Phoenix 2000

Fishbonez

Active member
Well
I think I may have purchased a good sailplane. I own a Wild Hawk but I would reckon that most true sailplanes pilots giggle and say "that aint no sailplane this is a sailplane" I originally wanted the Sonic 185 but nitroplanes took too long to get it in stock. For those who do not know I am impatient sometimes. Anyhow I saw this at HobbyKing on the 6th of May http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...dProduct=13994 and thought "why not Lets do this." So HK is slow as usual, Sonic came in while I wait DOHA, even with EMS shipping,which is not worth the extra funds I might add, she is currently in customs in good ole NYC and I hope to see her arrive soon. SHHH my wife does not know yet and I plan to tell her it is a gift to myself for my recent promotion at work . I am excited to try this one out I even purchased a satellite thinga a mobber to go with it in hopes I can go pretty high or far and not lose contact with the plane. So as I wait I began to look for other reviews on this plane and found very little. So if anyone has a Phoenix 2000 I would be interested in your thoughts. If not well, when I get my in the mail I will be sure to ramble some to give some folks my ideas on what I hope will be a fun plane.
 

lobstermash

Propaganda machine
Mentor
Keen to hear what you think, bonez. I've got a mate who's keen on one as his first post-trainer plane. I'd like to know how well it thermals
 

bmsweb

Site Moderator
Just watch out for the ESC, its worth changing it. When I got my son's Phoenix it also had two bad servos. Other that its a good model that performs well!

This is a video of the ESC failure we had . . luck to get control back again :)
 

Fishbonez

Active member
Thanks Teach it has always been my goal to make E7 before retiring and was glad I achieved it even if it was at the last minute...Surprisingly enough Mrs. Bonez was very good about it :D
 
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Fishbonez

Active member
My Humble review

Got a surprise last night from the Postman. I guess USPS.com is not always so accurate because my Phoenix 2000 arrived. The build seemed like it would be easy, yeah not so much. I did not take any pictures to show progress because I figured it would be so easy no one would care. Boy was I wrong. First of all everything came well packed in fact over packed and I can not complain about that I was just worried that I might accidentally lose something with all that packing material. After getting everything unpacked I read the manual or lack of manual. Basically it was worthless. If you dont have a little building experience you will get some with this kit. An example of the manual would be "attach tail wing." Yea I know I need to do this but with what and do I glue it or use these screws?? So my build lasted a good 4 1/2 hours. Ok enough of that. I saw that it has precut room for flap servos and all you need to do is cut the flaps out and Voilà and I just had 2 extra servos that were the correct size for this, on top of that there was enough extra hardware to make it work. This alone made up for the lack of instructions. I was actually surprised to see that the fuselage is not made of foam but plastic which I think is great and far more sturdy but I became concerned that it may be to heavy So after a lot of study of pictures I got this plane built and thought to be very nice and got excited to get her in the air. I then began to test all electronics and found I could not get the flaps to work and will have to do some research on how to get them to work with a DX6I. Decided I would have to maiden with out flaps. Checked the weather report and looked like Sunday/today would be a perfect day for a maiden but I have to get up early 5am early but will be worth it if it flies well.

So 5am comes around and grabbed my coffee and water and off to the field I went. After arrival of my flying buddy, Gary, we did a good preflight check and found that the elevator was not quite right and I needed to adjust the control horn and servos more. Got that done checked the throttle and the prop flew off. It would seem that the collete nut tends to back off while spinning. So added some thread lock to it and that seemed to fix that problem. My Pucker factor on a scale of 1-10 was about a 5 due to 1. maiden 2. lack of instructions but 3. was confident in my build and 4. My Mojo was good. Gary has a lot of experience with sailplanes and he was happy to give it a hand toss for me. She flew great required very little trim. Most trim corrections were in the up elevator. This bird cant wait to climb and climbs fast. After trim it was time to just enjoy a nice flight. The phoenix is very graceful and quite she loved being in the air and glided 90% of a 20 min flight. The hard part came when it was time to land the Phoenix flies gracefully but also gains speed rather quickly. I began to wish I had those flaps working. She came in to hot 3 times and I continued to go around for another go at it. I was worried that the prop brake would not work, because that is my luck,and worried I would break a prop, I dont have a spare. Finally I was able to get her far enough out for a nice easy glide and the prop break worked perfectly for a nice gentle glide to the ground. Belly landed perfectly.

This plane is a great sailplane in my opinion flies and glides very nice. Need to add some color to the bottom of the wing for orientation purposes. The instructions have a lot to be desired but that is probably it worst thing about this plane. I look forward to sloaping her and just enjoying some RnR flying and it loves the wind and for someone in Wyoming or Kansas or anywhere wind is a norm this plane will make you very pleased you got it.
 

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Fishbonez

Active member
Just watch out for the ESC, its worth changing it. When I got my son's Phoenix it also had two bad servos. Other that its a good model that performs well!

