Best Day of Flying Yet

So I'm off on break the Friday before the new year and I scheduled a day of flying with my Dad.  He has a flying buddy with access to a private field and was able to get some time on that Friday for us to fly out at the private field.  This field has a dirt, but smoothed out, runway out in the middle of open farm land.  My Dad brought out his Radian and his buddy took out his T28 for us to try out.  I, of course, brought out my Wild Hawk.

I arrived about 11:00am and we were out at the field by about noon.  John (Dad's buddy) sets up T28 around.  Wow, that was a lot of fun!  This plane is very responsive while still be easy to control.  Now I do have to say that the transmitter (a really nice Spektrum 6 channel) was set for a slow rate.  I flipped the switch to fast rate and about as quickly as I lost control of the plane, I switched the rate right  back to slow!  Way to responsive for my current skills.

This is where things started going south for my Dad.  I handed the controls to my Dad so he could check it out, and pretty soon he was getting to far away.  John advised that he should bring it back before it was too hard to control, and guess what.  Well, he tried to get it back but lost orientation and handed the controls back to John.  Too late!  It dove into the ground and broke the wing off.

Dad then got out his Radian for a flight.  A quick had launch out and the plane was not gaining altitude.  About 50 yards out the right wing tipped up and caught the breeze and with the low altitude, cartwheeled the plane into the groung!  Another broken plane!

Well, I got out the Wild Hawk and after two failed take off attempts, I hand launched it into the air.  I had a great flight with my make shift cell phone video camera on board (unfortunately something went wrong with the camera and the video file was messed up, so no video this time).  I landed it, took the camera off and hand launched it again.  I trimmed it out again since the loss of the camera weight, and asked my Dad if he wanted to fly it.  He said "no" as he did not want to chance wrecking another plane!

After this flight it was time to head home and get some lunch.  After lunch we checked out a local city park that people were known to fly at.  This turned out to be a great place to fly!  It's this huge sunken area surrounded by 10ft berms with parking areas.  We quickly headed home to get out planes.

We returned, me with my Wild Hawk and Dad with his Wild Hawk (Old Hickery) and his second plane (my brothers Wild Hawk that he procured).  We parked right up to one side with the slight breeze coming in toward us.  We had about 15ft of grass to the grassy berm.  I took off and landed on the parking lot and Dad hand launched out off the berm.  What a perfect place to fly!  We flew and flew almost till dark!  I burned off the 2200mah battery and started another.  Dad did crash and damage my brothers plane (he flew it behind us and lost it in the sun!), but continued to fly with Old Hickory.  We had soo much fun and had such a great time flying.  I think I had easily, a solid 30 minutes of air time!  We would just take the planes up and then cut the power and see how long we could glide around.  We had a great time bringing them in for low passes and trying to land at our feet (I have to admit that Dad took the prize here).  We are definitely coming back here again!

Sorry there are no pictures, the video didn't come out and I was so distracted by the great flying that I didn't take any pictures.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and please post comments, good or bad.  Be sure to come back and check for future posts.

Flying With Landing Gear

This was an experiment that I could hardly wait to perform and I finally got the chance.  My oldest daughter is finally home from college for Christmas break so I recruited her to film while I flew.  It was a beautiful clear day but the wind was starting to pick up.  I was  rushing to get things done so that I could get out before it got too windy.  I know that I could have waited for the evening calm, but I did not want to risk that the wind would settle and that something else would not interrupt my day.  So out we went and braved the elements anyway.  When we first arrived it seemed that we would luck out with the wind lining up with the walk way.  Well as usual the wind did not flay nice and it had fun crossing at an uncomfortable angle.

Not to be outdone, we flew anyway.  The wind did not make things easy.  After a few attempted take offs (see one of the last videos below) I finally made it into the air.  It was much harder than I expected to taxi in a straight line.  Especially with the wind buffeting the plane from the side, especially when it was just about to get off the ground.

Once in the air, it flew just fine.  The the addition of the landing gear had no noticeable affect in the Wild Hawk's flight.  As the wind was causing the plane to bounce around quite a bit, it might have been masking any affects of the landing gear, but I don't think so.

This first video shows the first successful take off.    I thought sure that I was going to crash into the cable again, but I just pulled back on the stick and luckily had enough airspeed to take off successfully.

This second view shows the first successful landing.  I came in dead stick because it was coming in fast enough and with power would have been too fast.  I know too that this was because I was landing with the wind, but it worked out OK.  I did think for a moment that I was going to land it on the walk way cable, but I made it to the pavement.

This video shows both the take off and landing from the airplanes point of view.  If you would like to see what I did to get this footage see my other blog RD Flying Fun.  I'll be updating it soon with how I modified a cell phone to take this footage.

Like the last time I flew, I had so much fun after the first flight that I just made sure all was still OK and then just took off again.  This was a shorter flight as I didn't want to battle the wind for too long and it was too cold for my daughter and I to stay much longer.

My daughter filmed this flight as well.  The first video is the entire flight from take off to landing since it was such a short flight.  You can see that it took me quite a bit to get it under control, but I made it into the air.

Landing was another issue again.  You can see that it came in on an angle and kind of "crabbed" in.

This video is the second flight from the planes perspective.  You might have noticed by now that the perspective is different than from the ground video.  What I did to get forward facing video had the affect of switching the video left for right.  When the plane is going left in all of these videos from the plane, it's really going right!

OK, this is the, well, blooper video of my failed take offs from the ground our perspective and from the plane's perspective.

Yeah, I could have cut some time out of this video, but I thought it was interesting seeing all of this stuff from the planes point of view.

Ouch, that last one looked like it really hurt but actually nothing bad happened.  I just checked it over and made sure the wing was still in firm (as firm as they can be with this much "experience") and checked the aileron servo connections.

If you liked this my latest blog post, please leave a comment and let me know.  Even if you didn't like it, leave me a comment as to what you didn't like.  Either way, be sure to come back and check for future posts.