What you should know before buying your first RC Chopper.

A couple of tips about buying your first RC Helicopter: The smaller, the safer (and cheaper) the chopper will be. You are also more likely to use and enjoy the RC Helicopter if you don't have to go outside every time you want to use it. The small ones can be used indoors, but the larger ones become very hard to use inside as they will keep crashing into stuff and the ceiling. The larger ones also hurt if they crash into you, your pet or family member. Friends can hurt too :( So get a small chopper if its your first one so that you don't hurt anything other than your ego with frequent "learning crashes"  at least till you can get good enough to brag to your buddies that you really know how to "fly a remote-controlled helicopter".
Forget trying to get one large enough to put a camera on. This is an armature mistake. If you want to get seriously into flying and want to have a flying camera, then Google it and you can buy one for a few grand. But first you need to learn to fly a simple chopper, so stay focused. Also for video or photographing from the sky, you want an RC Sailplane with a motor that shuts off so that you don't have the noise and vibrations, and its way cheaper of an option.
You can save alot of money on a RC Chopper by NOT getting one with a swash plate: Swash plates are the essence of what made helicopters possible, but they are not really needed for an RC Helicopter that you plan to fly around your office or apartment for fun, in fact they cause more problems. The reason is that the average user will over compensate when the chopper gets wobbly and exacerbate the problem. When you are first learning to fly, stability is the key, and a swash plate makes it easier to go out of control. If you are an intermediate user, then a swash plated chopper might make sense, because then it will go the direction you want it to. With a swash plate less micro chopper, you have limited control of the less/more nature, but that is about it. So if you start getting to close to the wall, you can do the opposite of what you where doing to further the trusty RC Chopper from the wall, but you can't make it go left or right so easily. An additional problems with RC helicopters with swash plates is that when you maneuver in a any direction, the craft will fall a bit, causing you to give it more lift and then reducing it again when it levels out. This takes a while to learn and will crash a bit at the beginning, Its best you get the hang of controlling the elevation with the throttle before you need to also balance the swash plate.
Go to a hobby store and not a toy store. RC hobby stores have a better selection and will also probably have slightly better quality for price. Tell them this is your first chopper and that you want to learn how to fly a bit before you guy one of the big ones.
You will need the low cost chopper even when you get a big one, one day: Whenever you have a chopper out around other people, someone is going to want to fly it. Rather than give them the remote for a $500-$1,000 helicopter that they might crash, break, and feel really bad about, you can give them the easy one to play around with so that they see its not that easy. After crashing the easy one a few times (without it breaking, I might add) - they will no longer want to fly the big one, trust me on this one :)

Remember, the main thing is to have fun, so if you are going to be able to crash it more and keep going, you will have more fun.



Once you get good at flying the small choppers, then its time to get the intermediate rc helicopter.
Click here to go to the Intermediate Choppers Page

What happens if I just get the intermediate chopper without first learning on the beginner models? Most likely you will crash you helicopter and damage it within the first few seconds of what you might call flying. If you really have a knack for these thing, then you will crash it less, but still it will crash and get damaged. If you break it and have to pay to repair it each time, you will hardly use it and therefore, you would be better of starting out with a simple remote control helicopter, get good at it, and then move to an intermediate one.

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