Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Cor blimey, what’s going on here? This looks suspiciously like a Sven-style gadget review! Have I managed to put as much effort into assessing things as my venerable homeslice usually does? We’ll soon find out!

OK so this thing’s billed as an indoor helicopter, with its most eye-catching feature being a 3-channel control scheme, which for the uninitiated means control of 3 separate vectors of motion – up/down, left/right and forward/backward. This should provide a much greater degree of control over the heli’s direction than those tiny polystyrene-bodied jobbies that were all the rage a while ago managed, as those typically only had 2 channel rigs and were very limited. The only way we ever got those things moving was to weigh down the front to give a constant forward motion, then just use the up/down and left/right controls, which worked ok, but not fantastically.

It’s a lot larger than those tiny polystyrene ones, and on first opening it (a present from my bro, thanks punk!) I thought it’d probably be too big for indoor use, remembering how woefully unstable those old ones were. After giving it a quick charge (30 mins for 10 mins flight time, according to the internets) though, I found that as long as you’re careful, it’s perfectly fine indoors! Whodathunkit? You’d think the extra size and weight would make it more stable too, and less prone to random wafting about.

It does, however, still waft about a bit, and once it’s decided to drift in a certain direction correcting it can be tricky. There’s a trim control on the remote, which helps stabilise things, but due to the tailrotor arrangement any attempts at forward/backward motion will almost always result in some spinning too… although maybe with more practice you can compensate for it.

Anyway now I’ve been all analytical about it I can say this bit: flying it around is great fun, I highly recommend it. I took a bunch of photos of the thing just now, some of which were successful (see above), some of which… (see below (and here))

OMG A GHOST HELIMOCOPTER