Progress indeed!
We have been blessed, in Surrey, with some pretty reasonable weather just recently. This has allowed me to get a lot of flying time in 
Today, started off rather cloudy and cool, maybe even cold. Being a family man means that I always have a number of chores to do - today’s chores involved mowing the lawn, putting the garden furniture away for the winter and other similar jobs.
And my reward? Just as I was finishing there was a distinct clearing of the clouds, the temperature went up and there was still no wind!
OK, the next bit is obvious … 
 I now feel confident enough to say that I really am starting to get the hang of this helicopter flying thing! I had 3 batteries (1000mah) worth of hovering around the garden. Zero crashes, a number of recovered “scary” moments and nearly all landing were controlled!
My 4th battery seems to be a bit low on performance so I don’t always use it. I was having such a good day that I decided to try the last battery too. While I was swapping the batteries over I had a sudden rash thought … “I wonder if I should try it without the training gear?” … well, I was in a confident mood
So then -Â training gear off, fresh-ish battery ready, pre-flight checks done, hh gyro ready …
I started up, enabled the hh gyro and throttled up to take off and up she went!!!
The first take-off lasted about 15 seconds and then I decided that it was best to land while the going was good. Well I never - I managed to land without incident!
The rest of the battery was spent hovering about 1 - 2ft for periods of up to a minute or so. It was excellent fun and terrifying at the same time, the heli looked so small and I felt like I / it was balancing on a knife-edge! Overall though, it was hugely satisfying to see that I was actually capable of doing it.
The training gear will be going back on for a while as I still have a lot to learn - nose-in and side-on hovering for example, but today was progress indeed!