Pancho
New member
We recently had a large model rocket event in the desert, and it is a fairly large rc plane event as well. We went with our Civil Air Patrol and several other squadrons. We had an Aerospace Education portion on rc planes and had a buddy box setup.
One of our squadron planes is a Sky Hawk. This plane should almost fly itself. But a fairly seasoned cadet was having problems with it. It needed a couple control horns re-glued (which should have been my first clue). I get all the control surfaces working good and I take it up. It's flying great! I try some limited acro at about 200' and am about to hand it over to a cadet when we hear "WHACK!" It looks like it hit a gust of wind hit as it got really pushed around. I pulled off the throttle immediately. the wings then start to spin on the carbon spar! But, I actually still had a bit of control of it! Then the wings just blow completely off! The plane nose dives from 200'! It breaks off the nose, but amazingly, there is no other damage except a broken prop. Since it is a pusher...the nose is an easy fix. The crash was fantastic and we got quite a lot of cheers.
But seeing that the wings blew off, I inspected the plane, and nobody had done anything to secure the wings on...they were just pressed in. So, I decide to look at the rest of the planes, and we had a big glider, the Calypso, and it was having problems...wings weren't secured either. The cadets built these planes with some supervision (not me) and nobody thought to secure the wings because they said they were fairly snug when they put them on. But after some flight time...they loosened up and started moving around.
We got it fixed fairly quickly, along with tuning up the Calypso, and they were back flying, and flying really well.
So...lesson learned is do a complete inspection before every flight, especially on planes you didn't build.
One of our squadron planes is a Sky Hawk. This plane should almost fly itself. But a fairly seasoned cadet was having problems with it. It needed a couple control horns re-glued (which should have been my first clue). I get all the control surfaces working good and I take it up. It's flying great! I try some limited acro at about 200' and am about to hand it over to a cadet when we hear "WHACK!" It looks like it hit a gust of wind hit as it got really pushed around. I pulled off the throttle immediately. the wings then start to spin on the carbon spar! But, I actually still had a bit of control of it! Then the wings just blow completely off! The plane nose dives from 200'! It breaks off the nose, but amazingly, there is no other damage except a broken prop. Since it is a pusher...the nose is an easy fix. The crash was fantastic and we got quite a lot of cheers.
But seeing that the wings blew off, I inspected the plane, and nobody had done anything to secure the wings on...they were just pressed in. So, I decide to look at the rest of the planes, and we had a big glider, the Calypso, and it was having problems...wings weren't secured either. The cadets built these planes with some supervision (not me) and nobody thought to secure the wings because they said they were fairly snug when they put them on. But after some flight time...they loosened up and started moving around.
We got it fixed fairly quickly, along with tuning up the Calypso, and they were back flying, and flying really well.
So...lesson learned is do a complete inspection before every flight, especially on planes you didn't build.