venom290

Took my h9 mustang (older)out today. 4th or 5th flight of the day. Take off, imediatly banks left. Give it a little right and it levels off. Flying a little weird, a couple of clicks of trim and it levels out. couple of circuts, whats that hanging below the wing the gear pocket, a piece of trim. No its one of my aileron servos.[X(] Hanging on by just the wire.Now I'm nervouse. Landed it a min.later.(had to make two approches, hard cross wind.)Blocks that the servo was mounted to just snaped out Could not belive it kept flying.Ever happen to anyone else??Reglued and screwed, good as new. I did not think a war bird, or any plane would still be controlabe with just one aileron. Oh well, just my lucky day.



venom

venom290

just noticed over 100 post. Glad it was not bad news
venom

solo_one

My Feedback: (13)

Nice save, congrats! I have seen this happen before, and yes, it should have crashed, especially since you needed a second approach. I hope you had witnesses, just so you can brag about that landing for a little while.

bbbair

Actually; I've seen severable planes saved by the two servo building technique.

The redundancy that the second servo affords you is the differance between a poor landing with a minor repair and going home with a bag full of scrap airplane. []

Two servos gives you much more versitility with flap control, landing features etc - but (to ME) they are just extra benefits after safety.

Landing with just one aileron servo is not easy, but it can be done - excellent job venom290!

Glad to see that you live to fly again!

parrthd

one of our flyers saved a funtana 40 after one of the aileron linkages came loose during flight. it wasn't pretty but he planted that plane square on the runway. he fixed the linkage and in 10 minutes he was right back flying again!! i'd have had to at least wait 15 minutes to let my nerves calm down!!!

if i can find it there's a video somewhere of a guy that saves a 30 or 40 % after one wing came off. he put it into a knife edge, made the circuit, came in for the approach, just before touchdown he flipped the wing level and bent the landing gear but that's all the damage he did!!!

T_om

You just lost one aileron and thought you should have crashed?

Take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjYhvOckKHQ

One aileron is a piece of cake, THAT guy had problems!

Tom

agexpert

My Feedback: (1)

One aileron is not a problem...just mushy and slow. If you have flaps mixed into the ailerons and you deploy flaperons on approach...that's a problem.

I have a SIG Mayhem with a nasty habit of spitting-out one aileron servo control-horn screw. My roll rate drops to nothing and I land with the linkage, horn and all, hanging under the wing on one side.

I seemingly can't be bothered with the whole 'lock-tite' thing. (My excuse is that I forget). One day I will bag the pieces and move-on, I'm sure.

GaGeeBees

My Feedback: (23)

I flew an landed a BAE Hawk with just one aileron. The other one having entirely departed the airframe shortly after takeoff. It handled surprisingly well.

Johnnie Red

Hey I'd like to share what I've seen happening to one CMPro F6F Hellcat.
There was this guy with the hellcat and another guy with a FW190 "dodging" around in the air trying to make a formation flight. Unfortunately the guy at the controls of the 190 wasn't carefull or experienced enough and in the second turn he cut off the left stabilizer+elevator of the F6F completely off the fin....Holly cow!! I said and in my surprise the F6F was landed like nothing happened....it made a very nice landing - even no bounce at all....unbeleivable!!!!!

rlipsett

I had a superstar that the mounting blocks for the aileron servo split just under the screw. That was the day that I learned how to turn with a rudder only. Its a good thing it was a trainer and inherently stable enough to bail me out of that problem. I had only been soloing a month when this happened. this all happened about one flight after I tried to fly inverted and got the plane pointed a little too far down and tried to get it to level off with down elevator. Needless to say trainer do not fly well upside down and react slowly to down elevator in that situation I just cleared the trees by a small number of feet. Time to go home after theses events the plane was trying to tell me something

TomF4U

Yah I have a H9 Funtana 40 that had the right aileron pull loose in flight. It was a first for me too, but its still flying.

joesabido

Some time ago, I was flying my former trainer, which I had modified and installed dual aileron servos.

The thing is that the left aileron servo came off in mid air but the linkage remained attached to the aileron, so the servo was hanging from the control horn and the servo's weight pulled the left aileron full down. I was lucky to be in a somewhat good position to attempt to land straight away, using full left to get the right aileron down and using only rudder to steer the plane. Good thing is that since both ailerons were down they served as flaps actually. So it was no biggie, just felt weird landing my trainer while giving full left aileron input and with a servo hanging from the wing.

Lessons learned:

*Don't use balsa for servo trays.
*Use CA to harden any servo screw threads.

Joseph

stikman26

i had that same problem with my h9 mustang. servo came out after the 4th or 5 flight. little screws through the plywood covers into the hardwood block fixed that problem