Yes Barry, maybe we need a system that is on for 5 seconds and off for 5 seconds and so on! YEE-HAW!!!

And I do dearly love my UCDEP! I love the fact that I can fly it right out behind my house. I don't think I would fly glow there. At $60 it's a great plane. No fuel! No Starting/tuning/cleaning! With a big 3500 or 4000 mAh you could fly for 30 minutes if you were conservative in flight. The best part about it is that it weighs a full pound-plus fully loaded so un-like most foamies you can fly it in your average low gust breeze. As a matter of fact I like flying in a little wind, like 3-5 mph with gusts to 7 or 8. When you turn it into the wind it just sits there. I love doing crosswind zig zags! In the zero breeze situation, where the Foamtana type, Depron foamies are happiest, this one turns into a great big flying dog toy! This plane loves a little breeze! I am running the Himax 2025-3200 geared brushless (3200Kv), a GWS 4 channel micro reciever and a 1350 mAh Thunder Power LiPo. It turns an 11x4.7 APC prop (yes 11!!!) The bad thing about this plane is that it is fairly soft. Even though a bad landing or a lack of good judgment won't necessarily total the plane, expect to have some hot glue in your arsenal! Some areas of the plane are very thin and don't hold up to much. They should have used Depron instead of this stuff they call "FlightFlex". This stuff looks like a thin (1/4" ) sheet of foam carpet padding! It's a bunch of little wads of the foam fused together and sliced thin. I have added a little hot glue since I bought mine but I fly the &$@% out of it so it's no surprise, tears in the foam happen. I have a brand new one still in the box that I scored in a local hobby shop close-out sale. I also bought a Shock Flyer complete kit that had an extra fuse and tail set included. At $32 for the UCDEP and $28 for the Shock I was delighted. They were the last two R/C planes ever sold at Wing's N Things in Tulsa, Ok. I cleaned them out! I don't know when I will ever get the new one out, I might just hold onto it for a while, unless the worst happens!

Like the close call I had two weeks ago, when my flying field was in use and I went to an unknown spot just to get some stick time. It was a deserted school that was surrounded by cattle grazing pasture land. As my UCDEP was flying well I let it get a bit away from me and a bit too low for comfort. I started to correct and bring her back when all hell broke loose and it went down just over a rise where I couldn't see from about 30 feet in a flat orientation. It was as if some one had turned on another transmitter on the same channel. I had enough time to kill the motor. As I headed for the barbed wire fence I would have to jump over and saw that there was tallgrass where the plane went down and I was relieved. As I continued walking (1/8 mile?) up to the ridge i then saw the cow pond! When I got there my UCDEP was now a UCDEPUW! It was floating perfectly on top of the water about 2 yards out, just enough that I couldn't reach it with anything. I thought, "Hmmm, propellers work in water don't they?" and throttled up. The prop flipped over a couple of times and the plane went the opposite direction than I expected. Then I tried to "swim" it to me by using the rudder as a flipper. No luck. I ended up shedding my shoes and socks and waded out into the silty, muddy bottomed pond. I had to remove a good amount of slime algae from the plane and it still has a slight green tinge in areas! There were no cows in the field, thank God!

I got a box today with all my servo lead extensions, Woo-hoo! One more step done on the UCD46! And I put a sandjob on the 4* fuse to prep it for covering. My son arrives back from Scout camp Saturday. At least I hope so! This is his first ever trip away from home by himself. Another kid might come home in his place! We'll just have to see. I just hope he's as good as the last one we had! Maybe I can give him a lesson in covering when he gets home. On his new (old) Four Star 40! I'll give him my old JR 431EX to go with it.

Bye now,
Blisster