Toni Arte

This was the first time an electric powered plane was used in the WW2 ACES event in Finland, and the result was the worst possible. Luckily there's no forest or dry hay nearby.
[ul][*] The plane had a midair collision with another plane, and the wing moved a bit[*] After a while the whole wing dropped off and the plane came down like a dart, nose-on at the field[*] First there was a puff of gray smoke, which thne turned black and after a while the plane was in fire[*] The only salvageable part is the motor (and the wing)
[/ul]

On the next event he will try if a 4S A123 pack is big enough, at least the motor has to be changed as it's kV was now just right for the RPM limit on 4S lipo and 8x5 propeller. The pack on this plane was a 4S 2200mAh lipo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiTJeLoKqrw

The performance of the plane was quite OK, compared to the glow planes. We follow the ACES rules with some Finnish exceptions (like all tuned pipes, including MVVS mini pipes are forbidden).

cccdad

I am flying SSC combat with electric motors. what battery were you using and where were they mounted to burn like that?

Toni Arte

It was a fellow pilots plane. But anyway, he was using a 4S 2200mAh HTX lipo from hobbycity.com, and the battery was mounted quite forward in the fuselage as the plane needed to be balanced correctly. It only had some foam around it in a glass fiber fuselage (the plane was an Aichi Seiran from http://www.svida.cz/horrido/index.php?id=92).

Anyway, usually planes came down spinning like crazy (if you look for 'Tuorla aircombat part 1' at Youtube, at the end you can see my glow-powered Kawasaki Ki-64 spinning down after a midair collision), but this electric one had the worst possible luck and came down like a dart, it could have been doing close to 100 mph without it's wing. We measured a few planes, the quickest one flew about 140 km/h, i.e. about 90 mph.

rrh

Maybe you guys should consider tethering your wings to prevent the lawn dart situation. Looks like you were prepared with fire extinguishing gear, good job. Too bad this happened on the first electric attempt. Ever notice how many of those jets burn up?

topspeed

here is another one burning;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X-Y...eature=related

combatpigg

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I wonder if the AMA makes insurance claims statistics public? Even though electric powered flight is in the minority, I'll bet losses due to fire [shorted out cells] is way more common than fires caused by glow fuel. In 25 years, I've seen 1 oil soaked C/L combat plane catch fire in flight and 1 out of control fire due to over priming in the middle of a match. In the same time frame I've never seen an RC glow powered fire of any kind. I've seen a few electric powered melt downs though and less than 5% of the RC activity I've ever seen has been electric powered. I fly RC combat every Summer over someone elses' dry hay field and would never consider using electric power. Insurance or no insurance, it doesn't matter.