Well I'm in shock here. I have felt like I have been put through the ringer to get this plane. It all started as a Birthday gift for my son. We would build it together and then my son and I would be able to fly together at the same time. My son was very much looking forward to it. To keep a long story short here is the story on getting the Great Planes escapade.

http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_88...tm.htm#8823652

For those that don't want to read the whole story it pretty much gets summed like this. My son opened the plane for his birthday on may 5. It had 3 different holes in the covering. After waiting for a replacement it turned out Great planes had problems with there emails. So I received the plane about 4 weeks ago. Only 6 or so months late.
My son and I put it together and enjoyed doing it together. We have had great fall weather and today with a high of 9c and wind just 5km/h it was time for the maiden. I called my son's school and told them my son would not be in today, a family matter. My son was excited to get a chance to fly his plane and getting out of school for the day was icing on the cake.
Well the takeoff went perfect, lifted off and flew great. 1 click of elevator up and she flew hands off. I did a few passes to check on the trims then did a climb. With the OS 46fx the plane climbed very well. Brought her around and cut power and put her into a 45 degree dive. The plan was to bring her back down a bit and hand off to my son still fairly high. Well I never got the chance. I heard a flapping sound and looked up to see both elevator halves flapping behind the rudder. All 6 hinges had pulled out of the slots. All 6 appeared to have very little glue on them. Not a lot I could do. She went in hard and now I'm left with a engine that won't turn over, a 2.4 Futaba receiver that is in 2 pieces, 1 servo that looks okay out of 5 and a garbage bag full of balsa.

The look on my son's face will be forever etched into my head. The funny part is (you have to laugh sometimes) was that my son ended up consoling me. Here I was, a devastated 38 year old and my 11 year old son was telling me it was only a plane and that we could get another one and fly together next summer. Sometimes your kids really surprise you.

Here are some pictures, I did go through the escapade thread and I did wick some CA into the elevator joiner. I remember reading about elevator failures and that the joiner was not glued in, I also glued down the tail feathers to help with the problem. I pulled on all the surfaces but obviously not hard enough. What glue I do see looks like wood glue. The only part of the hinge with glue and splintered balsa was right at the end. The glue did not wick down into the slot.

For those of you with this plane it might be a good idea to wick some CA into all the hinges. It's possible that this failure has occurred already and I didn't read about it. I did check on Great Planes website for tech notices and read about the joiner and grabbing the canopy for starting. Nothing else.

I understand that this hobby has up's and downs and I know by next spring I'm sure I'll be gung ho to get flying but right now I'm happy to put everything away till next year. It's tough to think about all the work that went into this plane and know that no matter what we did the end result was going to be the same. The end result was predicted the day the worker put this Escapade in the box. I will email Great Planes with the pictures but I'm sure they will have another "email problem". Thanks for listening, I know it has been helpful to me to get this incident off my chest. So don't be afraid to give a good pull on those surfaces. Thanks