Radian Pro Crash
Day 3 Of Learning to Fly the Radian Pro- lost it over a ridge - I'm writing a blog, so all the bloody details will be over there, see my signature for the link.
One of the things I'm trying to learn is to keep the plane close to the edge of the slope I'm standing on and not let it get too far away. It will do a very tight turn, but I'm not able to achieve that all the time - need more practice.
When I lost it, I punched the throttle and it went into a loop, I saw it pop up but couldn't do anything about it. After the second loop, I shut down the throttle. It must have went nose down into the side of the next hill.
Here are the parts:
The ground was soft enough to save the spinner and motor, but all the rest of plane's momentum caused energy to push out the sides of the cockpit. I could rush it, but I want to see if I can do a nice restore job on it, working a couple of hours a day.
The construction is two molded halves, and as you can maybe see in the last picture, about 60% of the joint has separated.
I plan to cut the remaining cockpit section along the manufacturer's glue line, then use the boiling water method to see if the cockpit will return to it's original shape.
From there I'm hoping to glue it back together with Scotch 77 Spray Adhesive using the same method that the Zagi HP build uses.
Most of that is landing rash, the little plastic thing the Radian has is useless. It's the separation that is a result of this crash.
On Day 2 I had a close call:
I was on the east side of the Berkeley Marina in a 10 acre (?) field, it got too close to the water and I tried to land it. It skipped and went over the edge and disappeared. I expected to find it floating . . .