Much has been written about what it is like to fly a helicopter, as well as  the process of learning how to fly helicopters.  You may have read somewhere that it is like trying to ride a unicycle while learning how to juggle all at the same time.  Now that's a pretty good one.

I recall one article where the author goes into great detail about what control inputs you make if you want the helicopter to move in a certain direction.  For example if you wanted the helicopter to begin moving forward and start a climb, you would put in a bit of forward cyclic, perhaps pull in some collective, add a little left pedal, all at the same time and in the proper amounts.  Too much collective and not enough left pedal and you start to spin to the right, etc. etc. 

Now if you want the helicopter to start slowing down and begin a descent, you would reverse the above inputs.  A little bit of aft cyclic, right pedal and lower a little collective, simultaneously and in the proper amounts.  A little too much of one input, or not enough of another input, and the helicopter will start to do some strange things.

The point is that some articles can make it sound like learning to fly a helicopter is a near impossible thing to master, when in reality, it's only kind of hard.........

In this series of articles I am going to do what many others have done.  I am going to write about what it is like to learn to fly helicopters.  It goes without saying then that these articles are not aimed at the CFII with 5,000 hours of flight time.  No these articles are written for the young (or old) aspiring helicopter pilot.  The boy or girl sitting in high school who is thinking of a career in aviation, but they are not sure if they have the skills or the brain power to become a pilot.  Do they have what it takes?  Or the middle aged man or woman contemplating a career change, or even the new TFO who knows that one day it will be their turn to start flight training.

I am not a certified flight instructor so these articles will not be from the perspective of an instructor, but rather the perspective of the student.  At the present time I have 1100 hours of pilot in command time, all but about 130 hours of it in turbine powered helicopters.  So I still consider myself a rookie pilot, and even though I have that commercial ticket, I am still very much a student pilot. 

I hope these articles will be both informative and helpful for anyone considering helicopter flight training.   

It is quite normal for us to underestimate our own abilities, or wonder whether or not we are smart enough to learn a particular skill or become successful in a certain profession.  Now perhaps nuclear scientist or neuro surgeons never doubted their abilities, I don't know.  But for most of us it is sort of a natural thing to do. 

Now this is the article where I tell you that I am of only average intelligence, so If I can learn to fly helicopters then so can you.  But before we get to the intellect part let's go back to the self doubt that always tries to creep in.when we face a new challenge.  What about confidence you ask, shouldn't I be trying to build up your confidence?  That is exactly the intent of this article is to build your self confidence in your ability to learn a skill, not to mention a rather large body of information that goes along with getting a private or commercial pilot license. 

We can be very confident, yet still experience some self doubt.  In fact if you never experience even a little bit of self doubt, then perhaps you are over confident and flying helicopters may not be the best career choice for you.  Over confidence will certainly get you killed in a helicopter.

So there I was, a 21 year old country boy from a small town of Oktaha Oklahoma, standing in line with 300 other men and women to apply for a position as a deputy sheriff with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.  The year would have been 1984 and it had been less than 12 months since I left my home state and moved west to discover greater things. 

As I looked around at the other 300 people in line almost everyone looked smarter than me.  I was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt, but I see much older, professional looking gentlemen many of whom were wearing suits and ties, and a few even carrying brief cases.  Of course all the lady's in line looked smarter than me too.  I did not feel confident at all, in fact a little voice inside my head told me that I was just wasting my time, and I might as well come up with another great idea of what to do with my life.  After all, I didn't even own a suit.

Somehow I made the cut and on December 13th 1985 I was sworn in as a new deputy sheriff for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.  Next came the academy.  Would I have what it takes to make it through the academy?  Was I smart enough?  Would I be able to handle the physical training aspect of the academy? 

I graduated the 74th Sheriff's Academy in May of 1986 and finished second or third (I don't remember which) in the overall combined academic and physical scores. 

Next came jail duty.  It was not uncommon for someone to get hired, make it through the academy but not make it through training in the jail.  Would I have what it takes? 

I passed my jail training and about 18 months later became a jail training officer.

In May of 1990 came patrol.  Now it was certainly not uncommon for someone to make it through the academy, through their years in the jail, and still wash out in patrol training.  I wandered if I had what it took to make it through patrol training and become a good street cop. 

