Mustang Again

I’ve only had it just over a week now and the Mustang has already had 14 flights. Most of these are in the 13 or 14 minute range, but a couple of my packs are obviously past their best and giving sub 10 minute flights. This is amazing though.

It was a morning of two halves today. I almost packed up after flight three as there was a huge black cloud overhead and it was looking very ominous. Weirdly, though, there was water on the top of my plastic bag that I use for kneeling on. Actually, it’s to keep my knees dry rather than kneeling on wet grass. So it was either wet from condensation after I put it down, or there had been a bit of light rain that I hadn’t noticed. This was what I was flying in:

Then, on the point of giving it up with four packs still unflown, I saw a bit of blue sky appearing. The black clouds went over my head and the sun came out. So did the wind unfortunately. It was crazy windy at the end. On about flight four of seven I was filming it and figured out that I could make the Mustang fly backwards by reducing the throttle. Of course, my RunCam battery then died part way through the flight and the file is missing. The image above comes from the third flight before it stopped working. Oh, well, none of the video is much good anyway because the aircraft is so small and fast.

I did learn some important things over the course of the morning. Firstly, you do get more than 2 seconds to connect the fiddly flight LiPo after turning the transmitter on. It’s just that sometimes it fails to bind and I don’t think it’s all down to a time window. Secondly, the panic inducing “expert, I don’t need the gyro” mode on the top right switch gives me an aircraft which is completely out of trim to fly. I now realise that it’s rolling to the right horribly. I tried stabbing away at the trim switch during the flight, but it took a huge amount of trim to even get close to normal. And, of course, the rates are on high so it’s much too sensitive anyway. There’s no way to reduce the rates, the trim switches are so hard to find when you’re flying and then I discovered that you lose the trim when you switch the transmitter off. OK, so it’s a cheap transmitter, but it makes it very difficult to fly when it doesn’t need to be that way. I really must see if I can get this bound to a Taranis so I can do something about the rates.

Now, having realised that the trim with no gyro is causing it to roll heavily right, I can finally appreciate that it’s flying with the right wing down when the gyro is on too. I’ve been giving it little stabs of left every so often, although it is flying itself very competently and levelling using the gyro. This now leaves me in a state of confusion. I obviously need to mechanically change the aileron trim to get it to fly without the gyro, but does this mean that the gyro needs resetting too? I think it will still level the plane correctly as long as the gyro was calibrated on a level surface to start with. I’m not going to try resetting the gyro unless I absolutely have to because I can see that causing all sorts of problems. Then there’s the bit in the instructions where it says, “Allow the airplane stay still about 3~5 seconds in a calm environment when you first time turn on X-PILOT in order to calibrate and activate the X-PILOT. When the X-PILOT starts to react, means it is activated”. How does that work? You turn it upside down to put the battery in and the gyro starts reacting while it’s inverted. These things hurt my brain.

So, the last four flights were way over the recommended wind speed range. I’ve flown the HobbyZone Champ in these conditions, and also the Beast, but I would say that the Mustang handles wind less well than the bigger, high wing, Champ, although it was going OK in what had to be 15 mph gusty conditions. You could see it shaking at times as the gyro was struggling to keep everything straight and level. I thought it was a lot of fun and have absolutely no problem flying backwards. However, it was definitely a good idea to land before the power runs out as it just cuts the throttle and there’s no way I can find to re-arm it, so you’ll be chasing it downwind.

It was a difficult day in terms of flying, accidents, and just downright stupid things happening. I got chased by a really big wasp while I was flying. That’s never happened before. I could hear this buzzing sound and thought it would go away if I ignored it. It didn’t go away. It looked like it was trying to get friendly with the arm of my fleece. So I had a bit of a run around, while still flying the Mustang of course, and managed to lose it. Then the buzzing came back again. It can’t be the same one, surely? This happened three times, with me ending up walking around the field until the flight was over so it wouldn’t find me again.

