Dan and Peter hit on something that we may be overlooking and that is that all of us here offering our help learned these lessons decades ago and have developed the reflexive skills necessary to fly decent patterns. You have passed the first one - confidence that the plane will do what you ask it to do. Flying skills are very personal and you are going to have to develop the ones that suit you, but you want to select from ones that work before they become habit. Along with his series on trimming, Paul Walker wrote a wonderful series on flying. I will try and find a link to it for you unless someone here has it already.
I will mention three, there are more. First and probably most important is feeling the wind. How you do it will be something you develop but it needs to become something you do without thinking about it. I am perhaps the worst one to give advice on this one.
Second is your handle grip and arm position - how you hold it when you are flying. Figure this one out early because it is very difficult to change it later. The only point I will make on this is to know your wrist and how it moves. The closer you can come to keeping it vertical and still have enough range of motion up and down the better. You want to use fingers, wrist, elbow in that order to maneuver. With a well-trimmed plane in normal wind conditions, you can fly most of the pattern with fingers and wrist alone. How much down bias you have in your handle should be determined by YOUR wrist, not somebody else. I have nearly three times the down motion vs up motion in my wrist.
Finally, where you stand and how you move when flying can be very important down the road. In spite of doing a lot of racing as a senior I developed a rather flat-footed approach to stunt. It really hurts me in low and high wind conditions and where you need to be moving while you are doing maneuvers to avoid your wake or whipping. It is a skill you need to learn early FROM OTHERS since I suck at it. One note on whipping. Learn that skill early, especially in wind, mainly because the F2B pattern requires it.
There are other skills but I will leave that to others more qualified to pass them on. It is considerably more difficult to break a bad habit than it is to develop a good one.
Ken
Topic: F2B Stunt Pre-Flight Checks & Flying Tips (Read 6507 times)