Now the first few days in patrol can be very intimidating, to the point that the little voice inside is now screaming at you that you are in way over your head.  The amount of information to learn and process and the pressure can be overwhelming to the point that some people just don't show up their second or third day. 

Here is an example of how self doubt begins to work on you in a situation like this.  I can clearly recall thinking; 

"Ok this vest is restrictive on my upper body, all this stuff on my belt is heavy and weighing me down, yet I am supposed to somehow learn my way around the city, find every single radio call, know what to do in every single situation, what report to take, when to arrest someone, I am supposed to do all of this without getting hurt or getting myself killed, or without using excessive force, without getting citizens complaints, and I am supposed to learn how to document everything I do in a written report in such a way that the sergeant approves of it, etc. etc. "

This feeling of being overwhelmed is the same feeling I would experience 16 years later while trying to learn how to hover in a helicopter.

There is no question that there were days in the beginning when I didn't think I would ever be a successful patrol deputy.  But the mind is capable of learning so much, if we just keep trudging ahead and keep taking small bites of the apple right? 

Two years later I was a patrol training officer training new patrol deputies.

Of course by now you see the pattern.  In virtually every situation when I really doubted myself, I not only proved that my self doubt was baseless, I generally went on to perform well above average in each situation.  I would come to find that flight training would be no different.  I approached each stage of learning, both the physical aspects of flying as well as the academic portions of flying helicopters, with almost an equal combination of confidence and self doubt.  Confidence won out each and every time!

So about that acedemic stuff.  Just how smart do you really have to be to learn to fly helicopters?  Well you have to be smart enough to pass the written and oral exams, and smart enough not to kill yourself.  But let's put a little more perspective on it.

At the time I graduated High School in the state of Oklahoma the highest level of math required was a general or consumer mathematics class.  Algebra was not required to obtain a high school diploma.  Though I generally received A's in English class, math was not my furte.  At least that is what I always told myself.  Let's just say that at the time a 'C' was a perfectly acceptable grade to me in my senior year consumer math class.  I have never had a high school or college level algebra class.  Now that is not something I am proud of, that's just the facts mam!  I often wished I had taken algebra classes, but that is with many things in life. 

So when a little self doubt starts creeping into your head, just remember that there is a C-level consumer math commercial helicopter pilot that has gone before you.  That should boost your self confidence a bit!

When it comes to learning to fly helicopters, learning to hover the helicopter is going to be your first big breakthrough. The moment you can control the helicopter in a hover, and make it do what you want it to do, will be the moment that you start to believe you too can really learn to fly helicopters.

But learning to hover is going to be a very humbling experience. It is going to make you question whether all of your excitement and enthusiasm to fly helicopters was really nothing more than a very stupid, dangerous, and selfish idea. It is going to make you sweat, and it is going to scare you.

Learning to hover a helicopter may be the ultimate example of how repeated failure can eventually lead to success, if one persists, overcomes their fears, and does not give up. You have probably heard the saying that failure is part of success. You will fail repeatedly while trying to learn to hover. But if you don’t give up, you will succeed. The breakthrough will come quicker for some than others, but most people can learn to hover in about 3-4-5 hours.

Learning to hover in the helicopter is similar to building the foundation of your house. You can’t build the walls and put the roof on until you have a solid foundation. In helicopter flight training you can’t learn to take off and land, or do approaches until you have learned to hover. It is the foundation that virtually all other areas of rotorcraft flight are built on.

A good instructor will start you off with some basic air work, before tackling the skill of hovering flight. As a brand new helicopter student you do need to get a feel of the controls and control inputs. Flying straight and level, gentle turns and gentle climbs and descents will give you some idea of how your control inputs, however slight, affect the helicopter in flight. But you will almost certainly begin to work on hovering on either your first or second lesson.

Now you can be around helicopters, ride in helicopters, and watch helicopter crash videos on Youtube all day long, but you will not fully appreciate the different forces and dynamics of helicopter flight until you take the controls. Very quickly let’s look at what is going on when you try to lift the helicopter off of the ground, or hold the helicopter in a hover.

Let’s say you are on the ground and you have rolled up to flight idle, so your engine and your rotors are both spinning at the proper rpm for flight. Your right hand is on the cyclic “stick”, you left hand is on the collective and your feet are on the pedals. Ok let’s start pulling up on the collective to take off, but don’t put in any inputs on either the cyclic or the pedals. Just hold them right where they are and just come on up with the collective.

