Soooo.... It's amazing what you can learn through experience... Bitter, painful experience...

Things like although the Twist flies great in the wind, there is a limit beyond which you should not go. I now know what that limit is... and so does my Twist!

On Sunday I was flying in a relatively strong 90 degree cross wind that was blowing consistently at around 12 mph and gusting up to as much as 20.

I had flown my Twist, Extra and Ultra Stick for about 3 tanks of gas each and was just deciding that it was time to go home because the wind was really not that much fun anymore. I mean, how many cross wind landings can you do before you get tired of it.

Anyhow, the other two were empty and packed up in the car and I decided that instead of emptying the Twist (which had about 3/4 of a tank of gas in it), I'd fill it up and go again. I flew around for about 15 minutes and my timer on my radio bleeped to indicate that I had a minute left in the tank so I decided it was time to land.

I came in over the field and about 4 feet off the deck when the wind picked up straight at the side of the plane and blew it to the far side of the field. So I gave it some more left rudder and dipped the wing slightly to get it back on track. As I did, the wind gusted and blew the wing down and the wing tip caught the deck and she cartwheeled.

Fortunately I was not flying very fast so it was not a particularly violent landing. Looking at it from where I was at the pilot station, she looked okay. So I walked out and picked her up to find that the force of the impact had pushed the wing into the fuse just behind the canopy several of the glue joints in the fuse had broken.

So she is now on my workbench awaiting the copious time that I don't have right now to fix her. I'll probably get to her on Friday night. It probably won't take more than an hour or two to fix, but she's officially had her first bang.

That's not bad considering she has already had more than a gallon of gas through the engine.