Some bad news to report.

As I warned earlier my not digging into the wings much deeper had worried me there were gremlins lurking in the structure. That seems to be the case here as I had it up this morning for its second flight and about 5 minutes of gentle maneuvers with the gear up it came out to bite me.

Straight and level downwind and suddenly the plane started a strong roll to the right. Tried to fight it but the plane rolled over completely and started an inverted flat spin from over 100' into the beans. Was able to cut the throttle before it disappeared. My initial thought on radio failure was discounted since I had throttle control and the most common fault to plague this plane were of horizontal tail compromises.

Grabbed a garbage bag and we headed out, strongly suspecting we would be collecting lots of glass and balsa bits. Holy THEEITT! Plane looked mostly intact as I approached and I was shocked at how little damage was done. The cause was apparent right away in the right wing as the wing tube had broken loose and tore partially out of the bottom skin. It appears the doubled and much stronger root rib kept it hanging on long enough and the inverted spin contributed to it at least remaining partially in place. There are some scars to the gelcoat, the front battery box where the weight was installed came partially loose and some dirt is impacted into the battery cover and top of the tail, but all told the major bits were carried out intact. To top it off, considering it fell on its roof from that height the canopy and cockpit were unscathed, with the only evidence some paint chipped from the pilots helmet. It will get a much closer examination, but another surprise was the firewall/fuselage juncture appear completely intact. From reports this was a weak area.

On closer examination all the wood the tube was built into was seriously compromised, with several of the sub ribs coming off the spar cleanly. This will live to fly again, but those wings will definitely have the rest of the bottom skins removed and a lot better structure installed. Luckily I will be able to use the intact left wing as a pattern for both sets of new ribs. At this point I am debating installing a shorter and smaller diameter secondary tube further aft, but have to look closer into the fuselage to see if there is room for that.

Some repair and reinforcement of the smushed fuse is in order. The receiver will be replaced just for comfort.

All told that inverted flat spin was a hidden benefit. If the wing had failed even slightly more the story would be much different.

I was hoping to have it ready for at least static display for a major scale event next Saturday. That will not be in the cards for a while now. With radio failure in the Harvard II a few weeks ago, (suspected overheating) and the Fox Eagle IV 60 mounted in the F-15 suffering a burnt piston the same weekend I'm now down to only one plane for scale events. This has been a systems failure season for me. Rather unusual. Up till now I have not lost any craft at all for quite a few years and those were to, let's say, exuberant flying.

Unfortunately my memory card filled and my friend was returning it to the car as this occurred. It would have made for some interesting viewing.