Before the helicopter ever gets off of the ground, you will be spinning to the right. In fact you will be spinning as soon as some of the weight is taken off the skids. Ok, how do we stop that? We stop that by adding some left pedal (anti-torque) at the same time we start to come up on the collective. Since we added left pedal the tail rotor is now compensating for the torque of the main rotor, and it is holding the nose of the helicopter straight ahead. But we haven’t done anything with the cyclic yet, just holding it in position so now let’s see what happens.

A little left pedal and coming up on collective…..holy cow, now then entire helicopter is sliding to the right across the landing pad before we ever got the skids off the ground. What the hell is going on now?

Well you just experienced translating tendency. Because we added left pedal, our tail rotor is taking a bigger bite out of the air. Even though it is holding the nose of the helicopter where we want it, it is now pulling or thrusting the entire helicopter to the right, (in American built helicopters where the main rotor turns counter clockwise- reverse for Eurocopters, etc.)

Ok so how do we fix this problem? Thanks to Igor Sikorsky and a few others, we know that putting in left cyclic as we pull up on the collective and add left pedal, will prevent the helicopter from sliding to the right. So our tail rotor is compensating for the torque of the main rotor, and we are tilting the main rotor to the left to compensate for the translating tendency to the right. You can now pull the helicopter up into a hover. But as soon as you do, your torque will be reduced so you will need to take out a bit of left pedal. And since you took out some left pedal you will need to take out some of that left cyclic that was compensating for the left pedal.

If you are not currently a helicopter pilot, then this should sound very confusing and very complicated to you. First off it is a little confusing and complicated in the beginning, but also, anything like this always sounds a little more complicated when it is written out word for word. Hey that’s why we guys hate reading directions right!

The real point of those last few paragraphs was to give you a really good idea of the different forces acting on the airframe of the helicopter in hovering flight. Now you simply need to manage all of those forces and inputs in the proper amounts, and you my friend will be hovering.

Note how the left skid hangs just a bit lower than the right.

[In the above photo the left skid (if seated in the helicopter) hangs jut a bit lower than the right while the helicopter is in a stationary hover as this one is.  This is visual evidence of left cyclic input compensating for translating tendency.  MD helicopters always touch left skid first on a flat suface, because of this.  From the pilot's perspective he is not intentionally holding the left skid low, he is just holding the helicopter in a hover.  Also- many manufacturers automatically compensate for this by rigging the rotor mast just a few degrees left and some even a few degrees forward.  The Bell 407 is a good example.]

Helicopter instructors have all kinds of neat little sayings to help you learn, but also to help build your confidence and assuage your fears. One of my instructors would explain it something like this, “look the helicopter is trying to kill you, and if you let it do what it wants to do it will kill you.” “You have to learn to make the helicopter do what you want it to do, not the other way around.”

Another instructor told me several times, “look I am just here to keep you from killing yourself while you learn to fly.” There is a little bit of truth in this statement as well. In some ways learning to hover is not so much your instructor teaching you, as it is you teaching yourself, while he keeps you from crashing. Have you ever taught a child to ride a bicycle without the use of training wheels? You can’t really tell him or her how to keep his balance and not crash, you just have to keep helping them along the way, keep giving encouragement, and keep them from hurting themselves until they get it right? Learning to hover is pretty much the same concept.

Let’s get into the meat and potatoes of learning to hover.

As I stated above, most instructors will start you off with some basic air work, and they will also give you plenty of breaks from the intense process of trying to hold the helicopter in a hover.

Most instructors will start off by giving you one control at a time, the cyclic for example. You will control the cyclic while the instructor continues to control the pedals and the collective. You will likely move through all of the controls one at a time, getting the feel for them and practicing controlling the helicopter with each set of controls separately.

Just as you are beginning to feel a little confident, you will be given two sets of the controls such as the cyclic and the collective, then perhaps the cyclic and the pedals. As you begin to get comfortable with two sets of the controls the third control will be added and it will seem like you are back to square one. This can definitely be an intense process that can only be described as humbling. I have never heard anyone describe learning to hover as being easy, yet it is eventually mastered by most student helicopter pilots.

