Helicopter

2010 Helicopter Flying Area - A gigantic stadium. There's a ceiling, but there's pretty much no worries about the helicopter hitting the sides of the room, and if it hits the ceiling and blocks your flight, you may have already won. (We're not sure though - The helicopters flew for a really long time)

The event description this year was a little confusing, so here are just some of our clarifications:

- "Rubber Motors" just means any sort of stretchable rubber thing that can in some way turn your rotor.

- "Plastic Film Covering" means like any plastic film that covers the parts of your helicopter. For example, you can use plastic film as the surfaces of your helicopter blades.

Top Tier Helicopters all last longer than 3 minutes and have moderately to smaller sized rotors.

The rotors you need to make by yourself, but it appears you can pretty much use any tool you want to make them.

This is a high-budget event, where other teams buy plastic wings and stuff.

A tip is that pretty much wherever you feel like you want to use paper or something, ALWAYS use a light plastic film covering. Something like the shrink-wrapping thing that you use on cut watermelons. It is one of the acceptable building materials, along with wood, paper, and glue, and this I think pretty much renders paper useless because wherever you can use paper, plastic covering is lighter, stronger, and more efficient.

The best helicopters seem to struggle with keeping OVER the 4 gram minimum weight limit - they were extremely light. Keep your helicopter as light as possible by using as little glue as possible, using as little wood as possible for the frame, and always using plastic film covering instead of paper or cardboard or anything else. Worried that your helicopter will break on contact with ground? I think the idea here is that if your helicopter is light enough, it won't hit the ground hard enough anyway.

 The best helicopters look more like planes than 'copters. The rules state, however, that you can't have any other "lifting surfaces" besides the actual rotors of the helicopters. In addition, "Wright Stuff," a B-division event, was taking place in the same room. So the ones that looked like planes probably were just planes in that event.

In addition, you can use kits and stuff for ANYTHING BUT the rotor. Also, you CAN'T use anything with pre-glued joints or pre-covered surfaces.

ONLY USE COMPETITION RUBBER (look for the word "competition" on the label!). It makes a humongous difference. Literally the difference between whether or not your heli flies at all. You wouldn't believe what a difference it makes. We used the blue 7" x 3/32" Guillow's rubbers (made for balsa models), and we didn't get any flight. We switched to specialty competition rubbers found in a legit hobby store and we got it flying.