Big Weekend Flying

Spent a fair bit of time on RC flying this weekend, with flying both mornings, and indoor night last night at Erindale College, and going out to take a look at the Namadgi Club open day today.

Not sure how much of what has gone on seems blogworthy but here's an attempt.

I installed some rare earth magnets in the wings of my easystar. A couple of times after high speed runs I was finding, even after a perfect landing that one of the wings had started to come away in the air. Needless to say that could get bad easily. The rare earth magnets are installed about an inch forward of the CF spar holes in the wings. Had a test fly with it today. Works good. Even after much gliding punctuated by high speed stupidity the wings were exactly where I left them (an unsurprisingly comforting thing for an aircraft).

The one incident of the weekend involved stalling the RV4 on approach on Saturday morning. She was just coming down a bit short (with me trying to perfect the positive AOA landing technique) and I gave her a click of throttle and some more up elevator - should have have just given her more throttle. She is a little hard to get in correctly, not cause the technique is wrong, but she is flying so well on that 8x6HD GWS prop, and there just isn't enough granularity between those low throttle positions to get quite what you want (or that's my excuse anyway). She was barely moving when she stalled, and damage was quite light - snapped the over wing stringer on the right hand side - glued up with CA this morning and she flew like a trooper this morning.

Elebee got some stick time after a bit of an absence - still just as she was.

Put a few more batteries through the TREX. Even did a pirouette today - first one ever in a real heli, and recovered to a nice stable hover at the end. Moving towards nose in hover gradually.

Speaking of helis the indoor night at Erindale had the normal amount of carnage and destruction. My Squirt was let down by her speedie and so didn't fly, but the Blackhawk had a good stretch of her legs. Was great to fly the counter rotating ship in such a nice large space, and see some of it's flight characteristics.

I did learn one thing - it is possible to bring down counter rotating helis - get enough speed in them, rudder them round to 90 degrees and give full cyclic role - blades touch, lose all energy and the thing falls to the floor like a feather. No real damage but a broken undercarriage strut (and I had a spare) - I spose this counts as an incident too, but let's face it - indoor night - it's gonna happen.