Hovering
Hi,
I do not exactly remind how I got through it other then that the field needed indeed to be big enough at first....
Something interesting however I observed with the R44-simulator I am building, is that I could not hover with it at first. Hovering has indeed some unstable modes, so if the pilots 'feedback' is not OK, oscillations (possibly increasing in amplitude) will occur.
I went back to the real R44 and observed that I would take on stable positions on the controls (for instance cyclic) for the give situation and make short corrections around these positions. The corrections are most of the time stopped even before the heli in fact started responding (meaning that they really are very anticipative). I copied that to the simulator and guess what, It worked.
Hope that helps.
Delta3
ps : reading back : this explains perhaps the previous remarks that hovering after approach is easier because the student found the stable positions before entering hover