Hey at 18 years old I learned to drive army 2 ½ ton trucks at Fort Leonard Wood, which required the student to learn how to double clutch. Each limb is on a different control in the truck, left hand steering wheel, right hand gear shift, left foot clutch and right foot gas. Double clutching took precise coordination between the right hand, left foot, and right foot. So again, the mind is perfectly capable of mastering different control inputs with different limbs and making them all work together in unison. It just takes practice.

One frustrating part of learning to hover is watching your flight instructor demonstrate hovering flight to you. In a no wind condition it doesn’t look like he or she is doing anything. The control inputs on the cyclic are often too small to even see. Often their hand on the cyclic does not even appear to move. It looks so easy. But then you take the controls and the helicopter wants to start doing crazy things.

Here is the real trick and the real secret to learning to hover. As long as you have to mentally tell yourself, “Ok I am pulling up on collective so I need to put in some left pedal” then you are still mentally operating behind the helicopter. It is only when you “instinctively” put in left pedal every time you pull in some collective, or you “instinctively” put it right pedal every time you lower collective that you are getting close to mastering the hover. Probably the only other secret is that the quicker you relax and stop over controlling the helicopter, the quicker you will be hovering.

I think I have more than adequately flogged this subject of hovering, and may be guilty myself of making it sound harder than it is. It is not easy, and it will humble you, but you can and will learn to hover if you choose to do so. Good luck!

Once the student is able to hold the helicopter in a hover, the next logical skill to learn is lifting off into a hover and landing.

One thing that I discovered early on in my helicopter flight training is that every new skill or task seemed equally as hard to learn as the previous one.  Learning to hover was a huge break through and a giant boost of self confidence, but the first time I tried to pick the helicopter up off the ground my confidence level was knocked back to square one.

Taking the controls from your instructor after he or she has already placed the helicopter in a stable hover, is a whole different ball game than transitioning to a hover from either an approach, or from the ground.  Simply controlling the various dynamic forces of the helicopter in a hover is an awesome thing to accomplish, but now we must learn to take all of those forces from one stage (from the ground or forward flight) and manage each dynamic force until the helicopter is in a stable 2-3' hover off the ground.

So let's quickly go through the proper control inputs to pick a helicopter up off the ground and place it into a stable hover in ground effect.  One thing to keep in mind is that each make and model of helicopter are going to require very slightly different levels of input (and remember some airframes are manufactured with the rotor mast already rigged to compensate for translating tendency.)  But for most training helicopters, and particularly with the MD500 and the Schweizer 300 (now renamed the Sikorsky 300) the inputs will be very similar.

So to pick the helicopter up off the ground you will need to manipulate all three of the helicopter's controls, the cyclic, collective, and the anti-torque pedals.  The first thing we do is put in a little bit of left pedal and a little bit of left cyclic, and then start bringing the collective up to add lift.  Now as you bring that collective up you are pulling in power and adding torque, which means the frame of the helicopter wants to twist to the right (in American made helicopters) which is why you need some left pedal to hold the nose straight as you come up off of the ground.

But as soon as you add that left pedal, the tail rotor is not only compensating for the torque and holding the nose straight, it is also trying to push the entire helicopter to the right- "translating tendency."  To compensate for this we have put in a little left cyclic.

If we get all of the inputs correct, and in the right amounts then the right skid should pick up off the ground before the left skid.  This is a very standard take off in most small training helicopters. In fact it is almost preferred that right skid comes up very slowly and the helicopter is held for a brief moment with the left skid on the ground.  Why is this?

Now remember that I am not a CFI and I am definitely not the CFI that will be teaching you to fly, but the take off is a slow, controlled maneuver that is probably easier to learn and master if it is devided up into parts (not to mention safer.)  So learning to lift the right skid of the helicopter off of the ground and hold it in a stable one skid landing/hover, is one big part of the take off.  When you have reached this stage of each take off, you are essentially half way through transitioning from the ground to a stable hover.  Also, it is in this first stage of take off that you will be making any minor corrections to your control inputs.

If you start coming up with the collective and the nose of the helicopter begins any movement to the right whatsoever, you need a bit more left pedal.  If you start coming with the collective and the helicopter starts to slide across the ground or landing pad even an inch, you need more left cyclic.  If you rush the take off you will not have time to mentally and physically fix these problems. 

