Very nice day at the field. I played with doing a kind of Immelman. Fun! My maneuver was a bit different. I did my 1/2 roll while in the vertical. That seemed like more fun at the moment.Today I felt much more connected to the plane than previously. This gave me a lot more control and smoothness than I’ve had in the past. I’m rolling better, managing power better, managing the exchange of altitude and speed better.
Favorite moves:
- Launching, giving it full throttle and watching it climb directly away from me in a straight line, ascending at 20 degrees. It just gets smaller and smaller.
- I was flying 45 degrees away from being into the wind and straight toward me. I noticed that in order to track correctly, the plane was actually side-slipping a lot. We don’t need no stinking rudder!
- Standing in the middle of the field and having the plane zip around me like a loyal dog darting around in the grass.
- Getting up to 250 feet, pointing the plane directly at me, building up speed and then bringing the plane straight up, right over my head. As it ascends, I roll. My view sees a dark line in the sky rotating around an axis. I then pull out and dart away.
- Flying by low and slow, low and fast, low and really really fast out of a steep decent, low and really slo[crash!] oop! When it flies by, engine off, silent except for a “shhhoo” of air, I grin ear to ear.
Oh, I forgot to mention what I did on Sunday! I went to the Poconos field. I watched just one Stick 40 combat. Zowie! They had to cancel the rest of the combat because moisture was tearing the streamers after just a few seconds in the air. I saw a plane on the ground rev into a fence, shooting 1/3 of a prop 50 feet over peoples’ heads and into the side of the truck. The fuselage of the plane was broken in-two. Lastly, back at Great Meadows, I saw a 7′ wingspan pattern plane (?) do looping, rolling, flipping 3-D tricks that blew my mind. My jaw was literally agape! It looked like a sprite fluttering about, only this sprite was larger than me and weighed like 50 pounds. Earlier in the day, I was impressed with a biplane doing what looked like shoulder rolls. But this new stuff was in a class 3 times removed.
Oh, I also tried flying at a local unused baseball field. I can now tell you that I can just barely keep the Zagi flying in a little league baseball field. I can also tell you that it sucks to have to fetch a plane in chest-high grass. Personal note: That’s about the smallest field I think I could ever fly at.
- I learned a valuable lesson about near-stall speed flying and elevon airplanes. It had to happen to me twice before I sat the plane down in the grass, put my fluid dynamics hat on, played with the controls and thought about it for a while. The lesson is this: If you’re flying very slowly and pull a hard turn… lets call it a hard right turn, the right wing now has it’s elevon pointed up in the air like a flag. At stall speed, that wing isn’t going to bank and turn the plane. Instead the elevon will act as an AIR-BRAKE, slowing that wing down and sending the plane into a really cool though horribly tragic spin. What does the airplane doctor say about that? “Don’t do that!” “But Doctor, sometimes I find myself in that predicament when flying fairly low and then making a turning error.. Like for example turning away from the wind too quickly.” The doctor just repeats, “Don’t do that.” And I bow my head and agree.
