Just reporting back on my frst self teaching outing.

I took my new Ripmax 40 Trainer to some nearby sands where it is safe to fly. It is about 5 miles across the sand and I used a fail safe to cut throttle just incase of any problems.

I have never flown before but am a very competent computer game player, especially good at flight simulators, and games requiring steadt controls, so stupidly assumed I would be a natural.

It was a cloudy day with say a 5mph breeze. I carried out all my checks and fired her up. Pointed her into the wind and throttled up. It only needed about 40 feet until is was gagging to leave the ground, and also trying to pull to one side. A bit of rudder and up elevator and she was away. The pulling to the side seemed to stop after it left the ground (not sure why). I climbed steadily and began to make clockwise laps, whilst trying to feed in some slight correctional trim. Even with exponential set up it seemed very eratic for the first few laps.

All this time I was mentally preparing for the dreaded first landing. I read all I could on this forum about landing and how you should test the stall speed high up first. I never went slow enough to stall, but slowed the plane enough for me to be confident at landing at that speed.

Well I lined the plane up into the wind, about 250 yards down wind of me and slowly eased off the throttle allowing the plane to decend slowly, but not slow enough to stall (or what I thought wasn't slow enough to stall). When the plane was about 10 feet up I really eased off the throttle and slowly applied up elevator to prepare to flare. Had to level the wings a couple of times, but seemed to be coming in okay until I pulled up to flair at about 6 feet, which I now know was too high as the plane did start coming down for landing and then nose dived at the last minute and flipped. I bust my propellor and got wet sand all over the engine and fuse. Only other damage was slight bend to front wheel strut.

Not bad I thought for my first flight. I would of flown again but had no spare prop. I will be trying my luck again this weekend. If I can get a mate to come I'll do a littel video of my erattic flying.

Still chuffed, and releived to still have some plane left.