Just as a follow-up, after being involved in a bunch of other RC projects, I finally got my Kyosho Me-109 up in the air today. Here's the flight report -- such as it is. First I'll start with the end of the flight. After kicking around the sky a bit I went vertical then as I inverted the model the engine stopped. This is where I really needed to think quickly about how to set up for a deadstick in the few seconds when I still had some airspeed. As it was, I thought slowly and just turned it around towards the field and was too high to make a landing and was clearly going to go long on a field you can't really go long on (trees at the end) so I tried to pull it around and it just dropped out of the sky from about 15-20 feet up.

Result: everything forward of the wing LE was torn out (it landed right on its nose). The rest of the model was completely intact. Engine and radio are fine. But I'll need to rebuild the nose.

Anyway, let's forget about that part and get back to the take-off and flying. Thanks to some warning from folks here I was prepared for the model to want to nose over on take-off and indeed it starts to tip forward almost as soon as you start your run. So it's necessary to feed in a little up elevator as you speed up. BTW, I found the PT-19 on RealFlight (2.0) to be very nice practice for this as the virtual model also wants to nose over.

It model tracked well but took off very quickly (in about 15 feel) so you have to be ready for that. The good news is that it flew very easily -- in fact not much differently than the low-wing version of the Kyosho Calmato. But you could feel that it's a bit heavier. In about 5 minutes of tooling around the sky, I found that that I didn't have to make any trim adjustments and that it seemed to be a stable flyer.

And it was at this point that I decided to try some more advanced moves -- at which point the the engine died. This model doesn't glide particularly well so with the power gone it started coming down fast. Not like a rock or anything but it was clear that there wasn't going to be a lot of time. Had I only turned outbound rather than inbound the moment it went deadstick I probably would have been able to set up for a proper landing.

Oh well. It was fun to fly it for the few minutes I did. Not sure what I'll do about it now. I absolutely hate spending any building time repairing ARFs so I'm awfully tempted just to by another swap out parts.