It was a very grey day, but hardly a breath of wind for once, so I finally made my first flight of 2018. Actually, I flew somebody else’s Ares Taylorcraft UMX plane first, having not flown since mid December. It appears I can still do it as I had four flights with the RS352 and another with the Taylorcraft. That is until the transmitter started making a really shrill beeping sound. We couldn’t figure out what it meant but thought it a good idea to land as it’s probably a battery warning. Whatever it was, it was really annoying me.
There were a lot of people around today. First, there was a new E-Flite Valiant flown by the guy who had the Fly Baby lookalike and Opterra wing. Another guy and his son were getting back into the swing of flying after a break as they had a new foam Spitfire waiting back at home. They were flying a Carbon Cub, but I think it was having some balance issues. On the first flight, a perfect take off from the ground was followed by a vertical climb, then left hand circles always losing height until it came back down to earth. It seemed to be tail heavy, so, after some fixing, the next flight was a lot better. I’m not sure if they’ll fly the Spitfire next though. We also had two guys, both with Mavics and a lot of FPV kit. One had a ZOHD Dart while the other was managing to fly a small T-Tail foam pusher around for what seemed like ages. Another Dart also turned up while I was leaving and I also saw another guy with his son walking across carrying a DJI Phantom drone. Apparently, there were a lot of them around right after Christmas. Anyway, the final drone flyer turned up with another Mavic, but couldn’t fly it because it had decided to do a firmware update. Personally, that puts me off ever owning one of those things.
As you can see, I’ve started re-covering the Autogyro. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of silver blue, so this one is going to be red up to the canopy line and blue on the upper sections. I’m not sure I like the red all that much, but it should look like my Extra when I put a white line along the join. I really just want to get it flying again at this point, but I’m currently trying to figure out where the best place to source the 0.8mm fibreglass head plate from. I also need to make another blade, so I’m not quite there yet. However, once all those bits on the table have found their way back into the fuselage, then I’ll feel like I’m almost finished.
flightpad 