Figure eights are tonnes of fun, one of my more popular events at fun flys is to set up a figure area and see how many figure eights a person can do in a specific time. Lotsa fun!

Learning Nose In
Lesson objectives:
First steps of nose in
Higher altitude nose in hover
Learning orientation tricks
Developing your nose-in skills
Nose in is one of the more important skills to learn when learning to fly. After all, if you fly the machine away from you, you're gonna have to bring it back aren't you?
Once you've learned nose-in, your flying will really take off. You'll progress a lot faster once you've learned it and you'll find yourself 'less afraid' of the helicopter as you'll be able to deal with it in most orientations.
Learning nose-in isn't that hard if you put your mind to it. Having said that, having a simulator to practise on really makes things a lot easier. I'm going to discuss two ways of learning nose-in, with a simulator and without.
Simulator
Far and away, the best way of learning nose-in is to use a simulator. You aren't afraid to crash the machine and you make much more progress faster. Practise on the simulator each night for a week and at the weekend, get up the guts and just spin the machine around and see how long you can hold it.
Orientation Tricks
Nose-in is certainly different to tail-in, no doubt about that. However, there are a few tricks that I use to help me give the right stick inputs. These are:
Push towards the low wing.
When the helicopter is facing you the left/right cyclic controls are reversed. Therefore, if the helicopter is facing you and is leaning to the left (ie the left side of the rotor disc is lower than the right), then move the left/right cyclic control to the left. As you do this, you'll notice that the left side of the rotor disc starts rising towards a level plane. Once the disc is level with both sides, release the stick input.

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