It may have been the dark, ominous, foreboding clouds that put people off this morning, but I was on my own for most of the flying session. Part way through the morning there was a mother and son with a drone and another drone flyer who only had what looked like a two minute flight at the extreme far end of the field. I don’t know if he crashed or not, but he didn’t hang around for very long. The little boy with his mother was also very lucky not to injure himself. I didn’t get enough of a look at it to see if it was a real DJI Mavic, or one of the cheap clones, but he couldn’t figure out how to get it to activate at first and had to call his dad. Then he managed to crash a little way downwind and had to search for it in the grass, but the really dangerous part was that neither of them really understood that a drone is not a toy. The child was probably about 12 years old and put the drone down on the floor right in front of him, while sitting on the bench with the controller. It was much too close and I wasn’t quick enough to stop him before he initiated the launch sequence. Basically, it jumped up into the air and flew straight into him. He put his hands up reflexively to protect his face and got away with it just cutting his finger. He was really lucky it didn’t do some permanent damage, but neither of them really seemed to understand that. I showed them what you should do to launch a drone, but she needed to be supervising him as he was much too young to do it on his own.

Well, that’s it for September. Now we’re moving into the Autumn there might not be the same opportunities to fly. Next time out I’m going to have to decide whether to take the Mustang or the Wing, but that will probably be down to the weather. That is if I haven’t got a Cap 10 to fly, whether in the big or UMX versions. The maker foam Mustang on the inside cover of this month’s RCM&E looks just as bad as my bigger Cap 10, so I’m now thinking that I need to get back to building it.

First Flight: Volantex P51D Mustang

I beat the weather Gods! I managed to do the first flight of the Volantex RC P51D Mustang this morning. I haven’t done a first flight in a while and my last one must have been the Atom Autogyro, so this was a bit different. The video above shows the launch and a heavily edited montage of all the bits where it was close enough to the camera to actually be able to see it. However, the first flight was broken into two bits, which you’ll understand if you watch the video.

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It’s nice to have a different picture for a change.

This shot gives you an impression of just how small a 400mm Mustang is:

Even the grass dwarfs this plane!

So, how does it fly then?

I loved it. Although I do have a few reservations. First off, my Volantex Mustang cost £72, but I notice that there are identical looking versions from Sonic RC and Eachine. If you shop around you might get one for as little as £55, assuming they are the same thing.

My advice for anyone pre-flight is to read the bits in the instructions about connecting the flight LiPo, the throttle arming sequence, the three gyro modes and how the aerobatics button works. Throttle full, then zero will arm ready for flight. You also need to connect the plane’s receiver LiPo within about 3 seconds of turning the transmitter on, or it won’t work.

The first flight was using an under arm launch as the aircraft has nothing to grab hold of underneath. There is a gyro which can be set to Beginner, Intermediate or Expert, so Intermediate was chosen for the first launch. This was on the basis that I can fly a plane just fine on my own without computer assistance and Intermediate gave me a bit of extra help for the first flight while on Expert you’re on your own. My recommendation is to either use Beginner or Intermediate for launching and only put it on Expert if you’re insane, but more on that later. This was my first under arm launch ever, but you can see from the video that it went just fine. And, yes, that really is the first launch taken using my RunCam on a tripod next to me. It’s not a faked first launch, i.e. I didn’t have a little practice first and do the videos later. Anyway, it lasted about six minutes before trying to fly on Expert mode (no gyro) got the better of me and I stuffed it into the grass. It’s all OK though.

If you watch the initial launch on the video, that “grab” of the elevator as it suddenly goes up was common to all the flights. I don’t know whether the pitch sensitivity is too high, or if it’s to do with the gyro, but a tiny bit of elevator would cause it to jump up into the air rather than the elevator being a progressive control. After seven flights of around 12 minutes each this morning, I was left with the impression that it might actually be me trying to fly the plane too fast. I tried to film all the flights, but my RunCam failed on flight four, so I don’t have the later flights to watch back when I was starting to get the hang of the plane a bit more. I wasn’t aware of this when I was flying, but on the video you can really see the wide speed range of the aircraft. It’s obvious where I’m backing off on the throttle and where I’m putting power back in as you can see the reaction in the aircraft’s speed. So, homework for next time is fly slower and more in control.

Normally I would note how much trim I had to add in to make the plane fly, but this gyro business has got me all mixed up. It’s actually the first plane of mine that I’ve flown with a gyro, although I’ve flown plenty of other people’s planes (Hobbyzone Champ, Beast etc). First off with a completely new plane I would normally find the operating point on the sticks where it flies straight and level and then work the trims to get that back into the centre. Of course, with the gyro, it just flew straight off the launch, although I had this feeling through all the flights that it was flying with its right wing slightly down. Maybe this is to do with gyro calibration, I’m not sure, but I’m going to look into it later.

