So out of pure abstinence I bought a Esky Lama V3 r/c heli and it has been a nice acquaintance this far. It is a small coaxial heli, meaning that it has no tail rotor but instead to rotors on top of each other rotating in different directions, to be flown inside or outside when there is pretty much no wind.
What's inside the kit
The kit comes with the helicopter, a 4 channel radio (incl. 8 non rechargeable batteries), 800mAh LiPo battery, battery charger/balancer for two or three cells , AC and DC connection for the charger, extra set of rotor blades, a cable to connect the transmitter to your computers USB port and the FMS simulator on a CD. As you can see this is a Ready To Fly (RTF) kit that comes with pretty much everything you need to get started.
First impression
My first impressions of the Esky Lama V3 when I got it out of the box was plastic. It really has no quality feeling to it but then again you might get what you're paying for. At about 99$ (990 swedish krona) I still think this is a nice heli to start with. The transmitter has much more quality felling to it than the heli. I really liked that there was a charger/balancer included so the LiPo gets balanced while charging it.
Before flying
There is not much to do before you are ready to fly the helicopter. Place the batteries into the transmitter, charge the LiPo (about 1-1,5h), turn on the transmitter and then connect the LiPo to the heli.
Flying the Esky Lama V3
After turning on the transmitter and connected the LiPo to the heli you are ready to fly. There are of course some trimming that has to be done in order to get this little thing to hover but I was amazed how easy it is to fly the Lama V3 heli. The battery will allow about 10 minutes flying and after the first recharge I was able to hover and move around a bit. At this point I felt that I was ready (yeah right!!) to take it outside and fly around. Everything started fine and then some wind tossed the heli into the ground - CRASH! The inner shaft broke at the top where the flybar is connected. I used some string and glue to fix the problem and soon I was flying again. After a couple of charges it was time for major crash number two. I think my repair broke and the flybar flew into the rotor blades and one can say that I landed pretty hard. This time the tail also broke and that is another thing that ads to the poor quality. The tail is fragile and I mean really fragile! It is now broken in several places but some tape fixed that problem.
But all in all this is an easy to start with r/c helicopter that will help you to learn the basics (at least I think) of flying r/c helicopters. One thing that I noted was that my simulator training worked really well. But I don't know if I got stressed up but with the simulator I had no problems fly towards me but in "real life" I had some problem making the connections in my brain. But I'm sure that some practice will put an end to that minor problem.
Spare parts
As I mentioned above this is a fragile little thing and you will need spare parts. I have bought two extra inner shafts. One with plastic parts like the one included in the kit and one aluminum. If you hit the ground or a wall or whatever with the rotors or flybar the plastic top of the inner shaft will break.
I also bought a extra flybar in case of some serious bending of the original. It hasn't been necessary to use that one yet.
An extra tail is probably a good thing to buy as this might be the most fragile thing on the Lama V3. I think that the one sold as spare is a bit more flexible and I think you can buy it in yellow (as the original) and in grey (or maybe it's white).
Extra rotor blades will always come in handy but remember that a extra set (one pair for the upper and one pair for the lower) rotors are included in the kit.
There is also a "crash kit" that you can buy that includes some of the parts that you are most likely to break. I didn't buy this one because they didn't have it in stock when I needed my parts.
Conclusions
The Esky Lama V3 r/c helicopter is a nice and quite cheap coaxial r/c helicopter that you will be able to fly within a couple of test runs. I think it is a good heli to learn the basics of r/c helicopters but if you want to get more advanced there are other helis to go for. The quality of the heli is quite poor but atleast the transmitter and charger/balancer has ok quality.
Since it seems like this is a fairly popular heli there is quite a lot of information on the Internet if you run into problems. Just type in "Lama V3 problems" into google and you will get links to forums discussing the most common problems that can (and will) occur.
To wrap this up I would recommend this heli for the beginners but be aware of that you should probably buy some spare parts at the same time as you buy the helicopter!
eSky 4CH Helicopter Co-co Lama Version 3 Micro Heli Radio Remote Control RC Helicopter RTF for $69.95
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