RE: Stiletto
Well it was a lot of good news, bad news, good news.
First off, the mods didn’t seem to make that much difference so I won’t be going that route again, just not worth the effort for a plane that can die so quickly. I got positive comments on the colors. The black stripe helped.
Now for the shocker: On the day before the race, fourth flight for the plane I had just completed a good practice round and everything performed great so I decided it’s time to land. The landing was perfect just like the others before. The plane was almost rolling to a stop in front of me when THE WING FELL OFF! The two wing screws were totally gone so the only thing that had been holding the wing on were the positive Gs (Which is so totally unlike my normal fling style). No damage except for the tips of the prop as the engine was at idle when it happened, but now I had one prop left. I replaced the prop and remembered to put blue lock tight on the screws this time.
I flew another practice round and did a few victory rolls and went to land. I made a landing attempt but the plane didn’t want to come down normally so I went around figuring the cross wind was to blame.
As I did a left turn to come back to the runway I noticed I had to use a lot of aileron to turn it. Setting up for the landing it did it again but I pushed it down anyway. It all looked good until at about 5 feet it snapped inverted and went in breaking the tail section off and trashing the spinner.
Totally confused and POed, I packed it up and went home. It was at home when I discovered the left aileron under power was down almost a ¼”. The wing only had a small scratch at the tip. It wasn’t the wind I was fighting, it was that bad servo. That made me feel better, I was about to swear off bad cross wind landing warbirds.
The tail is back on strait but the canopy and engine cowling have road rash and I’m going to leave it. I missed this race… next time.