My plan for the first flight was to try out the Beginner mode and the Expert mode on the gyro, as I wanted to do aerobatics with it. What I discovered is very important and can be summed up as follows:

Gyro “Beginner” – angle limits on bank and pitch (about 20 degrees?), low rate controls. No aerobatics. Anybody could fly the plane on this setting, it’s that easy to fly.

Gyro “Intermediate” – angle limits on bank and pitch (about 40 degrees?), medium rate controls. Rolling not possible due to the angle limit, but will loop from level flight without any problem. I also discovered that you can half loop and roll off the top, so you can do Cuban Eights. Harder to fly than “Beginner”, but this is what I would call a normal flight mode.

Gyro “Expert” (off) – no angle limits, high rate controls. You can fly it in this mode but you need to be just a little bit insane. It will roll, loop, stall, probably when you’re not intending it. With even the tiniest hint of wind you will want to be on “Intermediate”. I stuffed it into the ground six minutes into the first flight by over controlling on the ailerons.

At this point it’s worth noting that there’s a button on the top left of the transmitter labelled “Aerobatics”. This will only function in Intermediate mode, but I want to fly the plane myself and not stand there and watch the computer do it for me, so I had vowed not to try this out. However, it is a big red button and by flight three I couldn’t resist pressing it any longer. I had read the instructions, but couldn’t really remember how this worked, so I pushed it. There was a beep and then…. nothing. OK, press it again, hit full left aileron, then zero… and the computer executed a very passable left aileron roll. You can see the plane using the gyro and the elevator to keep the nose up so it hardly lost any height and it stayed on a very straight line. That was fun. I did that a lot afterwards. You can press the “Aero” button and roll left or right and also stab full up to loop, but hit full down and it does nothing. It’s probably safer that way.

Trying out the “Aerobatics” button to do a roll

Seven flights later, all around 12 or 13 minutes, and I couldn’t believe how much air time I was getting. I measured the batteries after I got home and they’re showing 3.5v to 3.7v, so I had most of the power out of them. As it uses power at a much lower rate than a quadcopter (one geared motor versus four), it was making very good use of some of my older LiPos that are no longer good for micro quadcopters. It’s got a much lower “C” requirement and tolerates a lower voltage better.

The low power usage led to one of the problems I discovered while flying. I found it very hard to tell when the power was starting to disappear and it was time to land. This was the point where I also discovered that the ESC has a throttle cut and I couldn’t figure out how to re-arm it in flight. I made a few “with the wind” landings when it caught me out three quarters of the way around a square box landing circuit. I’m missing the flight timer on my Futaba radio. At 54g it’s too light to do any damage though.

In conclusion, it’s a lot of fun to fly, but I would really like a mode between “Intermediate” and “Expert” which lets me do full aerobatics with just a little gyro assistance. Until then I’ll have to keep playing with the “aero” button in Intermediate mode and mixing computer rolls with manual half loops and rolls. I’m also going to see whether it’s possible to fly this plane with my Taranis QX7S and multi-protocol module. That won’t solve the gyro issue, but it will let me program rates and expo which I think are much too high when you switch to “Expert”. There’s nothing on the supplied transmitter to change the rates.

One really fiddly thing I don’t like is getting the LiPo into the little hole in the bottom of the fuselage.

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The catch on the white plastic door really gets under your finger nail too. Working out where to stuff all the wires is an issue and I also can’t get my 500mAh LiPo packs in there. It would probably mess the balance up if I did, though and you get 12 minutes on the 400mAh packs which is more than enough.

These are only minor issues, though, and I can see this plane getting a huge amount of air time in the future.

EPILOGUE

The weather Gods got their revenge!

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OK, so this is what happened. When I arrived at the field the weather was best described as “all mists and mellow fruitfulness”, or sunny with a touch of mist. You can see this in the video, but you can also see the bad weather in the background, so we knew we were on borrowed time. The forecast was for a front to come in round about 12pm with heavy rain. We were watching it all morning and could see the weather changing slowly, so my intention was to head home before that happened.

I had one LiPo left unflown. I should have headed home, but I put it in the plane and off I went for flight seven. Only the weather was very obviously changing. I felt it start raining as I was flying, so I landed and hurriedly packed everything away, but it was starting to get really heavy and I had a 30 minute cycle ride home. I got soaked. You can see the state of the Mustang carrier box that I spent all yesterday making. It did its job, though, as it got the Mustang there and back in one piece and dry. I now have bits of kit and clothes all over the house trying to dry everything out.

