ORIGINAL: opjose
Stang said it well...
I helped a fellow club member with his brand new O.S. 91 equipped Seagull Cub.
I helped him go over it and maidened it and trimmed it out for him.
After landing he made some adjustments and he asked me to get the plane back up in the air again as he was nervous... ( he's a decent enough flyer ).
I did one lap of the airfield with this plane at 1/4 throttle ( it has GOBS of power with a .91 engine. ).
All of a sudden I lost complete control. However the airplane kept flying slow stable circles.
Unfortunately a stiff breeze was blowing that day, so the plane would climb on every circuit and move further out.
After 12 minutes we could no longer see the plane even with binoculars... it was up in the clouds. 1-2 minutes later we could not hear the plane at all.
My friend went home upset.
About 45 minutes later a truck pulled up with three people dressed in business suits and with something bright and yellow in the bed of the truck.
At first I though they were attorneys looking for someone to sue.
It turned out that they had seen the plane make a graceful landing on the side of a major interstate highway 14 miles away. They told me that it landed so gently they assumed that someone nearby was controlling it.
They knew about our airfield, so they brought it over looking for the owner.
I called my friend and told him that his ''miracle plane'' had been found.
There was not the slightest scratch or bit of damage to it. It was just completely out of fuel.
He found he had not put the retention clip back on for the RX so it had lost power completely.
This is one stable plane when it is properly trimmed out!
That's amazing.
A few years ago, I was flying my Little Something Extra electric conversion on 72 MHz. I had been flying 2.4GHz all day and when it finally came to flying the LSE, I forgot to raise the antenna... it looked up to me (as I was used to looking at the stub 2.4GHz antenna.. duh.. ). Well, I got it up and started an orbit. But, at one point in the very first orbit, it was headed directly away from me toward the woods at the opposite end of the field. I could not do much with it.. it would not respond. It did manage to pull the throttle to idle but it kept going straight out away from me. Shortly, it was over the trees and gone.
As frustrated as I was, I walked to the opposite end of the field where I thought it had gone in over the trees and started walking in to the woods. A couple of hundred yards in, there it was, sitting on the ground, right side up, with a broken prop. That's all. Just a broken prop.
I gathered it up and went back to the flight line and completely checked it out, including a range check and total control check. I put in a new battery pack and, this time, with the antenna raised, I flew it for about 10 minutes. Amazing.... or should I say lucky!!!
CGr.