I wrote this in a Flight Sim forum, so it was easy to copy, and yes I know that if you have flown the old Sycamore you will need no reminder of what came naturally but to younger drivers it may be of interest.
So this early RAF helicopter from the 50s, the Sycamore, was a manual machine, no hydraulic controls, optimised for cruise with the cyclic stick central and the fuselage level. For aerodynamic reasons a basic chopper will roll towards the advancing side of the disc in forward flight, and this clever chopper had a built in correction which applied a left tilt to the disc to compensate as the stick went forward. This meant that in any condition other than the cruise it was anything but optimal – take-off had to start with the stick way back (to get the fuselage to ‘sit up’ level for a vertical lift off) which would give an unwanted roll to the right so the stick had also to be held way over to the left as the lift started. Then as the fuselage sat up the stick had to go forward and right towards central again to get a clean vertical lift-off, while playing a fine dance with the throttle and collective lever in the left hand with feet on the tail rotor pedals counteracting the yaw from the changing torque. In a tight clearing on a log platform or sloping ground this mattered a lot. Optimum rotor rpm in the hover and for climb out was 270. The throttle, like a motorcycle twist-grip on the end of the collective, was interconnected so that it was increased as the collective was raised, and vice versa, but not precisely. Starting at 270 rpm, raising the collective gave too much throttle initially, so the throttle had to be backed off to keep the revs constant, then rolled on again for the latter half of the take-off. The Sycamore had only a central collective lever - instructing from the left seat was challenging, sharing the same throttle in the 'wrong' hand.
I could ramble on about performance out of hot, still, humid, jungle LZs, but this was way before Vietnam and Hueys and readers of Chickenhawk and similar accounts would be seriously unimpressed, so perhaps not.
DH