JohnB...you may be correct...I do tend to over-engineer things in my zeal for perfection. Now that I have the 401, I'll just give it a good try and see what happens.
As for our formation flying...it is largely a good luck and by golly affair. We put up anywhere from 6 to as many as 13 planes at once, in a gaggle, and after that it is just a little skill and a lot of luck that we dont meet in the air. Our r/c perceptions of pitch and roll are pretty good, but yaw is almost undetectable. I think thats why pattern and IMAC flyers will use rudder to sneak back onto their line without signaling to the judges that they went off. It is hard to detect from our grounded vantage point. We do however attempt a pair, or trio of planes taking off, and/or landing, together, and thats where I'm hoping to see some benefit from the gyro. My thought being that once my line on the runway is established, it will tend to hold the line better with the gyro...again...because yaw is more difficult to detect, and correct quickly enough, while pitch and roll are fairly obvious.
We shall see.
Thanks for all.
jim