Well, my story is a bit lengthy here which happened 2 years ago. I bought the Kyosho Texan. Reason behind it was it was (is) the most scale looking out of any arf on the marker. Very detailed and impressive. It was a good build

I put Hobbico mechanical retracts which worked very well. I also had a ST G90 up front for power. This is where the controversy started but i will get back to that later. The plane came out tail heavy which most warbirds do due to the short moment up front. Even with the G90 up front I still had to add 1lb of lead up on the firewall.

The first flight was a simple trimming flight. The take off roll was insane. It was all over the runway. finally after it was pointed away from everyone, I just laid on it and put it up in the air.
I kept the plane around half throttle. trimmed out good and flew it around for about 10 minutes, landed and all was fine.

That was the only flight that day on it. The next morning, I took it up again and all went fine just cruisng around at half throttle getting the feel of it all. My buddy showed up about 10am and wanted to see it fly. So up it went again on flight number three. Again at around half throttle just cruisng at a good clip. I was coming back toward the runway when my friend said "that flys real nice." No sooner than he got those words out of his mouth, the wing right wing just snapped off! The plane came spiraling down onto the asphalt and blew apart.

Witnessing all this were some of the most experienced pilots around to included 3 Hobby Store owners, one of which has a great reputation nation wide!!! So I went and scraped the mess off the ground and brought it back to the table. Everybody gathered around to check it out.

Its a three piece wing. the left side and mid section was still attached to the plane. On the right side of the mid section was still the cap attached. The wing had broken away from that light ply cap. Now it was a clean break which showed liitle to no signs of any adhiesives. Also the wing joiner slot was slid out completely and not signes of gluing. (remember this is an Arf).

MY LHS guy said to bring it by the store later on an he'll return it to Great Planes. About a week later I started to follow up on it. I ended up talking with Bill Baxter "Bax." He is also here on the RCU in the Engine Support Area. We had some heated conversations and he would not send me a new plane due to the fact that "I had to much weight up front with that G90." He also failed to grasp the fact Ihad to add another 16oz on the nose to bring it in CG with everything installed per the directions. We got no where. then he wanted to just send me another AT-6 Texan. Sorry but I am not goig to make the same mistake twice and wanted a different plane.

We got nowhere after a couple days of countless phone calls. I blew him off and wnet straight to the Great Planes people and told them the story. They asked me what I wanted and said send me a Shoestring. They sent one out the next day. Now I had never been impressed by the Shoestring up to that point and had no interest in buying one but needed a new plane. To this day i would recommend it to anyone, especially over that Texan.

Putting that thing up in the air is a crap shoot just like the Rare Bear. Good luck, the choice is yours.


This picture of the plane was taken a couple minutes before that last flight