Last week on training night, the tail feathers on my Alpha 40 started to get wiggly. I had originally assembled it per the manual, with just the screws and wing nuts. During the week, I took it apart and epoxied the vertical stab onto the horizontal with tri-stock braces, and the horizontal stab to the top of the fuselage. I figured it was now pretty solid.

Last night at training night, I took off on my second flight with my instructor (my first was very short and ended with a broken prop), and one of the spectators shouted for us to land. The whole tail was wiggling badly. I managed to land it myself, and found that the top portion of the fuselage, where I had epoxied the stabilizer, had come loose from the sides of the fuselage. This the result of a weak or non-existent glue joint in the rear of the fuse.

I peeled away enough adjacent covering to get a good grip, and put it all back together with 5 minute epoxy at the field, adding tri-stock below the horizontal stab for extra strength.

I figured that with all of this messing around, the night would not be very productive for training, but after getting the plane back into the air and landing a couple of times, my instructor switched TX's with me while in the air, pulled out the buddy cord, and walked away. I did two more takeoffs and landings on my own and got a round of applause from the peanut gallery.

It turned out to be a great night, and I only burned 3/4 of a tank of fuel in two hours, but I did manage to solo.