The 5th flight didn't have such a good ending to it. I was doing fly bys straight-n-level at 10 - 15 feet. Not trying to do a touch-n-go just checking out my visual reference points for getting the plane comfortably centered over the runway. Speed (I think) was about 1/3 throttle. The plane then started an aggressive glide path towards the concrete runway. I applied (what I thought was) full throttle (smoothly but quickly) and applied back (up) elevator. The plane sped up but didn't climb. Seemed to do an aggressive flare at 5 feet (yuk). Nice 3-point landing with the throttle nearly full bore. The nylon landing gear bolts (3 1/4x20) sheared off and the plane veered a bit to the right into nice soft dirt and did 2 very nice cartwheels.


Without video, it's nearly imossible to tell for sure, but it sounds to me like you were in a stall. If you were a little tail heavy, which you indicated as probably the case by excessive tail motion, and had insufficient airspeed, the tail would tend to drop somewhat. Once the AoA reaches a critical stage (aggressive flare), airflow will stay disrupted over the wings even if you gain airspeed. Continued up elevator input only makes matters worse as it will prolong the stall. If this is indeed what happened, a touch of down elevator to get the wings back to level flight would have corrected the situation. It's just very hard to push the stick forward when the plane is behaving badly at 5 ft. off the runway