Vintage RC Helicopters - Joe's RC Helicopter Section - About me

About Me - Joe W Richardson  Joe William Richardson

        As a bit of background, I started helicopters in the early eighties with a fixed pitch Schlüter Heli-Baby.  No gyro in those days so learning was a little fraught though it did have floats which saved a lot of rotor blades (only broke one pair in learning to hover).  From this I moved up to a Morley Hughes 300, collective pitch and with one of the first 'home build' gyro's.  Unfortunately I was a solo flyer and as such I had to learn everything myself without the proverbial 'expert' assistance, I did though have the helicopter Schlüter 'Bible' which helped a lot.

Unfortunately the early learning methods generally had you practicing hovering then moving off into forward flight and flying circles around yourself.  I never quite got the hang of that as I would put the nose down then let it gather up too much speed  before attempting a left turn.  This usually did not work out right and more often than not it would end up in disaster and being taken home broken.  What I didn't realise was that Morley helicopters had opposite rotation heads to most others and therefore it was more difficult to turn to the left as it always wanted to go to the right.  If I had started with right hand circuits? well who knows however, I never did achieve a successful smooth circuit before circumstance put an end to my model helicopter flying.

        Move forward twenty years and I decided it was time to return to RC aircraft and in particular helicopters.  I bought a fixed pitch Piccolo thinking as it was small it would be relatively easy to relearn, wasn't I mistaken?  Initially I couldn't seem to keep it in one area never mind over one spot; eventually though I got the hang of it and could hold it reasonably still.  I had also prepared a Zoom 400 for when I was ready to move up a level and after a really bad day which broke the Piccolo beyond repair I decided to try the Zoom.  What a revelation, it was comparatively so stable that hovering was easy and progressing to side-on hovering was quickly achieved though nose-in hovering and figure of eights etc took a lot more time.  I bought a few more electric helicopters in order to keep my hand in just in case of the occasional 'eek' that always happens.  However, being an 'old person' it did seem to take ages before I was comfortable with them being at height or distance.  Things then just escalated from that point, I bought a few 'glow' types and had moved into circuits with the occasional (very rough) roll or loop which was ten times better than I ever could in the eighties.

        It seemed strange that in my younger years I could not get the hang of a helicopter yet twenty years later there I was flying them 'adequately'; so I decided to find some of the helicopters from my around my first era to see if it was me or that they were really that hard back then.  Many of the older ones were available, though requiring restoration, but as an engineer this did appeal so I started buying and snapped up any 'old' helicopter I could find.  I must admit I like collecting 'complete' sets, add this to my liking for scale and suddenly over a period of a couple of years my collection 'blossomed' to over one hundred.  During this period having also made numerous purchases of modern helicopters I concentrated on getting better and progressed to reasonably confident aerobatics along with stationary flips etc though inverted flight eluded the 'old' sense's.

Along the way it became obvious that information for older ones was beginning to get scarce and also the people who originally flew them were not getting any younger.  As a pastime I had built a number of what I call 'information' web sites i.e. no clever flashy bits.  In fact I had just closed down my own personal web site covering Vintage motorcycles and so it seemed obvious to commence this project using that site as the base model whilst information was still around.

So in Jan 09 I uploaded the basic layout and started to add information.  As usual I had set myself what is an impossible task as the subject matter is large and growing all the time so I reckon it will take a few years just to get a reasonable coverage of pre circa 2000 helicopters; never mind all the modern stuff.  In fact by mid 2011 even this estimate had proved to be way out as I had only just started collating the early 70's..........

If you've read to this point and would like to help the project along then please contact me - webmaster@vrhc.co.uk

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