Some pics from today. 3 H9 1.50 P-51's present. Mine, Rips, and another club flyer's "Old Crow"
Mine was the first to take flight. I didnt use the gyro though. It wasnt responding properly so need to make some adjustments and didnt want to do a "field fix" sicne it would require taking the canopy off, yada yada yada....
Anyhow.....mine got up and seemed ok, but the rpm',s based off sound of the motor, didnt seem very high. It also appeared that the rpm's were slowly decreasing as the flight went on and a few occasions it felt like i was losing altitude. So, the motor will need to be looked at again and some tuning done yet again.
Now.....decided I should land since the RPM's seemed to be lagging. Hit the gear switch and only ONE gear came down. Uh oh!
Tried to cycle them again. Same result. So..had one gear down and prospect for landing on one main and a tail wheel didnt really look promising. I might have actually tried it, but, those there at the field suggested retracting the one gear and belly land it in the tall grassy weeds on other side of runway. Set up for approach and dropped half flaps. Circled around to bleed speed and then dropped full flaps and let it come down to about 10 feet off the deck. Then I killed the motor and let it glide till it was about 3 feet up. Hit the elevator a little to bleed remaining speed off and it briefly stalled the left wing(with a quick recovery) plopping the plane pretty much dead on its is belly. I did hear a nasty thwack sound so I assume some damage occured.
Walked over to the plane, examined it and then picked it up and didnt seee any damage off hand. YAY! I was braced for the worst actually......and had some significant damage really occured, it probably would have soured me on the plane entirely.
So, only thing now is to figure out why the one gear failed to extend. Oh and I do have to reattached the threaded portion of the Keleo exhaust back into the cylinder head port as that came out....but...the weld on the brace of the keleo muffler did NOT break. Hows that for sturdy
The "Old Crow" is electric powered by an elfite power 160 on 12s 5000mah spinning an 18x12. Needless to say, it outperformed both Rips and mine. In fact, he has it set to limit the throttle to only 75% too. It was doing absolute vertical climbs while also doing aileron rolls straight up.