RCU Forums - Osiris 2m Flight

So, this weekend I drove out to the Arizona Electric Festival to meet up with Andrew to fly his prototype Osiris 2m airplane.

Specs:
Motor - Hacker A60-7s
Prop - Falcon v2 (35 grams!)
ESC - Castle Ice HV-80v2 I think
Battery - TP 65C 5000s
RTF weight - 4950g, and Andrew is sure they can take another 4-5 OUNCES out of the airframe when it goes to production

First off.. it doesn't show in the pictures due to lack of relative scale, but the airplane is BIG. 15" from the bottom of the fuse to the top of the canopy. The vertical fin/rudder is 17" tall. I saw his Nuance in the trailer and they're pretty close to the same size fuse. My flights were with his brand new wings with adjustments to help lessen roll mixing. It still had some adverse roll with rudder, but Andrew thinks he knows the mod needed and it'll go to production soon.

Keeping in mind that Andrew sets his airplanes up very different than I would, he ran over the conditions he had setup, and I took off. Wind was blowing about 12-15mph with a quartering crosswind blowing in more than down the runway. I flew a couple trim passes and gave P-13 a try. Right away, I noticed that even though it has a LOT of side area, it didn't take much work to hold the baseline where I wanted it. It's also a very constant speed airplane. Most notably on long downlines, you don't get a feeling of slingshotting out of the radius on the bottom of things. This with with the brake OFF as well, but I didn't think to try it with the braking on unfortunately. Headed uphill, the A60 pulls the airplane fine, which will be a GREAT choice for the budget conscious (like me). I'd love to say I flew P-13 with ease, but alas, no.. cause my thumbs are sorely out of practice, but right away I could tell the airplane was more than capable of anything I could throw at it including the integrated rolling loops, eights, etc. The knife-edge loop w/1 roll across the top was handled easily as well. The airplane has a LOT of rudder authority but doesn't feel 'wiggly' at all. By far the thing that sticks out in my mind the most is the way the airplane rolls. The fuse just doesn't seem to change attitude through rolls at all, and it's very easy to keep everything on line. The only thing I really screwed up badly was the spin, since if you don't get out of most of the elevator once the stall breaks, it will flatten out in a hurry. It'll drop out where you want it pretty easily, but it's ugly as hell when it flattens out. Snaps are GREAT! I've seen a lot of airplanes that unless you cheat the hell out of it, the snap exits wiggle a bit. Not this airplane. Snaps come out very 'quiet', which I think is a result of the really big vertical fin/rudder ensuring great yaw stability.

Basically, you can chalk this up to yet another low-cost entry into F3A once it shows up later this year. There are still a couple tweaks Andrew is going to make, such as moving the wing and stab back 1" to help with balance issues (we had the batteries up against the firewall to balance it, and the change in dihedral to fix the roll coupling.