TCrafty

You are NOT going to believe this! Went out today to try and find it and right before we go out in the sticks (I mean STICKS folks) there's another guy that puts one straight down into the forest, a big old cap with a MOKI 210 ! straight down and all we heard was the thud, with an echo. Seems he lost the ailerons. Story on that later. Anyways, we just doubled up the size of the group going into the woods.

There's a gate and a road that goes through the woods, turns out that the other guys, in looking for their purple cap, came across my dad's yellow Senorita. It hit some trees and landed in the road (about 1/2 mile down the road but on the road none the less). It was pretty well shredded but we got the radio and engine back. Dad's happy.

Now, the cap. We started venturing off of the beaten path looking for it. We felt compelled to help them ESPECIALLY since they found my dad's plane. We'd have helped them anyway. We start searching through the thicket and finding wild boar rummaging sites, spiders large enough to garner my respect and various other large birds, leading us to believe that teradactyls might not be extinct. Anywho, after about an hour or so, we hear that, "Got it!" that we'd all been hoping for. Dont know what the power is on the MOKI but it would make a great post hole digger. that 20 inch prop (at least half of it) was down between 8-12 inches into the dirt. That is, after the plane got shredded blazing straight down through a group of trees. It hit about at the root of the tree and STILL had enough umph to go that deep. There wasn't much left. It took three of us to carry out all the little peices. Conversation went like this: "Where's the fuel tank... Over here! ... Pilot? Uh, lemme dig for him" Went right through the canopy!

The reason for the two field trips? Dad had been soloing for a while but that day, the wind got ahead of him and he fought the little trainer to bring it back. Each time he'd bring it around, the wind would blow it sideways and away from him. Eventually, he lost it in the trees.

the Cap-- turns out that he put hitec servos on the ailerons but he put Airtronics or JR control horns on the servos. I might be wrong on the combination but the idea was that the horns had a larger hole for the splined shaft on the servo than what the servo had. They worked well until he hit the high rates, then, when it tried to push the ailerons hard, it stripped out both horns. No ailerons anymore.

At least we got the planes back. Sorry no pictures. didn't have a camera.