Most likely that ' s what an inertially stabilized control reference gives you . The helicopter has a control mode that is referenced to the ground , and you control linear and rotational motion separately , all in a reference frame that is grounddown you can fly up by deflecting a control towards up no matter which way the helicopter is pointing . That ' s quite a bit harder to do when you have classical controls , but perhaps the guy in the picture is using traditional control mode . With groundreferenced controls , that sort of flying is trivial , and a good helicopter will maintain its position relative to ground mostly independently of what orientation it ' s in . There is a range of orientations around rotor being vertical where some models may not have enough blade area to generate sufficient lift I guess . I ' ve been flying a friend ' s model and it could hover with the rotor completely vertical , or really in any other orientation , pretty much like what you see in that video . Flying like that is like flying in Minecraft .