She's flown, but not by me.
Terrible day, overcast, "white-sky" conditions plus Sahara-dust haze everywhere, with gusty, changeable winds, but the model still went up to
the strip for a flight. Safety Officer (and test-pilot) Rudy, while inspecting the model identified a jittery servo on the elevator. I had
three extra servos with me, so the wing came off again, and the servo was changed. More jitter. A third servo was tried, and when the jitter went
away, I quickly put the wing back on, and went to fuel up the aircraft.
As I was collecting my flight-box, I noticed a servo-arm screw lying on
the assembly table. The spare servos all had their screws in place, so the only servo that could be missing the screw.....
After putting the wing on *again*, I fueled the aircraft and began the startup. My flight-box gell-cell was flat. It's just come off 2 days charging, so I think that battery is now dead. I wonder if this model is trying to tell me something? Borrowing a flight-box, the engine was
started, and the carby tuned. We couldn't get the engine to idle at a low RPM. It looked like it would be too fast to land with that high an engine RPM, but Rudy said he'd fly it to "dead-stick" and land it that way. I
got the camera, Tony carried it out, and...
Away she went, quite quickly, taking a lot of runway and eventually
lifting off and executing a low climbing out. Rudy said he had to put full
up trim to keep it from diving into the ground. It was quite fast, and in fact couldn't be slowed down too much, but Rudy did attempt a stall-test.
The model behaved very politely. Rudy did sime brief maneuvers and
pronounced the machine to be a good flier. He then stooged around until
the model went dead-stick, and brought her in to the strip.
Unfortunately, conditions were terrible for photographs, but I did get one slightly unfocussed (I call it motion-blurr) shot:
http://www.anjo.com/rc/aircraft/seabee/#1stflight
Some adjustment of the throttle and the elevator trimming out seems to be
all that is needed to make this model just right. But the visibility was
very poor, with the white on the upper surface of the wing vanishing completely when viewed against the whited-out sky. Rudy says he was very nervous because of the visibility. Since three other models had already crashed, we decided not to take her up again, so I never got to try her
out. I can't say I'm sorry, really, because I'd prefer better conditions
for my first flight!
But anyway, the rum bottle was broached! :-)
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þ Synchronet þ Made of wood and glue, but mostly glue!