Toy Review: S107 Remote Control Helicopter

     The Syma 3 Channel S107 Mini Indoor Helicopter from Xheli.com is a great first helicopter (6-AA Batteries Not Included). It's a small rechargeable battery indoors only helicopter, so you have to have some living room or larger indoor area to practice, but even with that you get a feel for how to fly a RC helicopter! I bought this helicopter with the intention of learning how to fly a remote control helicopter with hopes of one day upgrading to a larger helicopter. It makes for a great begginner helicopter as it is durable, simple and stable. It allows for quite a few crashes, with minimal damage (if your careful about where you fly it of course). I had a few friends fly it, and they had minimal problems flying it on their first attempt.

     This helicopter apparently has a gyroscope to help with the balance of the helicopters stability. This really comes in handy for a beginner helicopter. Before the helicopter takes off for it's first time it has to stabilize. It does this by adjusting the gyroscope for the first few seconds by having it sit on level ground. When the little light on the back of it stops blinking, it's stabalized and ready for take off. Once flying, the hardest thing I had troubles with was making smooth transitions on the throttle for up and down control. I was a little too strong on the cutting back of power to the rotor blades dropping the helicopter to the floor with a thud (nothing broken). It took me about 4 8-minute sessions with the helicopter to feel pretty comfortable with moving it around the house and door ways.

        This helicopter did eventually break on me however, and the wost thing about RC Helicopters is the replacement parts. They arn't that expensive, but the shipping will usually double the cost. There is however two ways to get around this and save a little bit of money that a friend and I have come up with. These are:

1. When buying the helicopter in the first place you can buy spare parts along with it. The parts would just be guesses on what could break, but at least you would be getting them with essentially free shipping. (If it's any importance to you, the first thing to break on my helicopter was the balance bar, and the first thing to break on my little brothers helicopter was the top blade wing holder apparatus.)
2.  The second way to try to save money with replacement helicopter parts is to simply buy two of the exact same helicopters. Although this doubles your price of your original purchase, it makes it so when you break one helicopter you can keep flying your other helicopter. When your second helicopter breaks, you can order the replacement parts for both helicopters and save on the shipping between the two, and then you should be off and running for a while with two fixed helicopters. [Note: This technique could be adapted to two friends/family members trying to get into helicopters. Also, this brings me to an idea to have a local helicopter forum where people can join together and save on shipping for these replacement parts]. This second method may seam very expensive, but it is well worth it if you plan on flying a lot and really getting into helicopters, exscpecially if you plan on making some risky manuvers with your heli!

    Overall, RC helicopters are a lot of fun, but they do get a little old (maybe after like 3 weeks of flying and messing around with it, sorry folks!).  After I had mine for a week, I broke the balance bar, so I bought a new one (7 bucks w/ shipping included) so I decided to buy a replica helicopter for my little brother. He was able to pick up on the controls and fly it with ease in no time. We ended up trying them outdoors and they do work, but they are affected by the wind quite a bit, and they can go super high (and fall alot harder on cement, OUCH). We found that on a fully charged battery they could handle calm outdoor conditions, but when the batterie started to die, they weren't holding up to the outdoor elements.

     Tricks! Using the Helicopter indoors, we found that by holding them in your hand at an angle and having them take off that way makes them go super fast forward and you can really get their blades to slap against each other and collapse to the ground. It's fun to do but it messes up the helicopter. We also ended up taking of the rear angled support bars in the back and the landing gear to help take off some of the weight of the helicopter. I diden't notice any difference with the flying time, but it had to of helped a little, even though it did make it harder to take off from the ground.

    This helicopter dosent come without it's pitfalls however. I have noticed that over time the gears have become a little worn and it makes a jitter as it's powered. It's like the gears slip a little and it makes it a little less stable. It's not a big deal, as I have gotten plenty of use out of it and it still flys. I should also mention that when I first heard they only got 8minutes of fly time, I was a little disapointed, but once I flew it for a full charge, I felt like I needed a little break from concentrating on it for that long. It takes about 40 minutes to charge it up again through USB on the computer. In Conclusion, great beginner helicopter for it's price and super fun to play with for first few weeks!! This helicopter would make a great Christmas gift for friends or family member no matter how old they are!