Description
The Coronet is a series of tail-down ‘Rainbows’ that form a square circuit. At each corner of the circuit a 90º pirouette is performed as shown in the Diagram. The judges will be looking for a symmetrical, accurate circuit with well controlled 90º pirouettes that show minimal hesitation. The ‘Rainbows’ should be of constant height with the whole circuit being flown in a smooth manner. The start/finish may be made from an upright or inverted hover.

Preparation
This should take the form of breaking down the coronet into the component manoeuvres. You must be completely happy flying well controlled upright and inverted pirouettes, so practise these carefully, firstly in front of you and then at the 4 ‘corners’ of the coronet. At this stage, it would be very useful to place some markers at your estimate of the 4 corner positions and initially hover over these points whilst practising your upright/inverted pirouettes. You will find pirouetting at these positions is more challenging than directly in front of you.

If you have not flown any ‘Rainbows’ previously, it is useful to begin by practising some forward and backward flips. Begin with full flips before attempting half flips that have a ‘hovering’ start and finish. From here, begin to carefully slow down the elevator input whilst prolonging and increasing collective pitch to produce a definite arcing path. At the apex a corresponding slowing of cyclic is required as the model is encouraged to descend with a reduced pitch value. This initial rainbow should be flown in front of you in the side-on position aiming for an overall distance from start to finish of about 10-20 metres. To complete the coronet, you must be able to fly the 2 side-on rainbows in opposite directions. This opposite direction rainbow should be practised initially in the same position as the first before transferring your choice of rainbow to the further out side-on position.

Having mastered these 2 sides of the coronet, you now have the challenge of the remaining sides that involve one rainbow moving towards and the other away from you. In theory, these should not present any more difficulty, but my experience is that they do! Try to remember that the control requirements of cyclic and pitch for all 4 rainbows are the same. The problem is the perception of the model moving towards/away from you. Practise of these legs of the coronet is probably best attempted in their final positions, but initially at a greater height – I would suggest beginning at about 15-20 metres. Again, with these sections, you will have to master the rainbow flown in both directions. If you have chosen the direction your side-on rainbows are to be flown, then this will dictate the direction of the nose-in/tail-in sections that must be practised.

The final step is to put all this together to produce a complete circuit starting from a hover and ending at the same point as shown on the diagram. I would suggest flying 2 legs only, until competent, before adding the 3rd and then final leg.

The Manoeuvre
The circuit may be flown in either direction, but must begin at one corner from a hover. The size of the circuit is not specified but an average ‘rainbow’ is about 10-20 metres in length. However, if your preferred size is more or less than this, it does not matter. What is important is the smoothness and consistency of all 4 rainbows.

From the initial hover, elevator and pitch control is used to produce the first side-on rainbow as shown in the diagram. Care must be taken to bring the model to the hover smoothly and accurately at each corner immediately followed by the 90º pirouette. Without delay, the next rainbow must be initiated and so on until the start/finish position is reached at the end of the final leg.

During the rainbow section the control requirements are basically elevator and collective pitch. Tail control is limited to the 90º pirouettes.

If a wind is present, corrections will, of course, have to be made throughout to maintain symmetry and position.

Possible Problems
To fly accurate rainbows requires considerable practice, especially particularly large examples. I find the descending part is most difficult to judge as the model approaches the hover. My advice is to begin with small size examples and increase size as far as possible.

The nose-in/tail-in section moving towards/away from you will probably prove most demanding but by starting off to one side of yourself, and at an increased height you have the best possible perception of your model. Once you have flown these sections a few times, confidence will improve rapidly and the height of the manoeuvre may be reduced accordingly.