The 160 inch at FF West
Just to finish the story with the 160 inch, 4-plane.
We assembled the 4 planes with a view to flying during the second combat on Saturday....
And dressed her up with streamers to make her an easier target. Unfortunately, the second combat was cancelled (or at least postponed) and so we decided to throw her up anyway. In our nervousness, we did not take any video or pics so I have none to share except this one from the Flite Test Facebook page (is there any way to just insert an embed code for images from other sites, I am not sure its okay for me to use this image)
I hope that some of her flight will make it into FT video (or if any of you have video or photos to share that would be great). I can tell you that I tried to roll her and managed to survive it.
There was no way I was going to try and land her on the runway because there were too many people, so I landed out in the field which was a little on the rough side. One of the wings cracked during the landing.
One the Sunday, I returned with the three planes, one to fly as a single, and two to fly as a twin. Again no pictures of the before, but this is a picture after I put the twin up for combat with streamers on.
She was hit right smack in the middle of joined wings, ripping each half from its respective fuse.
Two new FliteFest friends, Josh from Marin and Harry from NZ - a crazy pair - convinced me that we could fix this. We removed the broken wings and hot glued the spars back in with the tailfeathers touching.
With Harry launching, this plane flew beautifully and landed cleanly. So I put her up for the last combat on Sunday, but she developed a serious roll problem and I only stayed up for 30 seconds or so before killing her.
All in all, this was a lot of fun, from four planes to two planes to one and a half planes.
Definitely doing something like this again for next year!
DamoRC