FPV Piloting

Videos

Starter flight control rates

Claude gave some advice about the controller sensitivity.

Default rates are aggressive. FPV sims like Liftoff ship with rate settings that produce very fast rotation for small stick deflections, and there's no expo (softening around center stick) applied by default. Fresh pilots nearly always find this twitchy.

Where to fix it — prefer the sim, not the radio. Liftoff has Betaflight-style rate settings under its controls/rates configuration. You'll find three values per axis:

RC Rate — overall sensitivity/max rotation speed. Lowering this calms everything down.
Super Rate — adds exponential speed toward full deflection. Lower it to reduce how violently full stick throws behave.
Expo — flattens the curve around center stick, giving fine control near neutral without sacrificing full-deflection authority. Adding 0.2–0.3 of expo makes the biggest difference for perceived twitchiness.

The reason to adjust rates in Liftoff rather than adding expo curves on the Pocket itself: if you ever fly a real quad, its rates live in Betaflight on the flight controller, and the convention is to keep the radio's output linear (no curves) so your sim rates and real rates are directly comparable. Mixing radio-side expo with sim-side rates muddies that.

Two housekeeping checks worth doing regardless: calibrate the gimbals on the radio (SYS → Hardware → Sticks [Calibration]) so center stick truly reads center, and confirm in Liftoff's controller setup that the full stick range registers 0–100%. A miscalibrated stick can masquerade as oversensitivity, particularly if center is offset.

A common gentle starting point: RC Rate around 1.0, Super Rate 0.6–0.7, Expo 0.25 — then raise rates gradually as your thumbs acclimate.