How To Fly A Quadcopter

Welcome to How To Build A Quadcopter

This guide will show you everything you need to know about how to fly a quadcopter. These tutorials will also apply to flying any other multirotor. After reading this page, be sure to check out the flying lessons.

THE CONTROLS

Below is an example of all the controls for flying a quadcopter and how each control works.

• Roll tilts the quadcopter left and right by speeding up the rotors on one side and slowing them down on the other.
• Pitch tilts the quadcopter forward and backward the same way that roll does.
• Yaw rotates the quadcopter by speeding up all of the rotors spinning in on direction and slowing down all of the rotors spinning in the opposite direction.
• Throttle controls the up and down axis by varying the overall speed of the rotors.

These controls also have other names, for example: roll = aileron, pitch = elevator and yaw = rudder.

STABILIZATION

There are usually 3 main stabilization modes for a quadcopter.

1. Rate, also know as manual, hard or Acro.
2. Attitude (not to be confused with Altitude), also know as self-level or Auto-level.
3. GPS-hold, also known as Loiter.

In the video tutorials I’ll be teaching you to fly in manual mode, it’s the hardest to learn but the most fun.

BEFORE YOU FLY

When learning to fly a quadcopter, these are the things you should do if you want to have the best experience while still flying safe.

• Go to a park or big grass field.
• Fly in the morning to reduce the chances of flying in wind
• Don’t fly with distractions
• Stay away from people and animals
• Take it slow, don’t go too far past your limits.

VIDEO AND WRITTEN TUTORIALS

These are the actual “How to Fly a Quadcopter” videos I was talking about.

1. Basic Hovering
2. Bank Turns