First Week in Flight

 

Well guys, I'm glad to say it! My first week being back in the hobby has been super exciting. I completed my FliteTest (FT) Flyer about 2 weeks ago and was able to maiden it last Monday and this week finished building and Maidening the brand new FT Mini Speedster. Both planes flew great, and considering I have about an hours flight time on both loved being behind the controls once again. There was however some very important lessons learned during this week that I think are important for all beginners to know before the throw their first plane up.

Firstly, and yes I am trying to emphasizes how important this step really is: CENTER OF GRAVITY or CG for short. The CG of an airframe should be followed by law for every single flight, whether its the maiden flight or whether you've put it up 100 times. This simple step if left uncheck can make for horrible flying but truly spectacular Crashes. I learned that with my speedster, especially smaller planes! Small planes = low tolerance for CG, which means you MUST be extra careful about balancing otherwise your will bang up your pretty new airframe pretty fast.

Tape is going to be your best friend! Illustrated by my Flyer, your nose is going to take one heck of a beating. Therefore, reinforcing certain places on the wing and nose will allow you to crash hard and easily put the plane back in the air with little ill effect. On that note, cary tape with you on your first flights because you WILL crash.

Putting together a "Crash Kit" is essential when going out to fly. In my kit, I have a roll of packing tape, scotch tape, extra BBQ skewers and rubber bands. I also have a landscaping flag that come in handy to tell which direction the wind is blowing. Pack plenty of extra props, you will go through them a lot!

First flights can be a little nerve racking, best thing to do is to take a deep breath before you throw the plane up. I also always go in with the expectation that I am going to crash. If you go in with that expectation, you will only laugh at how spectacular your plane looks barreling into the ground. All in all, It was a ton of fun. Next blog I will talk about the specific techniques I used to repair the nose of the Flyer.

After many years of being absent from the RC hobby, I found myself on Facebook scrolling through my feed. While on the page, I stumbled across one of my favorite pages, Make: Magazine. On this particular post, there was a feature about the “Maker Hanger” featuring Lucas Weekly. Out of my curiosity I jumped onto the Make: website and began to read about how Lucas was taking fellow makers through the process of creating RC aircraft from simple materials like foam board and hot glue. This was not the hobby that I remember from years ago. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more approachable the hobby was, and that an airframe made of foam was so easy to build and fly. After watching countless hours of Lucas, explaining how far technology has come, and learning all about 2.5Ghz and 5-9g servo’s I finally made it to the end of Maker Hanger. It was at this moment that he mentioned 3 channels on YouTube, Stone Blue Airlines, Flite Test and Needless to say I checked out all of them, and after looking on Flite Test, I was hooked.

This was all the inspiration I needed to run to my local dollar tree, break out my wallet and hand over a $5 bill. 5 sheets of foam later and a good amount of spare foam and I had my first PowerPod and FT Old Speedster. While on the Forum and becoming more involved on it, I quickly discovered the number of people passionate about designing and building their own swappable and foam designs. I quickly found Jason Eric Anderson’s Builds on sketchup, and learned how to take the plans from old balsa builds and turn them into flying foam masterpieces. After watching designers like NerdNic, RCSpaceFlight and Frikin, I knew I had to jump in the deep and begin to trace out my first designs.