The winds of change

Okay - that title merely reflects the fact that today's flying involved quite a bit of wind.

I think I have found the best prop for the Zero. It's a 8060. The engine runs at quite high RPM (even on the 2s LiPo) and I'm getting more like that classic warbird performance - quite a bit faster, but slow to accelerate. The take off run is now around 5 or 6 metres.

The shorter prop also means I am having less trouble with the prop strikes both on landing and take off.

I did 4 takeoff and landings with the zero today. 2 of the landings I'll call crashes - nose over when I first touched the ground, but the last 2 I'm calling safe landings despite what happened. Let me explain ("Here we go," I hear the readers think): The last two landings with the zero were both good. I got the wheels on the ground nicely, had the plane well settled - definitely good contact and rolling along the ground. Closed the throttle and as the model rolled to a stop the wheels dug in and it nosed over. On the second of these the speed at which it nosed over was so low that it ended up balanced between the landing gear and the prop shaft with its tail sticking in the air. Not sure what I can do about this given the somewhat rough nature of the field. Anyway the zero is tough enough to deal with these little nose overs, so as long as long as I can get the landings to the point where I get it right save the plane noseing over as I decelerate I think that is good enough.

As per advice from others am landing the Zero with some power. Gives you a better glide angle and makes flaring safer, and less of a "get it slightly wrong and you crash" activity. I have a feeling the one downside to this is I am landing at a higher velocity than I might otherwise, but that's okay. I don't think it would make much difference to my nose over problem.

Put the electrafun up for two flights on the NiCd cells. I gave both of these a good conditioning last night. One I am quite suspect about - I think it may have dropped a cell. After three very gentle discharge-charge cycles it was better, but seemed to only have enough power to just hold the EF in the air. However, the other one benefitted tremendously from its one cycle and flew like champ and gave good flight time. Had a problem with the engine arming button after that so didn't use either of the NiMH.