maukaonyx and nappy99,

So far the Yak's covering and decals are holding up well but like many ARF's I kind of expect it will start lifting sooner or later. I've had some planes that peel on the first flight. The covering was very well shrunken when I received the plane but acquired a few small wrinkles on the fuselage after setting in the hot sun. They shrank out easily with a covering iron. Some how I nearly got a hole poked in a wing and it left a rippled indentation but the covering iron made it disappear completely.

The structure is lightweight and an intricate assemblage of interlocking parts that hold together even if a glue joint fails. An example of this was discovered when a nosey friend wiggled my control surfaces to see how much play there was in my servos and linkages. There was some excessive play in the elevator servo and I found that the servo tray glue joint had failed (probably due to the jack hammering and shaking by my problematic YS. The engine is OK now.) Anyway, there was no way the servo tray could have come out without breaking the fuselage.


And yes, it does fly very well and it tracks straight and all surfaces, wing, stab, tail are straight (not warped). It is a 3D airplane and it does that very well. It flies on its side very well, meaning it can do slow knife-edges without wobbling around and can do consecutive knife-edge loops. It is easy to hover. I can only vouch for the quality of the model in my possession but I would be willing to buy another one, especially at the price if $199.

The one weakness that I've found in this model is that the aluminum wing tube will bend under the high stresses of 3D flying. I haven't had anymore bending since I hammered a 12" piece of Oak dowel from Home Depot into the 22.5" aluminum tube. Nitro Planes has no plans to replace the aluminum tube in the ARF kit with a carbon fiber tube but they offered to send me a new aluminum tube and for some reason I accepted it. What was the point? Probably because it was free I couldn't help myself.

If you have a carbon fiber tube of that same small diameter you could try it but if it should break there will be no second chance.

The recommended engines for this 69" Yak 54 are the YS 1.10S and the OS 120AX and they both do a great job. Anything bigger would be a waste.

By the way, thanks for having confidence in my evaluations of the model. I’ll present the facts as accurately as I can.