Once the helicopter is in a stable one skid hover, then you have been successful in controlling both the helicopter's torque, as well as it's translating tendency.  Now you will just pull in enough additional collective to left the left skid off of the ground.  As you pull in this extra bit of collective you will have to add just a touch more left pedal, because you are adding even more power which is adding torque. 

So what happens the exact moment in time when the helicopter reaches a 2-3' hover.  Well the amount of control inputs required to bring the helicopter into the hover are very slightly different than the control inputs required to keep the helicopter in the hover.  Think of it this way.  If you held the exact same power setting you use to lift the helicopter off of the ground and to move it in a vertical direction, then wouldn't the helicopter continue it's upward movement?  Generally yes (taking ground effect out of the equation for a moment- as the helicopter does requre additional power to climb vertically out of ground effect). 

What this means to the student pilot is that typically once the helicopter is pulled up into a hover, it doesn't require quite as much left pedal or as much left cyclic.  So the cyclic generally comes back to the right just a touch and the left pedal is adjusted to keep the nose straight and not turning either left or right.

Now that I have outlined the perfect take off and have described the exact control inputs it takes to lift a helicopter into a stable hover, what will your first attempt to take off in a helicopter be like?  Scary as Hell!  For both you and your instructor.

Before I go any further let me re-cap how my flight training was structured.  I received 24 hours of intitial instruction from our in house flight instructors, in our own MD500 helicopters.  So I learned all of these procedures I am describing to you in a turbine powered helicopter.  For the record a fair comparison between the MD500 turbine powered helicopter and the Schweizer 300 piston powered helicopter (and probably the R-22) is a bit like comparing a Porsche to a VW Bug.

The MD500 has a lot of power all of which must be harnessed and controlled while the Schweizer 300 has much less power and is much more forgiving.  I can only imagine that learning to take off and land in the 300 must be somewhat easier than learning to take off and land in the 500, but to what degree I could not say.

What I do know is that for the first 10-15-20 times that I lifted or attempted to lift the 500 into a hover, I felt like I was about to be thrown into a hand to hand, combat, caged match with a full grown and hungry tiger!  Trust me that is no exaggeration.

I have mentioned previously how one of my instructors would explain that the helicopter was trying to kill me, and it was up to me to not allow it.  Well I can tell you that there was probably no other manuever where I felt like the helicopter was about to kill me, more than the take off.  Once again the beads of sweat would literally be running down my face while I focused every brain cell I had listening to my CFI's instructions and trying to control the 3000 lb hungry tiger that was strapped to my butt.

As with most things in life, the more I did it the better I got and the easier it became.  Eventually the take off and landing became just one more manuever that I had mastered (at a student level) with the helicopter. 

Oh, what about those landings?

Well logic would tell us that setting the helicopter back on the ground would simply be the reverse of picking it up off of the ground, true.  But still it is a slightly different skill set.  If you recall from above we put in certain inputs before others, I.E. left cyclic, left pedal, then up with collective.  Landing the helicopter is exactly the reverse.

Take the left cylcic out before lowering collective all the way and you will absolutely go sliding to the right, (a dangerous thing in a helicopter by the way.)  I can remember setting the helicopter down in a field one time and screwing up the proper sequence of reducing the control inputs.  In other words, I took out left cyclic before lowering the collective all the way and locking the helicopter on the ground.  The result- helicopter sliding along the ground to the right.  I remember my instructor looking out the door at the freshly turned up dirt under the skids and saying "holy sh%t I just discovered a whole new way to de-sod a lawn".  Oh yeah!

Ok so now that I have made it sound like taking off and landing is an almost impossible maneuver to learn, I am happy to tell you that if I can learn it then so can you. 

You see the human brain and central nervous system is truly a wonder thing.  After a period of time, practice, and fine tuning, the human brain along with your CNS and muscle memory can lift a helicopter up off the ground, put it into a stable hover, and put it back down perfectly and almost subconsciously all while making it look as simple as buttering a piece of bread.

LEARNING APPROACHES:  So you can fly a helicopter straight and level now.  You have experienced the thrill of finally learning to hover, and you have lived through picking the helicopter up off the ground and putting it back down.  Things should start getting easier from this point on right?  Not necessarily.

