egens

Let me share my experience. I bought a Red Hawk 3 channel from LHS. After charging the battery for about 12 hours using the AC charger, I went to my Golf club to fly. Unfortunately we were about to get hit by a Thunderstorm. The wind was about 10MPH. The instruction did tell me not to fly in a wind more than 5MPH. But I was too impatience to wait for couple of days to fly again. So I said "Screw it" and hand launch the plane. Well the wind was 10MPH below 20 feet but above that it was about 20MPH. It got extremely hard to handle the plane. I was letting the plane glide most of the time to bring it back to the ground but it did not work. Suddenly there was a gust of about 30-40MPH wind and boooooom the plane flipped and hit the green of the golf course making a hole size of a softball. The wing and the v tail were completely broken. Fortunately, nothing else was damaged. So two things i learned from this.

1. Never fly a trainer in wind above 5MPH no matter what.
2. Golf green are hard surface.

Going to LHS tomorrow to get the wings. G night.

jooNorway

At least you have experienced one thing a lot of pilots seems to ignore: the windstrenght at the ground is lower than in the height! This is normal, and all professional pilots know this. Also myself who have done some skydiving and fly paraglider I know how important this coeffisient is when I prepare for landing. Hanging above the landing area at 300 meters tell me something about where to aim when doing the final approach, and I know the landingspot will be further against the wind if I don`t calculate there is less wind close to the ground

Patience is not easy when you have a new toy ready to fly!