Well fellas,

The maiden flight was performed last night with mixed results. The Modeltech
P-51D is a real sweetheart. Ground handling was a little dicey on the grass field,
even with the retracts angled forward about 15 degrees. I had to be very slow
on the throttle-up, but after the tailwheel came up, the take-off was quite like any
other tail dragger. She performed beautifully in the air, flying very stable and
predictably. Fly-bys were awesome, although they weren't quite as fast as I had
hoped. There are still a number of things I can still do to boost the top speed
though. Stall-tests revealed no tendency for tip-stall, and the airplane can fly
very slow with flaps extended. I spent a lot of time worrying about my first
warbird flight, but it was really quite easy to fly this plane.

The landing approach went quite well until I chopped the throttle prematurely.
I made an error in my depth-perception to where the plane was over the runway.
At one end of my flying field, the grass suddenly ramps up about 3' from the
level surface. I thought the plane was drifting just over this plateau area when
I cut throttle, estmating the wheels were about 6 inches above the grass.
In fact, the plane was not above this hill yet, and to my very unpleasant suprise,
the plane dropped a whole 3 feet, collapsing the left strut. It was a real bummer
of an ending to an otherwise incredibly successful flight. Fortunately, the damage
is quite minimal and it should be easy to fix. The real shame was that I couldn't
get more flights in before this happened. Just the one. The airplane really slowed
down nicely for the landing approach, and I know that I would have aced the
landing if the confusion over this hill didn't complicate things. I'm certainly not
going to touch down in that area of the field again. I'll go around for another
approach. Another lesson learned the hard way, I guess.

All-in-all, I feel quite good about the outcome of the maiden flight. This is the first
warbird that I have built and flown, and things could have gone much worse.

By some incredible luck, an ameteur photographer happened to stop by the field
(he's a club member) and wanted to photograph my aircraft in flight to try his new
digital SLR camera! The photographs are spectacular, so I've posted alot of them.

Note: I flew with the CG at about 4.25" back from the wing centerline LE.
The aircraft was plenty docile in the air with this setting, so I'm going to slowly
move it backwards to improve ground handling on my grass field. I would say
that 4.25" is a safe place to start with this model.