I am sure that I have mentioned it previously somewhere, but one thing that always astounded me was how every new maneuver with the helicopter seemed just as difficult to learn as all the previous maneuvers.  Seriously, how hard could it really be to learn approaches?  Well I was about to find out.

When you first start learning approaches in a helicopter you will almost certainly be in a wide open area with no other traffic around, and you will start with straight in approaches from 500' agl, into the wind.  So, with the help of your instructor all you need to do is manage the helicopter's descent from 500' agl to a fixed spot on the ground out in front of you.  A good standard rate of descent is about 800 feet per minute. 

Here is how you are going to learn approaches.  You are going to get a visual fix on your "spot" or LZ, then you are going to focus on where that spot is located in your field of view, or on your windscreen (that would be your windshield in a car).  Now it will be difficult for me to set here and tell you exactly where that spot is going to be on your windscreen.  That will depend on the type of helicopter you are flying, and how far out you are from your LZ.  We have already established that you are at 500' agl. 

In the MD500 and Bell 407 we have a horizontal cross member that separates our lower and upper windscreen, we then have a vertical strip separating the left and right windscreen.  A pretty standard approach would put my LZ somewhere near the center of the windscreen, above the horizontal strip.  I am kind of stating the obvious here.  Of course the LZ should be somewhere in the middle of your windscreen or you have a problem, right?  Continuing..................

You are going to learn to do approaches simply by holding the LZ in the same spot in your windscreen.  Sounds pretty simple right.  Let's look at it from a slightly different perspective.  You are flying along at 500' agl and you pick out a LZ, but you continue to fly toward while maintaining your altitude at 500' agl.  Obviously the location of that LZ in your windscreen is going to very rapidly start moving down your windscreen right up to the point that you fly directly over the top of it.

Conversely if you pick an LZ out in the distance, you bring the helicopter to a hover at 500'agl, and then begin a hovering descent, that LZ is going to rapidly move up on your windscreen right, again pretty obvious.

Cockpit view of Bell 407 on patrol.Finally, lets pick out the LZ, mentally note where it appears on the windscreen and start a gradual descent toward it.  If after a few moments that LZ begins to move up on the windscreen you are descending too rapidly and you will arrive at the ground short of your LZ.  If on the other hand the LZ begins to move down on your windscreen, you are not descending rapidly enough and you will overshoot your LZ if you don't fix the descent. 

I can pretty much guarantee that your first few approaches will not even be close, and will likely involve many go-arounds.  In fact your first 10 or 20 approaches may not even be close.  The only way to improve is to do them over and over and over again.  You may do 10-15 approaches and notice very little improvement, if any at all.  As with learning to hover, it can be a very humbling and exhausting experience.  I can remember cursing myself under my breath and feeling like I disappointed my CFI with another screwed up approach. 

Eventually however things will begin to click.  The more in tune you become with the helicopter, the more relaxed you will be, and the easier it will be to hold that LZ in the same spot on your windscreen.  To clear up any confusion, there is no "correct" spot for the LZ to be on your windscreen.  This will vary depending on your altitude that you begin your approach, and the distance from which you begin your approach.  Regardless of where the LZ appears on your windscreen, if you hold the LZ in that spot and don't let it move, you will fly directly to that spot, or at least within a few feet of it.    

Even once you learn to fly a smooth approach, without over compensating with the collective, there will always be fine tuning.  I can remember flying pretty good approaches but I would always, always, end up about 10 feet short of my spot.  More fine tuning, such as looking past your LZ about 10' will start to bring your approaches closer to where you want them.  Your CFI will assist you in fine tuning your approaches.

After a couple of years of flying you will look back and wonder what was so difficult about learning approaches.  You will be able to fly a near perfect, no hover approach to landing and put the skids within an inch of where you wanted them, all while perfectly relaxed.   

APPROACHES TO A HOVER:  Now that you can do an approach, the next problem is that you have to do something with the helicopter once you reach the bottom of said approach.  You have to either put it on the ground, bring it to a hover, or initiate a go around by adding power and climbing out. 

In the first part of this article I focused simply on keeping the LZ in the same spot on the windscreen.  I never even mentioned the term power management.  But one uses power management (via the collective & cyclic) to keep that LZ in the same spot and fly a smooth approach.  But what happens at the bottom of the approach when you want to bring the helicopter into a hover? 

