They’re not hard at all if you look at them from an airplane standpoint. In hover they sort of share some characteristics with multi’s (very loosely). But that’s where the similarities end. In flight they fly like an airplane - the control inputs, short of collective management, are even like an airplane. They pitch up and down, roll, climb, dive and create lift in forward flight - just like an airplane. The only real difference is that the wing on a heli is rotary and used for propulsion thru cyclic pitch, on an airplane it’s fixed.
Let’s face it - current Loiter controller (and Nav controller) in Copter is far from ideal for heli’s. We really need the L1 Nav controller from Plane. And this New Loiter will be fun to test to see if I can arrive at a combination of settings for it that is suitable for helicopters and maybe get better performance on Auto flights.
I didn’t get a chance to play with settings in my first two flights. But the defaults were not ideal. How do you turn off that “braking” feature? Or least limit it to say 0.1G or something so you can get a smooth stop with a heli vs it acting like somebody just whacked it with a baseball bat? Maybe that can be tuned with the lean angle? As long as it doesn’t limit my acceleration coming off turns in Auto. I run 590-650 for WPNAV_ACCEL to keep the “leash” short and kind of, sort of, roughly get the heli to hit the waypoints @ 30m/s. But the current implementation still pretty much sucks for heli’s. It took me a long time to arrive at a setup that (kind of) works with the current controller. There’s a lot of stuff to test here. 