I forgot to mention in my previous post that I've been flying my beater Avistar for five or six years now. Mine is the old heavy covering (not Monokote). I get a lot of grief from my club members because it looks pretty ratty (covering is all cracked and taped over on the tail from oil attack and old age). But I just remind them that ugly planes don't crash. I just re-engined mine from its original O.S. FP-40, and put on an older Supertigre 45 ABC. It now has pretty much unlimited vertical.

I've never crashed it, (well sort of... keep reading) and it has held together well. The other day, during first flights with the Supertiger, for some reason I kept it upright and did not do my usual inverted low passes. Good thing, because when I did my *final* hot low pass, I rolled 90 degrees to do a bank-and-yank pylon turn, and was surprised to find there was no yank -- I had lost the elevator servo. I rolled it back upright, chopped the throttle, and it landed relatively level in the far-out rough field going pretty much full speed. I saw the plane flip up in the air and disappear, and then flip up in the air again. As I headed out to retrieve it, I expected a debris field the size of the Titanic. What I saw shocked me. There it sat on its belly, fuse was fine, wings were fine, tail was fine, and the main gear was fine. The prop was broken at the hub on both sides, and the nose gear was folded 90 degrees back. Wahoo -- no firewall or prop shaft damage!!! A new nose gear and I'll be back in business. It must have snagged on the nose gear, flipped, snagged, flipped, and then landed. It's just to old and ratty to self-destruct...