When the Novus CP came out I was pretty happy about it.  I thought finally a collective pitch that I can fly around in the living room or practice some acrobatics within the backyard with.  It is light and fairly durable. It is available only in a RTF package and is a Walkera knock off made for Heli-Max. In light winds or indoors it does perform fairly well for itself.

Basic forward flight and zipping around the backyard.  It’s motor and gearing is reasonably quiet which makes it sound cool going though the air.  It is NOT super-stable and slight twitchiness with the thumbs can make this tiny bird really unstable really quick.

I was told at the LHS that there was a guy who was inverting it in his living room (I figured I must really suck as a pilot and/or he has a really big living room).  I tried 20 or 30 times to flip this guy inverted over soft grass and basically crashed 20 to 30 times trying it out.  I even bought the hop-up kit to install the brushless motor for more power.  It did get smoother performance with the brushless upgrade and the full metal head upgrade, but I still couldn’t do anything other than sport flying with the controller as it is set up. Again my skills might be lacking in this area.  There are plenty of videos of people flying this thing all around and doing interesting things with it, I’m just not one of those guys.

The heli is small—nano sized the rotor disc is only 305 mm (roughly the length of a 250-sized helicopter’s blades)  because of the small size everything effects this tiny bird.  It does come fully assembled, just charge, insert batteries and fly. The radio is non-programmable, although there are a couple of adjustments you can make.  It flies better as all heli’s do, in idle up mode but the switch is on the ’wrong side’ if you are used to a the idle up being on the left front.  This can make for some interesting moments when you are trying to avoid damage in a crash.  The blades are foam and if out of balance due to damage really make this heli shake a bit. It has a powered tail rotor that I had some issues with the tail rotor staying on the motor shaft. (it comes with a spare for you).  The Novus 125 is basically a bigger, more stable version of this heli. If you were looking for a Novus to buy I would get the 125 over this one. This heli is not for the beginner or even your first collective pitch.  I would advise that you have some CP experience and skills before trying this one on.

To me this was an attempt to make a larger collective pitch heli in a super tiny package and it worked OK but not really a ’home run’.  Because of it’s light weight (only 2.4 oz) minor crashes will likely just require popping back on a ball link.  It’s really small so working on it really requires some type of visual magnification device and small, stable hands.  Repairing it can tax your patience some and I lost a few super-tiny screws in the process.  The blades are similar to the Novus 125 and in a pinch you can interchange them but they are notexactly the same and performance difference is noticeable but not drastic.

All in all a pretty fun heli but honesty since getting the Novus 125, & the mCPx  mine just sits there.

You will likely find this at your LHS or online at www.hobbypeople.net or www.towerhobbies.com .