I personally think that a fail safe should dump the plane as soon as possible. You seldom will loose control over people, pits, etc, but loss of control may end up there. If the radio isn't talking, fail save should be sticks in the corner and get it down fast. Fail save isn't going to save a plane, so give up on that idea.

We had two incidents at our field over that last couple weeks. The first was one of our guys was wringing out his Tiger 60 and waited a bit to long to pull out of a spin. We have a stock pond and an embankment then a drop of about 30 to 40 ft down to a Vineyard behind our field. His plane went down below the line of sight and then hit the roof over a big disel pump shed for the vineyards. The amount of damage to the roof was astounding. Photo below. Thinking of what the carnage might have been if it went into the pits, well it just isn't a happy though. If you have a signal loss, dump the plane as close as you can to where it's at.

The second was my Ruperts Dad just a week later. I was just doing some stuff you do on the trainer, slow figure eights and such. When I went to straighten out after a big easy turn, nothing. Absolutely nothing. We handed the TX around, turned it off, turned it on, nothing would talk to the plane which continuing on its big slow easy turn. Round and round and round it went for several minutes. The wind was causing it to drift to the left along the runway, and it was loosing about 5 to 10 ft elevation per revolution. About four of the turns took it right over the pump house that our guy hit the week before. If it had enough height, the next obsticle was the local comunity college. Luckly, it lost enough altitude to crash on the outer embankment of the pond. More than once during this event, I wished I had my shotgun with me, I wold have shot it down. I wanted that plane down on the ground, in any condition. The problem turned out to be a tab on the RX battery let loose, shutting down the power, so there was no power to the receiver. Fail save would not have made any difference in this flight as there was no power to set the plane up for a controled crash.

Setting your plane up with fail safe to try to maintain a flight, is pure foolishness in my mind. It is not going to come down damage free, and if you do happen to be so unlucky to have failsafe keep it flying you to stand there and wonder where it is finally going to come down and what, or who, it will crash into. Shut it down and force a crash to get it down.

Don