Just jumping in with my two cents...

Generally, I teach my students to take off only after they have mastered landings. It sounds like the original poster is doing landings, that part is covered.

Takeoffs are all about attitude. You want to use the rudder to keep the plane lined up on the center of the runway, the ailerons to keep the wings level, and the elevator is used not to control *climb*, but to control *pitch*. You don't care about speed at all. As you slowly advance the throttle, you are trying to hold the nose about 15 degrees high. When the plane is ready, it will lift off.

I use a different technique for tricycle gears than I do for taildraggers. With a taildragger, I taxi with full up elevator. At the start of the takeoff roll, I neutralize the elevator and wait for the tail to come up. When the pitch reaches the desired attitude for climbing, use whatever input is necessary to maintain that pitch. For a tricycle gear, I start the takeoff roll with full up elevator (I fly on a grass field, and I like to "unload" the nose gear as soon as possible). As the nose starts to come up, I release the up elevator until it's steady at the desired pitch. In either case, the airplane will gently start flying once it's got sufficient airspeed. Remember, you want to *slowly* advance the throttle so that these things don't happen too fast.

This technique works with *any* airplane, and in any weather conditions. Remember what each control is doing: Rudder to track straight down the runway, aileron to keep wings level, elevator to control pitch. Your inputs to the sticks may vary with different cross winds, but the technique does not.

Forget about P-Factor, torque, spriralling airflow, etc. These are all real phemonon, but they're just an explanation for *why* something happens. When you are at the sticks, you should really care about *what* to do, not so much why to do it. It really doesn't matter if you have to add right rudder because of P-Factor or because the airplane is badly out of trim. You just need to develop an instinct for doing it.

I've never understood why people do the race-down-the-runway-and-then-rotate-when-you-think-you-have-enough-speed technique. The reason that you see full scale planes doing this, is that many full scale planes are multi engine, and if one of the engines quits, you need to have enough airspeed for the rudder to compensate for the resulting asymmetrical thrust. This just doesn't apply to the vast majority of model airplanes, and it gets people into trouble because you're just guessing at the things. If you just concern yourself with attitude, then the airplane will tell you when it's ready to fly.

Hmmm. I guess that was probably more than two cents...

-Wade