The plane came in around 10 lbs with a full interior and an on-board glow driver which yielded about a 24oz/sq. ft. Having heard the horror stories on heavy Staggerwing models I asked our club's best flier to take the first flight. After a thorough final check we fired up the Saito .91 and pretended to set the idle while nerves settled, then my friend Paul Berger taxied it out and made a pretty take off with a slight cross wind. After a few trimming passes he retracted the gear and made a low flyby at 2/3 throttle.

The plane handled very well at all flight speeds, but seemed to groove best at 2/3 throttle. Some gentle loops and barrel rolls later he commented that the plane rolls axially with little or no correction and flies inverted with just a trace of down elevator. Since I plan to fly it in a fairly scale manner (and in deference to the very thin wings and 'stick' construction) he didn't try any snaps or radical maneuvers. The top wing attachment structure does not look too strong, but was certainly up to the task. He made a couple of low speed passes and noted that it began to get squirrelly and quickly drop a wing if you slow down too much. - It wanted to drop out of the air. Paul then set 30 degrees of flaps and noted that we had too much down elevator mixed in, but unlike some models, flaps really help the Staggerwing. He was able to slow down quite a bit more with flaps before she headed for China. For the first landing he retracted the flaps and set his pattern with a slight cross wind. As she crossed over the end of the runway about 30 feet up it slowed down too much without the flaps and snapped but Paul managed to recover into a main wheels landing.

We refueled and adjusted the flap to elevator mix to 4% negative elevator at full flaps, then took it up again. Now we took time to just enjoy the sight of that big red bird with the elliptical stagger wings. She tracked through anything asked of it at 1/2 to 2/3 throttle and flew in a very scale manner for (relatively) slow fly-bys. The second landing was s-w-e-e-t. Flaps down and with no wing walking she came over the runway and made a nice wheels landing then taxied back to us.

Final thoughts are that it is a worthwhile project that flies very well as long as you remember to keep the landing speed up and use flaps. Take offs and flight are on par with most aerobatic bipes. It's not a plane for low time pilots, then again it's no monster. I plan to take it up next weekend and enjoy the Staggerwing.