Flying the approach requires one power setting (set with the collective) but hovering requires a completely different power setting, I.E. more power.  So now you must learn to smoothly transition from an approach power setting to a hover power setting.  As you near the bottom of the approach you will begin to add power.  You will slowly start pulling up on the collective, while adding left pedal (to compensate for the additional torque) and start coming back with the cyclic to arrest your forward movement.  Coordinate all three of the controls and you come to a nice relaxed hover at the bottom of your approach.  Get behind on any one of them and bad things start to happen real quick. 

For me I can tell you that the hardest thing for me to master while doing approaches to a hover, was getting in enough left pedal.  Don't get in enough left pedal and the nose starts to come around to the right on you (in American helicopters) very quickly.  Letting the helicopter spin is a bad thing.  Even after telling myself repeatedly that I need to put in more left pedal at the bottom of the next approach, here would come the nose turning to the right.  Damn it!  This is definitely one of those times you have to be thinking and reacting out ahead of the helicopter.  In other words, if you let the nose come to the right at all, you are re-acting behind the helicopter.  Not good.  You need to be anticipating and be out in front of the helicopter mentally.  But some of this just comes with practice and experience.

Eventually, like all other areas of helicopter flight, you will master all of the dynamic forces working on the helicopter as you transition from a smooth approach to a stable 2-3 foot hover while not allowing the nose to come around one bit.  It will become so natural you will eventually do it many times a day with little conscious thought.

NO HOVER LANDINGS:  When would you ever want to land without hovering first?  How about off field in a dusty environment.  The quicker you get the helicopter on the ground the less dust you stir up.  That's just one example.  Eventually you will become so proficient at your approaches and landings, that many of your landings will be a version of a no hover landing anyway.  A run on landing is another type of no hover landing, but it is more of an emergency procedure which can be used in situations such as a stuck tail rotor. 

In a perfect no hover landing you are going to completely arrest all forward and vertical airspeed at exactly the same time your skids kiss the ground.  Initially the hardest part of a no hover landing is just that, keeping the helicopter going toward the ground, and not stopping at a hover.  Why is this difficult you ask?  There are two reasons.

The first reason is ground effect.  If you have flown a nice slow smooth approach, you added some power at the bottom to keep from smacking the ground, then very often you are still holding enough power so that as the helicopter reaches "ground effect" it does not want to land.  Now this may not be the approved FAA terminology to explain this, but that is essentially what happens. 

The second reason is think is more psychological on the pilot's part.  When you first begin to practice no hover landings it seems virtually impossible to descend through ground effect and land without first coming to a hover.  No matter how many times your CFI coaches you "ride it all the way to the ground" You will inevitably stop at a hover.  With much practice however, you will learn to coax the helicopter through ground effect and into a nice no hover landing. 

MORE ABOUT LANDINGS:  When you are first learning to fly it is likely that you will do some, if not a significant portion of your training, off field in open areas.   It is almost certain that some of your first landings will be on hard packed dirt or grass. 

It is not uncommon to go out and practice landings, approaches to landings, no hover landings etc. off field, then come back to the airport or base and struggle with landing on the concrete pad.  This is sort of the same phenomenon as the no hover landing.  Again, I think it is two fold, part ground effect and part psychological.

There is a difference in the amount of lift in ground effect over concrete or asphalt, vs. grass or dirt.  The harder the surface the greater the ground effect is going to be, (The correct way to explain this is the harder the sufrace, the less power it takes to hover in ground effect).   There is also a psychological aspect in that you know you get a slightly softer landing on grass, so it is a bit easier to coax the helicopter through ground effect when landing on a perceived softer surface.

Now get back to the base and try to put it down on the concrete pad and the damn thing just refuses to land, or you end up bouncing it all over the pad.  The same can be true when transitioning to a different aircraft.  Basically everyone in our unit experienced the same thing when we transitioned into the Bell 407 with hydraulics.  I can't tell you how many times I heard experienced pilots say that there worst landing was the one at the airport.  But sometimes the best or easiest way to land on a hard surface is a no hover landing.  Just something else to think about. 

This is a good time to remind you that I am not a certified flight instructor and that the pupose of these articles are not to instruct, but to simply give you an idea what to expect if you choose to learn to fly helicopters.