Unboxing a Volantex P51D Mustang

After seeing two P51s flying last week, I just had to have my own one, so I placed an order with RobotBirds on Monday, the aircraft arrived on Friday and I’m hoping to fly it on Sunday. You can’t ask for better service than that. I’m very impressed with what I’ve got for my £73.

So what’s in the box then?

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The aircraft arrives very safely packed on one side of the polystyrene cube, while the transmitter and other bits are packed on the other side.

These are the bits that you get with it:

A spare prop and adapter are a very nice touch. In fact, the prop has a very clever prop saver mechanism which allows it to pop off in the event of a crash and prevent damage.

You can’t quite read it, but it has 130×70 written on the back, which is the diameter and pitch in millimetres. If you turn it around there’s a small hole in the tip of the spinner through which a Phillips screw head is just visible, so this must be holding the spinner, prop and prop saver together. The motor is an 8.5mm brushed motor of the type commonly found in micro drones, driving the prop via a gearbox, which gives this aircraft its 10 minutes plus flight times. The box claims 15 minutes, from a 400mAh 1S LiPo, so we’ll have to see how that works out. I don’t think it’s excessive, though, because I was getting out-flown by two of these things last week when I was flying my mini wing. I was doing between 10 and 12 minute flights and noticing that the Mustang went up just after me and was still flying when I landed, despite my having made use of all the thermals I could find.

The other bits in the bags are a Phillips screwdriver to put the wheels on, which is a very nice touch, two wheels and fixing screws, a spare prop saver and a USB charger for the 400mAh 1S LiPo. So I put the LiPo on charge and set about the wheels.

What can I say about the wheels? The best piece of advice I can give is, “just don’t”. They’re not great. It might be because the thin wire legs have been cut with wire-cutters, but they don’t fit in the holes. It either needs the wire to be filed down a bit, or the holes expanded with a micro drill, but we’re talking fractions of fractions of a millimetre here. Also, don’t use their screwdriver to tighten the screws, or you’ll surely end up putting the screwdriver through the wing. The head slips in the screw slot and there’s no thread on the plastic insert, so they’re expecting the screw to cut the thread. Personally, I would cut a thread with a small tap if I had any taps less than 1mm, file off the U/C wire and use my own screwdriver. But, save yourself the hassle and just leave the wheels off. If you’re wondering, for the photos I took where the wheels are on, they’re only push fitted and barely fitting in the holes.

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The wheels… best to just leave them in the box.

By this point the LiPo was charged, so I stuck four AA cells into the transmitter and tried turning everything on. I say tried, because my first attempt resulted in nothing. I think you have to power up the TX, then connect the LiPo in the plane within about 3 seconds. The LiPo is a bit fiddly with the wiring inside its little plastic and foam box, but nothing that’s a problem. I’ll have to do some more experimenting with the TX to see if that 3 second window is real, but that’s what the instructions say. There are procedures for binding and calibrating the X-Pilot gyro too, so you might want to take the instruction manual with you on the first flight. Remember this bit, though:

“throttle arming sequence – TX on, Rx on (throttle zero), throttle to full, throttle to zero – armed and ready to fly”.

I always hate it when you have a new plane and can’t figure out how to make it go. It’s embarrassing.

After that everything worked. On the gyro’s “beginner” and “intermediate” settings I could see all the control surfaces moving in the right sense, so that was working fine. Put the gyro on “expert” and the controls only move when you move them, not when you move the aircraft around.

The transmitter is very good considering the price point of the aircraft. The sticks feel really nice and smooth. There’s no ratchet on the throttle, which some people prefer and some people hate. Then I discovered that the rudder has a tendency to stick. The right stick (it’s mode 2) is fine, it’s just the left stick when you move it full right it has some resistance when it’s coming back. I might be over-reacting, I think it’s fine but only the flying will tell. Also, once I’ve flown it as intended I’m going to see if I can make it work with my Taranis QX7S with a multi-protocol module. The only other minor problem I found was with the neck strap. I clipped my Taranis neck strap onto the plastic clip in the middle of the radio to make sure it fits and then couldn’t get it off again. It’s an odd shape and you have go through some crazy contortions to get it off. My advice it to fit a key ring to the transmitter and clip onto that, but it’s a minor point and the radio is brilliant for virtually no money.

