Guess what? I crashed my glider
. I was doing a performance test with my dad that morning. I normally put a few clicks of down trim when I'm near the ground to make sure I don't stall, but this time I didn't. I was low and slow, which didn't leave me with much control authority and overall safety. A cross wind gust came and banked me hard to the left, so I put in full right rudder, throttled up, and pulled up. That ended up with the glider being in a tight, steeply banked turn (my rudder input did nothing) about 2m off the ground, for at least a full 360 degree turn, and then it hit. the wingtip hit first, then the nose swung into the ground. There is some wing damage on the left outer panel and the firewall is stuffed, but it could have been a lot worse. For anyone who is interested, we measured the altitude using two stakes, a string, a tape measure, and trigonometry. Then we timed how long I could glide before I needed to throttle up. From that we figured out the rate of sink and the glide slope (L/D). The calculated rate of sink was about 0.65 m/sec, or 2.13 ft/sec. I was flying FPV to help me fly accurately at minimum sink, but there definitely would have been a drag contribution from the FPV gear (see photo), so the actual performance should be a bit better. I seem to remember the cruising speed being roughly 30km/h from a GPS test I did, which would put the glide slope or L/D at almost 13:1 with the FPV gear. Not bad for my second ever balsa design!
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