I was out flying at our club field today when a member asked me to do the maiden flight on his Kyosho Spitfire 40. I went through all of the normal pre-flight checks and got it up in the air without incident.

Did a few aileron roles, a few passes over the runway and so on. Then I decided to do a big loop to see how it tracked. While coming out of the bottom of the Big Loop all of a sudden something came off of the plane. I could not tell what came off at the time but the plane suddenly started acting tail heavy and then headed straight for the ground.

I applied full up elevator with no luck so I decided to give it full down elevator to see if I could get it into an outside loop. Well foruntaly that manuver worked and I was able to get the plane back to a comfortable altitude and proceeded to set up for a landing.

The plane still felt tail heavy, but I was able to bring it down safely on the runway. Once the plane landed, many of our members walked up to the plane for the inspection cycle to start. Can you tell from the picture what happened?




The left horizontal stab broke off... upon closer inspection we found that the break did not occur at a glue joint.

The wood just gave way... split... broke... You would think harder wood would have been used for a structural component. This was very soft balsa.

Is this the quality Kyosho is putting into their kits now? I remember their AgWagon to be a pretty good plane... so this was a shocking situation to me.

Has anyone else seen this problem on the Kyosho Spit?

I have never seen this problem on any of my Kyosho warbirds, and I have quite a few of them. Did you hit something in flight? What about hangar rash on that stabilizer? Maybe the piece of wood used on the stabilizer got passed QA inspection.

Richard L.,

Nothing was hit in flight, and as I described a pre-flight check was conducted to verify that the plane was flight worthy. This plane was checked by several club members including myself before I took it up. There was no hangar rash detected, to me it appears to be poor quality construction materials.

I hope someone from Kyosho reads this thread and offers up some sort of support to my club member.


Rick,

I had one of these 2 years back. Flew great. Didn't experience the problem you've had although I've had a couple of other models with horizontal stab weakness. I thought the undercarriage fixing was extremely bad. Their are no real solid mount points for the undercarriage straps. One poor landing and the undercarriage wire can either get push through the underside of the wing or will rotate and the wheel will pierce the underside of the wing. I never buy planes with the undercarriage mounted on the wing anymore.