Dave,

Oh man, I am very sorry to hear about this. I followed your build thread with great interest. [] Please do not be so hard on yourself. I do not do kits so I cannot relate well to the feeling of taking a bunch of sticks and creating a plane. I do customize ARF's so I feel bad when I plant one. Thank god in over 800 flights over the last 1.5 yrs I have only planted 3 of them but each one hurt to a degree.

I, myself, was pretty confident that you would be fine on that plane. I will never argue the fact of flying a more docile trainer like the LT-40 is better but in your case I really did not see where it was going to matter and I still stand on that belief.

Now I also agree that your instructor should have not let you do the more advanced maneuvers. He should have taken control sooner. May I suggest that the next time you and the instructor work out a communication strategy so that you both understand who is doing what and when, just like you do in full scale in either training or even if you have a first officer next to you. It may sound silly to those that have never taken full scale lessons or have flown full scale commercially, but communication is key.

You did find out very quickly that full scale does NOT carry over to RC in respect to handling the plane as orientation becomes a problem, fast. I have not doubt about your full scale skills and I have a gut instinct about you being able to pickup on RC fairly quickly.

The really cool thing is you recognize what went wrong and already have a plan to help reduce the risk of that happening again. That is a true sign of a good pilot as you already know.

Tom Skerrit in Top Gun said it best. "A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what happened so that he can apply what he has learned". And that you just did. [sm=thumbup.gif]

Again, I am sorry this happened, please keep us informed of your progress. Your posts make for great reading.