Looking at the weather report for the weekend I just knew we had to test fly my Sickle.

I went over the airplane several times checking and rechecking everything.

I called NFB and set up a time to meet at the field so he could set up the motor function for me.

Jeff did the motor setup and looked over the airplane and noticed a few items I needed to take care of before we flew it. Minor stuff but always good to have a second set of eyes looking.

Winds at 5mph or less,sunny and cloudless skies. No reason to hold back now.

Take off roll saw the canopy come loose, dang builder error, the canopy pin isn't engaging far enough. Run to the local Dollar store and get some packing tape to hold it on.

Second attempt, Take off roll is uneventful, rotate and the airplane heads to the heavens, about 5 clicks of down elev and 3 clicks of aileron and it seems to be flying straight and level.


Try a few rolls to check the CG and the roll to inverted and back are very easy and smooth. Looks like I have the CG pretty close. It's at the center of the wing tube or about 175mm from the leading edge of the wing.

The rear of the Batteries are even with the back of the rear LG mount. Turnigy 5,000 30c

Rudder is EXTREMELY effective. Caught me by surprise how little it took. Need a lot of expo.

The 45 up and down lines are pretty straight.

Time for some up and down lines. The airplane has a pretty evident pull to the canopy going up. I'd put about 3% down elev to low throttle in the setup and the down lines were fine.

KE showed pretty much zero pitch either way, later test flights will check this closer.
I've never had an airplane that didn't have some pull before. Kind of neat.

On inside loops it dropped the right wing and the left on outside loops. Elev half's were off a bit which should fix this issue.

Again builder error.

On powered up and down lines the fuse would take a pronounced skew to the left. Odd, I've never seen an airplane do that.

Landing was a breeze.

End of flight #1.

Jeff and I checked the thrust and found it to have a tiny bit of left thrust in it even though the spinner is centered on the nose ring. So theres no right thrust built into the fuse.

Jeff flew the second flight and he agrees it needs right thrust. He did some snaps and inside/outside loops and confirmed the wing dropping. He was happy with the first few snaps but we forgot to do any spins.

Need some more setup time in the shop before the next flights.

He likes it, so do I.

Looks like a keeper.

Once back in the shop I took the motor out and placed a shim to get some right thrust later back in the shop and now have 5/16" of right thrust measured at the prop tips.

Found the elevators off a bit from each other.

Tomorrow will bring another test/trim flight.

Tim