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30 What is gyroscopic precession? (RC flying - Helicopters)




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This article is from the Radio Control (R/C) Flying FAQ, by Shamim Mohamed shamim@math.isu.edu with numerous contributions by others.

30 What is gyroscopic precession? (RC flying - Helicopters)

This is a counter-intuitive aspect of helicopters, that even many advanced
pilots don't clearly understand. In order to get the helicopter's rotor
disk to tilt (for example) downward at the front, you increase the lift on
the right side of the rotor disk and decrease the lift on the left side of
the rotor disk. (This is assuming the standard clockwise main rotor
rotation.) To see why this is so, consider the following example. If the
heli is in a nose-down attitude, the forward moving blade travels downhill,
and the aft-moving blade travels uphill. The blades travel level at the
front and back. To get a hovering heli to go into a nose-down attitude,
you need to encourage the forward-moving blade to start going downhill and
the aft-moving blade to start going uphill. Hence, pushing the cyclic
stick forward causes lift to be killed on the forward-moving (left) part of
the rotor disk and increased on the aft-moving (right) part of the rotor
disk.

 

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