Mike,

Glad you had some success with the Z. Don't get discouraged. The gear is very long on a scale Z and it causes most of the landing problems. The best advice I can give you is to keep the grass short and only fly it on windy days. If you decide to try the plane on pavement, put a small tailwheel on it or you'll get into some serious ground looping.

Only flying in the wind will make a huge difference to your landings. Everything happens slower and the air will be flowing over the tail nice and fast even though your ground speed is much reduced. As you no doubt discovered, dead stick landings are quite fast. With no prop disc to slow it down it tends to come in pretty hot. I think you did very well on your first flight considering that you had no chance to experiment with stall tests and slow flight.

BTW, there is a lowering kit available that cuts 1" out the planes height and it does improve the landings at a small cost to scale accuracy.

Adrian