I put the first flight on my firebat from the deluxe kit today, this evening actually. It was well above 90 deg and humid here in FL, so performance was going to suffer.

I'm not sure what the deal is with the canard and CG set-up, but per directions was not right. I had to add a lot more up-canard to get the thing to fly. First test toss was like throwing a lawn dart. Busted the nose off. It was a clean break, so after some 5min epoxy - I adjusted things and went again. It flew ok, but not alot of extra power, for sure. The prop came off in the middle of the flight.

With a new prop and all trimmed up I went up for a 2nd flight. It climbed better - in trim, and I was able to get a roll out of it. Hwever, I was nursing it around the sky the whole time. A turn of any usefull radius bled off all speed and lost altitude.

It seems to me that it is nose heavy, even though I balanced it per the manual. It may also need the elevons raised a little to unload the canard, as the canard is 1/4" off (TE down) from where the directions show. It wouldn't pull vertical from level flight and flare took a good bit of speed.

It is quite twitchy in roll. It doesn't have "wing-rock" but it will just pop to a bank angle randomly and often. I think this may be due to the rough mold-line on the leading edge of the foam wing.

Here's what I'm gonna do:

-Take off the 1/4 oz nose weight.
- Less pitch on the canard
- more nose-up from the elevons
- Sand down the wing and canard LE's and tape.
- pray for fall to get here ( humidity sucks)

Considering conditions, this thing isn't the unflyable dog I've read about, but it will take some tweaking.