Saturday I had the first major crash with my beloved Big Stik 60. I was flying too low and pulled up to avoid another aircraft when she stalled and went in. Didn't lawn dart her, but the firewall, landing gear and and tail section are ripped off with lots of splintering. Probably could be rebuilt if I had the time to glue every toothpick back together.

This really sucks. Guess it gives me the opportunity to look into that OMP profile I've been thinking about.

Yep, it happens to the best of us sometimes []

Get yourself something like that OMP for the rest of the summer and put the Stik away till winter sets in

If you fly, you will crash. You gotta be philosophical about it. I keep telling myself that after 30+ years in the hobby. However, I do feel your pain. I totaled my second 1/4 Fokker Dr.1 a couple of years ago due to a elevator hinge failure and it took a lot of the heart out of me. I'd worked hard on that plane, and it was very detailed. It flew great. I had a GT Fokker Dr.1 on the shelf, but had not planned to start it for another year or so. The crash left me without a large scale plane to fly, and I actually stopped flying for a while. I'm getting back into it with a Spook '96 that's about half finished. The GT Fokker will be next.

Step back, take a deep breath, and press on. Luck to you!

I have done that many times. I have told myself that to save the plane in such a circumstance you must give it down elevator, even if it is just 10 feet off the ground. It goes contrary to self preservation! Obviously there is more to it than that, I have saved my plane a few times that way.

Sorry to hear of the crash DenverJayHawk.
Your experience reminds me of another post I saw on RCU about getting the jitters. Although I haven't had a major crash in a long time I came close recently because I was trying to force a landing when I should've gone around again. Minor damage quickly repaired but easily could've been much worse. This is why I don't like to fly on Saturdays at my club field, Just too many planes in the sky. The experts are buzzing around when I'm trying to just concentrate on flying. I sometimes get so nervous my hands sweat and my thumbs want to slip off the sticks. Then I'm having to worry about running into someone's plane or them running into mine. So I've turned into a Sunday flyer - LOL - A few of us meet on Sundays and wont go up unless the person in the air is OK with it. Which at the moment I'm not. I need the whole sky to fly! LOL

Hope you got something else in the hangar.
Shaggy

It's like sking. If you're not falling down you're probably not trying new things and expanding your skills. Bummer it had to be avoiding a mid-air. I lost my beloved stik in my only mid-air. Took the wing off 200 ft up at full throttle. Itty bitty pieces (even the engine was shattered into pieces as it hit a rock!)

I look at it that if I can salvage the engine, receiver & battery and hopefully the servos (though I disassemble them to check for broken teeth in the gears) I am satisfied with my luck. Think of it as an excellent opportunity to try new airframes without needing additional storage space.

I've been flying RC since 1972 and crashing is part of the hobby. One of my first lesson was to have other radio ready airplanes to fly. Back then there were very few ARF's, Lanier, SureFlite (Foam), and She'll Fly by Hobby Shack come to mind. Because almost all aircraft were built we tended to rebuild rather than toss out. Costs to fly now days are so low you can have mutiple airplanes ready to go. Because I do a lot of testing, experimenting, and modifications to many of my aircraft, I crash quite often. Just this month I damaged a foam P-51, a High speed glider, a total wipe out of my foam Tiger Moth. If looks are not to important you can probably repair the Big Stik and make it safe to fly by over laying the splintered area with 3/4 oz. fiberglass and thin CA. For the firewall area you would use a couple of layers of fiberglass ans epoxy and recover as needed. It's a great hobby stay with it.

About a year ago I lost a Senior Telemaster in a mid-air. I was little pissed because the guy I knew like to chase other planes around, but in a large Telemaster I really was not going any where fast. He was warned in the past not to chase other planes. After that incident whenever he would fly, everyone else would land. A lot of people would remind him of the incident and I haven't seen him flying for over 9 months. I guess he quit flying.

update: After stewing and feeling sorry for myself for a couple days, I brought in all the pieces from the garage to the work bench and gave it a good looking over. I was able to salvage the horizontal and vertical stabs which is good since they were modified for a tail dragger conversion. The wing has a few cracked ribs, but nothing a little surface CA can't fix. The fuse could be rebuilt, but I just don't have it in me to fix all the splintering. I just ordered a new fuse from the LHS for $39.99. All the electronics, push rods, and engine equipment should be reusable. So this crash should cost me about $40 from the wallet which isn't bad at all. The biggest issue is time. I just don't have a lot of time to build, but I'll get around to it a little bit at a time.

Good to here you can save it. A lot of RCers won't even try to decide if one can be rebuilt until the shock wears off. Sticks, thankfully, are quite easy to repair do to their simple design.
I treed my favorite knock around plane a while back. It was a well modified LT 40. I just rebuilt the wing (3rd time) and saved the tail feathers because my son and I built them in a different shape. I put them on a salvaged fuse from another LT 40 and am recovering now.

Any how its hard to really wipe out a stick. It just comes down to "Do ya wanna fix it "[8D]

Think of it as a character-building exercise.
You'll be a stronger man when you've finished.

Sometimes, not even the best of us.[X(][X(][X(]