Esky Lama V4 Review

The Esky Lama V4 is an inexpensive indoor electric helicopter. For less than $100 USD online, you get a completely assembled and ready-to-fly helicopter, four channel transmitter, LiPo battery, charger, and a spare set of blades. The Lama does not come with training gear or an instructional video like similar models from Tower Hobbies and Horizon Hobbies, but it only costs half as much.

The first thing you'll notice is the two main 13" rotors, each of which has its own 180-sized motor. This coaxial design cancels out the torque of the blades without the need for a tail rotor. This supposedly makes the helicopter more stable and easier to fly for beginners. Turning the nose left and right (i. e. yaw) is accomplished by changing the relative speeds of the top and bottom rotors. While this works quite well, there is a drawback in that turning changes your total downward thrust, so moving the rudder stick can change your altitude. Forward/backward motion as well as left/right roll are determined by two servos which tilt the swashplate.
The battery, charger, and A/C adaptor. The stock battery is a 7.4V, 800 mah LiPo pack which is good for about 10 minutes of flight. It takes about an hour to charge with the supplied charger/balancer. I was happy to see that this two cell pack has a balancing connector for charging, rather than using the main discharge lead and potentially leaving the cells uneven.

Flying for the first time was straight forward. There's no assembly involved at all - just charge the battery. It wasn't clear whether the factory had trimmed the controls, so I set them all to neutral and turned on the transmitter. After plugging in the battery, the gyroscope took a few seconds to stabilize, and then lit up solid green. It's important to bring the throttle up slowly to avoid stripping the gears. I was happy to see the Lama come up off the floor easily and seem to be pretty stable.

Rather than taking a chance, I took note of which way it was drifting, then landed and adjusted the trims. After a few tries, I was able to get it pretty well dialed in, with the exception of yaw. I found that even with the rudder trimmed fully to the right, the heli would still turn slowly to the left and needed constant correction. An open basement with seven foot ceilings was enough space to learn how to fly, but more height would have been better. Spending a few hours on a simulator before the first flight also helped a lot in terms of orientation and anticipating what the controls would do.

Flying the Lama V4 is really addictive. It's a very easy helicopter to learn on, and it's remarkably tough. It's endured more crashes than I can count, and the only things that have broken are the rotor blades and one side of the landing gear. The flybar has a resilient design which causes it to pop out undamaged in a crash, which is a great feature. It's important when reattaching it to make sure that the upper blades pivot freely, which largely determines how stably the heli will hover.

Performance wise, the Lama V4 is not a rocket ship. It will move forward at a brisk walking pace, and will happily move in any direction you command it. It is definitely sluggish compared to a traditional tail-rotor, non-coaxial helicopter. The reason is that the upper blades have no cyclic control, and so are always working to pull the helicopter back to a static position. This is fantastic for a learning flyer. However, sudden changes of direction are prone to causing ‘blade clash’, where the tilting lower blades come into contact with the static upper blades. I’ve only had this happen once, when hauling hard back on the cyclic while the heli was at close to maximum forward speed. If your idea of fun is flying circuits of your lounge, but not high-speed aerobatics in a gymnasium, then the Lama is perfect.

The Lama will not fly outdoors, except on the most incredibly calm days. Considering the forward speed is so low, it can barely hold position with full forward cyclic in even the lightest breeze.