Flight report:
There was no flight.
After Carl had a few botched take-off attempts with the P-40, and my botched attempt to fly the Dauntless, I decided that the only way she would fly was to take off and land on the grass. While there were ruts from farming growth lengthwise with the runway, there were a significant amounts of bumps in the grass from the knobby tires of the harvesting tractor. These caused my tail gear to break at a spot where they broke before. With the tail gear collapsed, I have no tension on the pull-pull wires to steer. Not safe and there was no way I was going to risk others, or the airplane, just to have her fly at one event.
So, she sat on display and I still had great conversations with folks. On my way back from my flight attempt I did pass by the Horizon tent. They were super impressed with the build and shot some video for their use. HH has every intention to continue the Top Flite brand. There are complications to that, as they explained, causing sourcing issues. The tooling, moulds, and dies used for these kits do wear and it seems that Hobbico did not pay up to get new ones made to continue to supply parts and kits. Some suppliers got burned by Hobbico and are now asking Horizon to pay the Hobbico bill before they start producing parts for Horizon... and Horizon is happy to pay for the new parts! So, the long-run of this story and strong takeaway that I got was that there will continue to be support for the Top Flite brand but it will take some TIME for things to settle down and get into the groove. Another note is that according to the marketing guys there, kits are just not selling anymore. The likelihood of getting new kits made is very low due to just doing business. ARFs sell and in order to make money, a company needs to sell product. If a product is not selling, they will not make it. I get that.
My big takeaway here is that my mind is slowly being shifted. I love kit building. HOWEVER, there can be a LOT of work done to ARF-bash a build and it be just as much work as a kit build with exceptional results. I used to frown upon ARF-bash builds but if done right, I can start to see that you can approach a build with the same fervor as a kit build. Thoughts from others would be welcome to be discussed in this space.