Several years ago I finally set up my first Gas plane. 80plus wingspan, 22 inch prop, kinda snuck a couple extra non-existant bucks here and there to get it together and went to fly it. With quite the positive attitude of "It's a big stick, who can't fly that" I took off in pretty heavy winds that were the norm for the whole weekend AND proceeded to fly it for 5 days straight. Not only did it fly, it flew great, handled the winds with ease. Last day of the event towards the end of the day I was flying it when someone started playing James Browns "Sex Machine" on the loud speaker. Well now I was twitching my rear end to the music and before you know it me and this other dude are doing the bump.
Then I remembered I was flying an airplane and turned to look for it just in time to see it pile in. I did NOT handle that well. Tripped on my lower lip all the way out to the crash site. Picked the stuff up while uttering some of my favorite profanity. Walked back draggin entrails and started dis-assembly while a bunch of guys were standing over me, hats in hand. Took me a while to shake it off.
Had this been an expensive kit that I'd pushed so hard to complete I might have just given up. However, it's a spad. My wings were damaged but usuable. I used my tailfeathers again and only had to rebuild the fuse. I broke a carb standoff and the prop, the PROP!!! most expensive part of the plane at 15 bucks! Anyways, I finally shook it off, rebuilt it all and was flying the snot out of it at the fall flyin WHERE I was trying to do a slow, inverted, low pass that I stopped forward movement about 25 feet up and dropped it out of the sky, ruining another fuselage AND PROP DANGIT!!!! The next spring I was flying it, rebuilt again, and when the engine flamed out at an odd place I landed it way off the north end of the field. After I flaired and it stopped rolling IT FELL 10 more feet! Oops, That cost me a spar and a nice crease under the landing gear, saved the prop! Haven't crashed it yet this year. Ugly as heck the ground is rejecting it. But the first time is the only time I didn't handle it well. I had been under a bunch of stress including the build stress then was rewarded by WAY too much good times, fun, food, and 5 days of flying till you can't stand fun only to have it turned right from absolute joy (ok, sounds weird when you consider I was dancing the bump with another dude) to utter, pitiful sorrow. The rest of the times I did manage to think it was quite funny. Oh, this year at the event I was about 50 feet up, inverted and ran out of gas. That turns out to be just enough time to get the nose down, speed up and pull out around 10 feet for a glide to landing WAY out there. No damage.
Now, I did strangle a plane this year but the engine was giving me problems and after fiddling with it for an hour I knew I needed to take the firewall off to get at the problem WHICH meant the plane was going to fall apart, it was kinda worn out. But that LOOKED bad even though I had a fuse back home ready to swap gear and wing to, just didn't get to it in time. Worked great two weeks ago when I got to try and fly it again.
You can SAY "if you can't afford it" but there's more then money invovled here. There's a deep attachment to some planes and it can really hurt to lose the sum of your efforts. Sometimes it can mean the end of your flying for quite some time. This is why ARF Trainers really helped the hobby. People didn't have to spend 40 hours building a plane, becoming attached to it and then they couldn't concentrate on flying they were so worried about "Their Baby". ARFS made that monitary only and now and AXN will do what balsa ARF's would for a fraction of the cost. Shoot, no attachment whatsover. till you get up to one of those 1/3 scale 3D machines.
Or my SPAD USS, my Baby, sniff.