I added a paddle pop stick under the wing, and tried flying it again.
I decided to do some more troubleshooting with the electronics by bringing it to the baseball field to have a nice open space in case anything went wrong. I did a whole bunch of taxi runs up and down the basepath, and it seemed to be working perfectly. And since I was already at the field, I chose to give it a little test flight since the electronics were working pretty well. It still didn't fly great, so I landed it pretty quickly before anything bad happened.
I then decided to remove the small amount of uptrim I had on the elevator. I took off again, and the difference was immense. It now did not fly with a nose up attitude at all, in fact it seemed just about right. Then I got a little disoriented, and landed to plane to avoid a crash. I decided to try one more flight, and this time right before I took off, the motor began to make a short beep about every second. I wasn't sure what this was, but it stopped after about 20 beeps or so. I probably should have seen this as a warning, but I didn't, and tried to take off anyways. This time, before it even left the ground, the motor speed dropped significantly.(I I had to guess, I'd say I was about at 70% throttle, and it dropped down to about 30) I immediately cut the throttle when I realized it had slowed down, but the motor didn't stop. It kept on driving down the basepath. It wasn't going that fast, so I ran after it, picked it up, and unplugged it. I haven't tried turning it back on yet, but I certainly won't have the prop on when I do.
Having the motor randomly turn off is one thing, as long as I'm somewhat high up, I can glide it in for a reasonable landing, but having it not turn off? That does not sound fun to me. I can think of a lot of cases where that could be very bad.
Since the short frequent beeps kind of sounded like an error message, I looked up the manual for the ESC I use and I found some things that seem like possibilities for what is going wrong.
From the ESC's manual (under "protection features"):
"Over-heat protection: When the temperature of the ESC is over about 110 Celsius degrees, the ESC will reduce the output power:
^This seems possible, but I think if it had become that hot, I would have been able to smell it. It also does not explain why I was unable to stop the motor.
This excerpt from the manual seems more likely:
"Throttle signal loss protection: The ESC will reduce the output power if throttle signal is lost for 1 second, further loss for 2 seconds will cause the output to be cut-off completely"
^This one does seem a lot more likely, but the throttle was certainly stuck for more than two seconds, so I'm not sure why it didn't stop the motor after the two seconds went by. Also, why would I have lost signal? I was <20' away from the plane when it happened, and I had recently done a range test, and it worked fine at the 400' that I tested it at. The radio system I'm using is the fs-i6.
Also, the ESC's manual does have a section on calibrating, I'll try to do it, but it looks pretty complicated.
Here's the link to the instruction manual if you want to take a look at it:
https://www.valuehobby.com//media/wy...PDF/GFORCE.pdf