mflander

Well, I'm hoping to get some stories from you guys by telling one myself. No pics as it happened a long time ago.. but should be entertaining in the least.

We used to have a shop in our basement, with no windows, and bad lighting. My dad and I spent an entire weekend(fri. night to sunday afternoon) in the "dungeon" building a trainer for me. We finished it up on sunday afternoon and decided to take it up to the park nearby our house to taxi it around and break in the engine.

Well while my dad was taxing it around, the urge to fly it overwhelmed him.(Now I don't want to hear replies telling me about rules broken or you should fly near neighborhoods or anything, this was 14+ years ago, and we learned our lesson, trust me.) So he took off. Shortly into the flight, about 30 seconds or so, it dawned on me that we only had 2 rubber bands holding the wing on and the battery had not been fully charged. Add on top of that the fact that neither one of our eyes were properly adjusting to daylight because we had been in the dungeon for two days straight, and you know where this story is going.

In a semi-panic attack to get the plane down realizing it was a complete mistake to put it in the air, we decide to talk ourselves through the landing. With my dad piloting and me confirming location and what not of the plane, he began the decent onto a street nearby. We both confirmed that the plane was over the street and he should take her down, only to watch it smack right into the roof of a house and come tumbling down. The bad thing was, this was the house of the infamous "bad neighbor" of the neighborhood. The same guy who once went after my r/c car with a sledgehammer for driving in his yard now had my brand new crashed plane laying on his driveway.

We lucked out on this one, the crabby old man wasn't home, and to my knowledge, never knew what happened. My dad and I learned a valuable lesson. My dad learned, well at least I hope he did, that patience when it comes to flying planes is a necessity. And I learned to never let my father have the controls of my new airplanes ever again.

Now let me hear some of your stories!

Edwin

My Feedback: (2)

We all learn from our mistakes. I was a new member of a club and was transitioning to power flight from sailplanes. Taught myself to fly sailplanes. So with my trusty Kadet and a non-flying buddy we prepped everything did the pre-flight and had the engine running on the runway. We were the only ones there. I noticed the ailerons were reversed. SO, with engine running and no-one holding it I decided to switch them on my Futaba 7-UAF transmitter. For whatever reason I went to channel 3 and reversed it. We heard the engine go to full throttle and by the time I looked up the plane was already 10 feet in the air. Instant Panic. So after what seemed an eternity I composed myself enough to change the throttle. Nothing happened. The plane was climbing higher and faster and starting to do loops. I had no control. After what seemed like hours my buddy noticed the transmitter was turned off. In my panic I must have switched it off. Turned on, now I have control but have TWO controls reversed. I managed to get it facing back to us and throttle coming down but just simply could not deal with the reversed ailerons. By this time, my buddy is dying laughing rolling in the grass and cant even stand up. Lots of help he was, (he was the one that noticed the transmitter was turned off). After several attempts to land I decided to cut my losses and bring it down. Was an easy decision since it was already in a spin heading for the ground. My friend asked, about an hour before it hit (seemed like that long), ya gonna rebuild it? I said, yep! Then it hit, and I said nope! Went and bought an arf and finished up my training. Sometimes the obvious things get completely overlooked.
Edwin

No matter how many times I cut it, its still too short!