An experimental control system is proposed for the attitude control of a simplified 2-DOF helicopter model. The main rotor is a rigid one, and the fuselage is simply supported by a fixed hinge point where the longitudinal motion is decoupled from the lateral one since the translations and the rolling rotation are completely removed. The yaw trim of the helicopter is performed with a tail rotor, by which the azimuthal attitude can be adjusted on the rotatable post in the yaw direction. The robust sliding mode control tracking a given attitude angle is proposed based on the flight dynamics. A pitch damper is inserted for the control of pitching angle while the compensator to reaction torque is used for the control of azimuth angle. Several parameters of the system are selected through experiments. The results shows that the proposed control method effectively counteracts nonlinear perturbations such as main rotor disturbance, undesirable chattering, and high frequency dynamics.