both O-Rings soft, it may be too soft.
I was able to run a headspeed of 1500 RPM as shown in the photo below. without a wobble! The tach indicates a maximum RPM of the second flight to be 1500.3RPM. The first flight was 1583RPM so I dialed in a bit more pitch and the OS61SXWC was pulling the weight quite well and was still in a fat 2 cyclle. It has ample power, I'm surprised that it's as strong as it is running only 15% CP. Notice in the picture the Tach is held on to a "fake boom", it's a 35mm film container glued to the inside wall of the heli. The tach mount is designed to mount on your tailboom so I needed something round to connect it to, this is very light and works great.
All in all I'm very pleased with the heli. The model looks good. It isn't a superscale by any stretch but is a very nice funscale machine. I like the way it looks in the air. After I tinker with some balance and maybe the expo settings I think I will have a better flying H500. The area I flew in today is not very large so I wasn't comfortable doing any circuits, just putting around in slow forward flight and getting a feel of the heli.
The OS is running great, it purrs like a kitten at idle yet really winds up and provides all the power I need for this ship. The tail seems to be tame with the GY401 and a powerful S9250 Digital Servo. Vibration was minimal, I did get a small harmonic vibration around 1575 RPM at hover, I dropped the headspeed to 1500 and the tail vibration which wasn't bad to begin with virtually went away.
My good friend Ray was with me the whole time today and was snapping a few pics with my lame digital camera, new one coming soon so the pics should improve when I get it. Ray also had his Sony Digital CamCorder and videotaped some of the heli. He said he would take a few snips of video compressed enough to download. I'll post the video as soon as I receive it and get it uploaded to my server.