ORIGINAL: Nathan King
Pick a point, and work around the plane from there. Don't go "Engine, tail, wings, etc", but rather start at, say, the left wing. Check the wing, the aileron servo, the aileron...then start moving to the back of the plane...check the left side of the fuse for cracks/etc, work toward the left stabilizer, left elevator half, rudder and vert stab, etc. Basically, think of it as a clock...start at an "hour" of your choosing, and then work your way around in a circle...
Sage advice, sir. This is what full scale pilots do, and also happens to be exactly how I preflight my models.
Here's a page from the checklist of a full scale aircraft. Whenever I fly the Bonanza, I perform the walkaround check. It starts in the cockpit and ends at the trailing edge of the right wing:
Good stuff, Nathan. And indeed, the similarities to full scale were, obviously, intentional.
It doesn't change much from one plane to the next, ime. Obviously WHAT gets checked might changed, but the idea of "start at X, work AROUND the airplane back to X" seems to be fairly consistent for any full scale I've flown. I suspect there's a fairly simple reason for that : it works for the most people the largest amount of the time.
So yeah, why not apply it to our models?
Like i say...I don't think it's the "only" way to pre-flight a model...or even a fullscale. It just happens to be a proven and effective one.
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Must agree with j.duncker's point about "kick the tires and light the fires" too. Ok, I'll admit...I don't do an obsessive preflight every time I toss a $100 .40-sized ARF I've had for 3 years in the air. SHOULD I? Yeah, probably...it's still potentially dangerous, and there's no reason to risk a perfectly good airplane (even a beater bird) out of sheer laziness. But hey...we do it.
I've learned two lessons from doing it however :
Lesson one : A VAST majority of airplanes I've lost would still be in my hangar if I'd done thorough pre-flights. Loose bolts, failed glue joints, cracked structural components, loose connections, low batteries...the works.
Lesson two : No preflight in the world will magically give correct rudder in a knife edge despite your fingers' insistence on driving it into the ground.
