Field Report, I took S Scout to the field today and crashed it again. This is the fourth crash, you should place bets on how many crashing the Scout can take before I have to decommission it. Today's outing was the best so far, I got almost 2 minutes of air time. The Scout now have 3 full minutes of air time.
I'll start with my excuses first, I think I need a bigger field to be comfortable. The Scout is at least twice as fast as the Cub. I feel like I spend all my time turning to avoid getting near the trees. Granted, I have more space than I'm using, but I fear treeing a plane about 10X as much as crashing it. (If I tree it, I don't have parts to rebuild.) I also am afraid to get the plane real high for the same reason (the trees all around). Ok, with that out of the way.
I went out to the field, the biggest one I have available to me, at around 8:30 am. A lady and a German Shepard were playing ball. I toss up the Crash Cub and did some practice runs. The breeze was much stronger than it felt on the ground, even with a new motor the Crash Cub was struggling. At one point, I augured it into the ground about as hard as I could imagine and it still worked, out of trim, but working. I continue to practice and got about 30 minute of fly time in , the breeze was just too much for a 2 ounce plane. So I started to truck and looked around, no one around, nice day, weather forecast is not looking good for awhile and I figure, what the heck, fly or crash, I can't just go home.
Flight prep: Ok, I went through everything, full flight review yesterday. I made trim changes, based on the videos I have, and based on my experience with the Crash Cub, I added some right rudder, I changed the up elevator and made it a slight down elevator, I trimmed ailerons to a slightly to the right (as they were a little left). I used a straight edge on the control surfaces to be sure I was seeing what I thought. I also noticed that the elevator was slightly different left to right. Then I obsessed over the cg. I found Flite test has two entirely different cg numbers for the Scout, 2.25 and 2.44 inches. That's considerable, on the first flight, I was using the 2.44 spec (though I was forward of that), but switched to 2.25 for today's flight. My concern was about launch, I realize you guys can easily trim these things out in flight, I'm just trying to get the plane up and minimize variables as much as I can. I really don't need any help crashing.
The launch went great, I used less throttle and prepared myself as best I could to react to whatever was thrown at me. My plan was to prevent rapid ascent of the last 3 launches, the launch was pretty flat, got my hands to the controls and added throttle after the launch. It's almost exactly what I was hoping for. I could do nothing and be fine for awhile.
The flight: I had one problem the whole flight, I wasn't flying high enough. I was aware of it, but yet I was struggled to get the elevation I needed. The plane needed more throttle, so I could add more elevator, but I continued to try and fly at cruising speed. All my issue today were elevation related. I made mistakes but with proper elevation, it wouldn't have been a problem.
At 1 minute, I was very comfortable flying, but at 1 minute 35 seconds I decided I'd trim the elevator and took my right hand off the stick and the plane descended much quicker than I expected (I wasn't high enough to be doing this) , from that point on, i was flying way too low, making mistakes and eventually it caught up to me. Enjoy, the last 20 seconds I'm all over the place, too much aileron input, ect.
I started the flight in med rates, 85%/30% expo. During the flight I switched to low rates, 70/30. The Scout is much more sensitive than the Cub, particularly the ailerons.
Damage: broken prop (given), some shear tear out of the barbecue skewers in the fuselage, front end damage, power pod damage. Landing gear tear out. All and all, it was pretty minor. I was going replace the prop and try again, but I noticed the power pod moved all around. Anyway, it's all fixed and ready to be crashed again. Not sure when I'll get another chance, maybe Friday morning when it's cold before folks get out.