I flew the first flight with my new Seagull Spacewalker II on Saturday and I must say - the model flew off the board with nearly zero trim adjustments. It needed a little elevator but I am at this point attributing it to the heavy hub I put on the nose for the first few flights.

I've got it powered with a Magnum .61 RFS; the engine is new and still breaking in. It's a ringed engine and the ring seems to be seating nicely so far as compression is still building. It feels a little better after each tank and with an OS !QUOT!F!QUOT! plug it starting to idle down.

Back to the flight performance - I set the plane up with the recommended throws on the control surfaces and I think for a beginner those are fine but for an advanced flier they are very conservative.

For the first flight I lined up on the center of the runway and started to advance the throttle slowly; I had read that this plane had some bad ground handling traits so I was slow with the throttle and easy on the rudder inputs. The 61 RFS is pretty torqued so when the power came on the plane started to go left - gentle rudder inputs helped to straighten it out - clearly some right thrust is needed in the engine mount. It's clear that some expo on the rudder or to use the recommended throw is key in keeping this plane straight on the runway on takeoff. At about 1/3 throttle with the tail up and a little up elevator the plane started to climb out slowly. I advanced the throttle just past 50% and it continued to climb - straight and true with little effort. I flew it around the circuit a few times at various throttle settings but let me impress upon you that this is not a !QUOT!fast!QUOT! plane. It's got a lot of wing and when I added throttle it wanted to climb. I did some acrobatics at about 50% throttle and it was a pretty lazy performer - it was very scale like in it's interpretation of my inputs at the sticks. I switched the dual rates to high and started to have a little more fun with it. The engine definitely needs to right thrust as at full throttle it tends to pull it left in loops and such. The plane flew very well and so I started exploring it's stall characteristics; since I used a computer radio and it had a server on each aileron I programmed them to be flaperons and I tested those as well. The model slows down well but so far I wouldn't say it was a !QUOT!floater!QUOT! which kind of surprised me. I expected that it would float but there was no real wind on Saturday or Sunday and it came down very predictably with a little power. With flaps it slowed down a bit more (I didn't use more than 3/8!QUOT! down) and required more power.

I hit a few nice touch and goes with both three point and wheel landings - this airplane looks very nice doing touch and goes like that too I must say.

All in all the build quality of the kit was excellent and the flight performance was right on. With a Magnum .61 RFS or similar you'll have an old standby airplane for every weekend. I'm not sure more power would do a lot of good in the 4-stroke form as the added weight might hurt it too much but a 2-stroke 61 or high performance 50 would probably make for some nice vertical performance. I must say that a spacewalker almost demands a 4-stroke though; I always wanted one and now I've got one so what could be better?

That's all for now.