Beige

Finished my nice new Decathlon friday night all ready for it's first flight on saturday morning, but as always everything was against me and there were loads of people watching and playing cricket, so no can do.

Today (Sunday) there were only a few people preparing for a kids party giving me 45mins to have a quick fly. So i setup gave the model one last check, added some fuel and started her up (Irvine .53, started first time). gave the engine some running on the ground and set the needle for the normal rather rich run-in setting.

So i turned the model around, or rather my dad did, and did some fast taxing to be sure the engine wasn't going to give out too easily, all was looking good so i lined up for take off.

Giving it lots of throttle off she went veering left towards some fence poles, having successfully steered past them she was off into the sky, some quick work with the trims and she was beautiful, nice and stable and obviously capable of being pretty frisky with the right inputs.

After a couple of nice left hand circuits i decided to do a figure 8 and continue to some right handers, however the engine had other ideas [:@], i got just to the end of the cross and the engine quit, and since i have some issues with depth perception, and this is my biggest model to date i thought i was in the field, but, much to my surprise she disappeared the other side of the trees [X(].



I'll stop the story now, as all this descriptive writing is giving me a headache, suffice to say apart from the undercarriage being wiped off, and a cracked cowl and spat she's fairly healthy off to fly something else this afternoon [>:]


Heres a movie of the first flight... [link=http://beigematchbox.co.uk/site/mainsite/Movies/2A4E29C6-242B-4898-9D38-90840E34274C_files/decathlon_crash.mov]>link<[/link] 5.5Mb mov

deadstickpilot

Ouch, I hate ripped out gear, it drives me nuts!!!

E-Mo

My Feedback: (12)

Right at the best part of the vid he swings the camera away
get a new camera man~!

CrashPro

My Feedback: (1)

get a new camera man~!






hehe.....too funny

towertrainer

i always have to end up beefing up my landing gear. hope your next flight goes well.

av8rdavid

WOW........Very lucky you got only that damage out of it! I just totalled my seagull decathlon a few days ago....I'm looking into a phoenix models decathlon...How do you like it? What engine are you using? It looks like it has serious power! Mine used to crawl with an fa-65 4 banger...Plus all my added adhesives, fiberglass and epoxy repairs it was like flying a brick..

Beige

Just to confuse you, mines a black horse kit

However, i'm pretty sure it's more or less the same kit. Anyway, i'm using an Irvine .53 2 stroke, only 5 grams more than the Irvine .46

devil505

My Feedback: (3)

I was looking at getting the same airplane but decided not to because of having to get a sport muffler. It looks like you have a normal muffler with a deflector. What size engine did you put on it and how is the engine mounted?

*JCB*

My Feedback: (9)

my favo(u)rite part of the video was hearing the trim-beeps...HA!

bummer about the wreck...we've all ripped at least one set of landing gear out

bkdavy

My Feedback: (1)

I'll never understand the logic behind using 4 steel blind nuts to hold landing gear on a 1 inch wide piece of plywood. Beef up the landing gear plane to accept the stress presented on landing.

Sorry about the crash, but it gives you an opportunity to work on your repair skills!

Good luck on the next flight.

Brad