I asked this question in another thread but is Self Level and Bail Out two different functions?
Ken
That is a hard question to answer I think they might be blurred or maybe one of the manufacturers has copyrighted the term bailout.
SelfLevel retuns the helicopter to the nuetral position when you release the cyclic kinda like a coaxial helicopter. You can also set it up so that you can only tilt a certain amount of degrees in any direction. Further limiting the capabilities of the helicopter. This makes flying a collective pitch helicopter super easy. This is flipped on shortly after take off and you fly around with it activated.
BailOut to me the helicopter always know the the correct action to satablizie itself and do whatever it needs to to get itself away from the ground which includes applying the right amount of pitch. Such as the helicommand modules. If the quickest way to stabilize itself it to go inverted its gonna do that and apply the correct amount of pitch to get away from the ground. this is flipped on when you lose orientation and flipped off after you regain orientation.
The ikon is somewhere in the middle. It knows how to right itself and is always going to end up right side up. It doesn't know how to apply pitch you have to do that which is easy enough. It also has another problem it uses accelerometers while in SL mode which are more sensitive to vibrations. This can cause the helicopter to make the wrong adjustment and do the wrong thing making it unstable when it tries to do that function. In normal mode the Ikon doesnt have this problem and flies rock solid. Where as the helicommand doesnt use accelerometers from what I am told and isnt effected by minor vibrations. Just to give an example on my 300x I flipped inverted 4 times and flipped the self level switch it correctly flipped itself back over. The 5th time I was inverted I flipped SL switch it flipped itself back over but ended up in a hard forward to the right dive with the tail pointed to the side. Now the next problem was in SL mode I had it limited to 45 degree angles so when I pulled back on the cyclic it didnt allow enough collective adjustment for me to make enough of a correction and it ended up in the dirt. I probably could have switched the SL off and regained control but it happed so fast and I was trying to correct the incorrect SL that I didnt have time to flick the switch off.
The 300x is like flying a ford fiesta though, it's not an elegant helicopter. You can buy the 300x new for $250 and the beastx alone retails for $230. So you can imagine this thing is built pretty cheap. But that was the reason for me starting out on the 300x. I wanted to learn what this Ikon SL feature is actually capable of without risking an expensive heli. So maybe some of the others have had better luck on better machines. That is what I was asking. For me flipping over from inverted is kinda like a parler trick its not really that telling of what the Ikon is capable of as far as a BailOut feature goes. I'd like to know other peoples experiences in hard 3D manuevers where oreintation is easily lost or the Ikon gets fooled and does the wrong thing.
So its a hard question to answer and will depend on the end users definition of the two terms. IMO for what I have seen so far I would not trust the Ikon as a bail out feature.
