I built what we believe is a prototype of the Sickle for a fellow flyer. It is well constructed, wing, stab and fuse were aligned well, but incidence of the wing was off so I had to add adjusters to it to get some positive incidence in the wing, as received the wing had slight negative incidence. The nose was very strong and I actually had to remove some of the exterior nose ring material to get the C50 to fit. Nose ring mounting an outrunner would be no issue as far as strength is concerned.

The only other thing I noticed (and this was forwarded to the manufacturer) was the location of the rudder horn forced the exit holes for the rudder pull-pull to be very close to the top of the elevator servos. I suggested they raise the rudder horn location to above the stab, as received it was below the stab.

With the C50, we had to shift everything forward to get close to recommended CG. With heavier outrunners, it should be less of an issue.

Basically, I felt the plane was overbuilt and resulted in addln weight. While we would have been able to make the 5K gram limit, I felt there were areas that could have been reduced in weight to make it easy to make 5K with the C50. With some outrunners, you would have to work harder to make 5K with the prototype we built.

All in all, I felt it was built well and hopefully the manufacturer has taken our suggestions to improve the built quality.

In the first test flights I observed, the plane appeared to fly well, it presented well in the air and seemed to have potential. Unfortunately, the plane crashed shortly after the test flights I observed and trimming was not completed prior to the crash.

Woodie