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Yesterday I went out with Doyle and Julia to the little Allamuchy baseball field. I got to see Zagi Flap for the first time. It freaked me out! I got it up to about 250 feet and dove at about 80 degrees at full throttle. Only 1/2 way down it started flapping like a crazed swallow, like 5 times per second! I thought the battery pack was going to pop right out in mid-air! Well, it didn’t but I was so freaked that when I brought it in for a landing to see if it was ok, I scraped it against a fence, tearing the starboard elevon off for the third time. I gotta get coroplast elevons.

Soaring with Eagles

Yesterday morning after class I was flying at WCCC. I saw some eagles (hawks?) catching a thermal at 300 feet so I went up to meet them :-) I found their thermal at 200 and rode it to about 350 with them. Very cool! I got pretty close to them… riding the thermal maybe 50 feet vertical below them. I thought they’d be completely freaked out by the plane but they didn’t give up their thermal for at least a minute. I’d like to think they were done with the thermal but yea, I probably scared them off.

Dynamic Soaring

Today I went out to the Allamuchy field… it was a really windy day. Though the field is small and flat (it’s just 3 little league baseball fields) I tried dynamic soaring. What a hoot! All I had to do was loop carefully and I’d get some speed fer free!

I’d come in 3′ off the ground, shoot up 20′, fly inverted for 40′ and come back down near the ground. Since the wind is moving faster at altitude, I come out of the maneuver faster than when I go in! I’ve still got to work a lot at my vertical turns. This time around, I could rarely do more than one loop before pulling out of it to stabilize myself. And I was using a lot of throttle to keep me going. If I was -really- good, I’d be able to do this with no throttle at all!