Well, that’s the unboxing done and here are some pictures of what you get to fly:

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In conclusion, you get a lot of aeroplane for your money and I’m looking forward to flying this one. One thing that puzzled me when buying it was that this one is badged “VolantexRC”, while there is also what looks like an identical plane badged “Sonic RC”, which was the one reviewed in the June 2020 RCM&E. I think they’re the same product, but manufactured and then distributed by different companies, as “Eachine” appear to have another variant. I’m not sure about this without having another one to compare against, but I would be interested to know.

One final thing, but this is the other reason I bought this plane:

It uses the same LiPos and connectors that I use for our drone workshops. I’ve got a few of these lying around wanting to be flown.

OK, that’s the unboxing done and I’m hoping to fly this tomorrow, weather Gods permitting.

Make Do and Mend

I’m back in the air again, even if the cycle ride to the flying field did involve taking part in a half marathon. There were runners on the route and bits of cycle path coned off, but it wasn’t immediately obvious where the course was. Nobody knew what was going on, so I may have inadvertently cycled along the half marathon course, or, then again, maybe I didn’t. There seems to be an increasing trend for causing chaos by closing roads and cycle paths at the weekend for events, but leaving the local residents to fend for themselves.

It was busy today, with two UMX sized Mustangs, a MicroAces SE5A, a larger Cub high winger, large (2m?) electric glider, a ZoHo thing that wouldn’t fly and me with my own design wing. That’s also not counting the two guys with drones who arrived at the end, along with another guy and his wife on bikes with a drone, a guy who walked across two fields with his drone and a couple of outlier drones on the edges of the field. In short, there were a lot of Mavics around, one of which was bright orange, which was coloured with stickers and a QR code with his CAA registration. It was certainly visible. It was also good to see a lot of aircraft back and the two Mustangs were really amazing to see fly. The duration on a 1S 400mAh is really amazing. They were flying for longer than me with my 3S 1300mAh and thermal soaring wing. I may have to get myself one. I also got some really great shots of the SE5A which looked amazing.

These pictures have a bit more of an atmospheric feel to them as the digital zoom on my camera was having a hard time.

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As for me, I got three really good flights with my mini wing. I’ve done some repairs and replaced the hinge tape on the elevons, using a slightly thicker material. In truth, as I pulled the old tape off, it really did look like it had had it and been aged badly by sunlight. I checked all the control movements too, and I think the new tape cleared up some of my control issues. The new hinges fit tighter to the wing and don’t allow any extraneous movement up and down where the thinner tape was allowing the hinge to move around. I also changed the wing incidence using a couple of 2mm shims taped to the fuselage under the wing leading edge. My intention was to add down thrust, but this isn’t easy due to the way the motor is mounted. Normally, a couple of washers would suffice, but you can’t do it here without a lot of grief getting the motor back in. So, being a wing and not having a tail, I can just pack up the wing so that the wing to thrust line incidence changes. While I wouldn’t normally do this, there’s no tail, so no wing to tail incidence change to worry about. Anyway, it seemed to work as the power on to power off trim change is not as massive as before.

I was rather nervous about my first flight of the day due to the elevon and wing incidence changes, but I needn’t have worried. It headed skywards at a rate of knots and was flying immediately without any problems. Also, there was absolutely no wind, so I had a job picking a direction to launch. It was rolling left a bit, so I trimmed that out, which brings my elevons a little bit closer to central. As I said before, when I shut the power off, there was a much less abrupt transition to gliding mode, which meant I was able to do some thermalling. In fact, I think this was one of my best flights as there were long periods where I could just glide. I’m still holding in a little up elevon for the gliding trim, but I’m hoping to remove that as I get the power on /power off trim more balanced. This is something I’ve never had before, as, normally, I would just add in down when the power goes on, balance the amount of throttle and that’s that. But, with the wing, the launch is the problem. If I trim with more up elevon for the glide, then that means there’s more up trim on the launch when it’s got an issue with ballooning upwards, stalling and spiraling left into the ground. Not good. So, the plan is to add effective downthrust so I can get the glide right without risking everything during the launch. A special launch mode wouldn’t hurt either. At the moment it’s really climbing out much too fast and almost going vertical with my super fast javelin launches.

So, the first flight was the best by a long way. After that the thermals weren’t easy to find. On the second flight there was some really severe turbulence too. The aircraft was oscillating all over the place, but, still, there were no usable thermals to be found. I was even feeling confident enough with it to switch out the aileron rates and see what that’s like. You could certainly be more positive initiating turns, but I really didn’t want to push my luck too much, so I kept my stick movements low.

And all the time I was being out flown by a couple of Mustangs, doing 10 minute flights easily on their 1S 400mAh packs. I’m sitting here at my computer looking at a dozen identical packs right now and they need flying. I’m seriously thinking about buying myself one of these Mustangs as I could get a lot out of it. That’s assuming I can get it there on the bike. The MicroAces SE5A wasn’t doing too bad either, but I think that might be more of a problem to fly in winter conditions.

As for my own building this week, my own design micro Cap 10 is coming along nicely. I need to fix the wings on tonight, then it will be ready for some test glides. Fitting the gear should be relatively easy, but I think it’s going to turn out to be a bit heavy to mix it with the Mustangs. I do desperately need an alternative to the mini wing. The other bit of building this week has been trying to cut new wing joiners for my bigger wing. I say “try”, because the 3mm steel that I’m using is really tough. I have one cut, but need to save up all my energy to cut the other one. I don’t know how viable this is going to be to actually fly, but all the bits are there waiting to be fixed and it can be done with minimal effort. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Here’s hoping the weather next week is just as perfect, as we couldn’t have had much better conditions this morning.

Virtual and Extra-Terrestrial

It’s my co-axial helicopter simulation of NASA’s Ingenuity sitting on the surface of Mars

There’s a running race this weekend and all the roads are closed, so nobody is going anywhere. That’s a shame because the weather was absolutely perfect. Add to that the fact that my week off turned into a week of work and I’ve done very little on any of my non-work projects.

As you can see above, I did have some fun yesterday flying a Mars co-axial helicopter simulation over some remote sensed terrain data. This is a project I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it really only took a couple of days work. When I say, “simulation”, though, it’s really not that accurate. It’s just a variation on our quad simulator, but with a different terrain. I still need to figure out how to change the gravitational constant, but the graphics look quite impressive. It’s part of a series on how to handle remote sensed data, so it’s an example of how to turn a Digital Elevation Model from a geotiff into a real landscape.

This is a baby Cap 10 (40cm span)

About the only building I have done this week is to press on with my mini version of the Cap 10 which is designed to fly using all the micro quadcopter batteries I have lying around. Having said that, though, building the wing for this thing does take quite a lot of work. I know I said last week that I was fed up with foam board and that I was going back to balsa, but I discovered this week just how allergic I am to balsa dust. Even wearing a mask, it just doesn’t seem to make any difference. You have to admit that it’s a nice shape wing, though. That’s why I decided to build one in the first place. I was hoping to have done some flight tests this weekend, but I still haven’t quite got the wing attached to the fuselage. That should be easy enough though. I may have to cut some lightening holes and tissue cover it as the final weight was 20g for the wing on its own. Solid sheet is not a great way of making a light wing. My other options were either to curve a flat plate around some formers and make a Jedelski wing which is open underneath, or go old school and do a fully built up version. I guess foam is a fourth option, but I haven’t got a foam cutter.

My one other work in progress this week is to make some new wing joiners for my big wing. I cannot for the life of me figure out what I used as wing joiners originally and then what happened to them when the wing was retired many years ago. The sizes of the holes tell me that it must have been steel rod, but I have nothing of the right size, so they’ve disappeared somewhere. Never mind, I’ll have to cut some new ones, glues the fuselage back together and fit it out with gear again. I might use the Cap 10 gear, as that project doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment and the wing would be a good quick win if I could get it going again. The main problem is going to be actually carrying it to the field as it doesn’t fit in my ruck sack. The favourite option, then, is to buy a bigger ruck sack. I’m still working on that.

I started this post with “virtual”, and it’s the virtual which is really making me want to fly again. I seem to have a thing for flying wings at the moment. PicaSim has a plank wing, which I really love flying and I’ve been looking again at the “1×6” plank in the June 2020 RCM&E. It has a very strange Jedelsky wing which looks like it could make for a very quick build. I worry about the performance, though, and their version has wing panels as two part plug on sections, each 90cm in span. I would need to make a smaller one and reduce that to 2x50cm, spanning 1m instead of 1.8m. The performance at that size might be an issue, so it’s probably not a good idea. I should stick with what I’ve got at the moment to give myself a backup to the mini wing.

Oh, well, we’ll just have to see what the weather is doing next weekend and keep up my simulator flying until then.