This is a video of the ESC failure we had . . luck to get control back again :)

As a matter of fact I saw your video while doing some homework before purchasing this plane. I am definitly keeping that in mind. Could be catastrophic at the most uncool time
 

Fishbonez

Active member
Here is a video of the maiden yea is sped up because of the lousy spyglasses. I thought I would try them out for some video but it comes out all choppy and not smooth so ignore the quality and oh by the way HI-PC spyglasses are junk dont buy them EVER
 

Fishbonez

Active member
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Ok I have a few flights under my belt with this plane and just some of the charteristics I have found so far are the CG was spot on I use a 3s 1800 mah battery but there is plenty of room for more. It does stall if you do not give it a wide birth for turns. It will turn on a dime but if it does not have some good wind it will stall and attempt tp fall out of the sky especiaclly in crosswinds. She loves to climb and will climb very fast not like a rocket but you will definitly be at altitude in no time at all. and it really does not want to leave the sky, landing can be an experience and need to give it a lot of room because she wants to glide and kick up if you try to keep the nose up and level while coming in. This plane will glide for a good while before greeting the ground.

Side note I have not experienced anythig with the ESC failure as of yet but I am definitly keeping it in mind.
 
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lobstermash

Propaganda machine
Mentor
I'd give it a little more weight in the nose. A 2200 should do the job, and will should fix the stall issue.
 

Fishbonez

Active member
ARGH

Well where to begin.

The Phoenix 2000 is officially toast. Well let me back up. First of all the Phoenix 2000 has 2 bad drawbacks. First of all the battery tray, Very weak and has to constantly be checked the balsa easily comes loose causing a possible CG problem due to it shifting either forwards or backwards. The 2nd drawback can be its stall characteristics. It does not take much for this plane to stall on any turn. This brings me to Monday evening. A big crash. The wind was blowing at maybe 18 mph with gust at about 20mph. A typical day here in Wyoming. However when Fishbonez decides to go flying in windy conditions it no longer becomes a typical day in Wyoming. I was a bit apprehensive taking my Phoenix 2000 up in the wind because I had had a rough couple of days repairing her but one of the reasons I purchased a sailplane was to enjoy the wind. Today was not that day. While in flight I made a mistake not sure what mistake that was but it caused the plane to stall and it came down like a rocket at approximately 60 mph and slammed into some playground equipment, making a huge plume of foam, luckily no kids there, but the couple sitting on the bench well lets just say they are now ready for the Olympic high jump. Scared the pants off them. Glad they were not hit or hurt. The phoenix well did not fare so well. She is repairable but will definitely take some toothpicks, glue and a lot of heart to get her back up. After several pain staking hours of repair. She was ready for another go and today was the day. As usual she took off right out of my hand and climbed to height fast. That was the best I can report because suddenly she began to turn right and fly in circles with no response to left. Possibly a sticking servo. I tried to give it some rudder but no response suddenly it stalled and came rushing down. Learning from my last mistake I quickly gave it some gas and up elevator. Motor kicked on but no response to the elevator. Then Wham right into some pine trees. Ripping the wings and tail feathers off. Wing and tail feathers were left high a top of a tree and the fuse log stuck in the ground nose down in the mud. Broken prop. Tried recovering the wing with numerous tactics but she was stuck. Many other parts were found spread through out the crash site. I recovered all that I could find but was going to have to wait until the wind began to blow to recover the wing and tail feathers. Few hours later the wind kicked up and I went to recover. However the wing had separated from the carbon spar and huge chunks of foam were missing from both sides of the wing. Some were still showered through out the pine tree. So all in all she is toast. Even if I were to fix her up it would require a lot of replacement foam to get the wings back to a usable condition and to mount to the fuselage. Now the question is this do I purchase a spare set of wings and tail feathers? A good idea however the cost of the wings and tail feather is just about 10 dollars shy of a new P2k. Do I try another sail plane? This is possible but I don’t like to give up on any plane I purchase. So I am not sure which way to go.
 

bmsweb

Site Moderator
I don't have time for a detailed response as the wife is on her way back from shopping and I've been told the aircraft need to be off the Pool Table as we have visitors coming over.

OK let me get some of this out as quick as possible. The phoenix is a pretty good plane doesn't stall easily at all, but and there is a big but here. When my son first flew this model he was trying to keep it in a tight circuit like he does with his other models. A 2 meter wing span model needs a lot more airspace than a small one, so if you do tight turns you will bleed off heaps of airspeed and hence stall the model, being a big model it will need a lot more height to recover from a stall. I noticed this the first time Thomas flew the model. I quickly grabbed the TX from him and showed him exactly how I expected him to fly it and how much airspace he needed to use etc. Just some thing to think about . . I'll comment some more later on unless someone else touches on each point you've brought up.

Don't ever give up as from what I'm hearing you only need to adjust your flying a little and a big bird will fly well.
 

Fishbonez

Active member
The phoenix is a pretty good plane doesn't stall easily at all, but and there is a big but here. When my son first flew this model he was trying to keep it in a tight circuit like he does with his other models. A 2 meter wing span model needs a lot more airspace than a small one, so if you do tight turns you will bleed off heaps of airspeed and hence stall the model, being a big model it will need a lot more height to recover from a stall.

I could not agree more with you and you make a very good point. When given a very wide burth she does fly well. In the cases where I stalled the plane, key phrase being I stalled the plane in my crash cases both times I was turning right and into the wind. I do not know if the wind speed had anything to do with it and possibly wind pushing down onto the wing so to speak. But when it stalls boy does it drop fast.
 

bmsweb

Site Moderator
I know if you're flying into the wind and then turn off (this is where Thomas had the most trouble when developing his flying skills), you need to do one of two things, either apply more power or take a very slow long turn. The following is the outcome:

1. Turning tight off the wind - Without additional power your air speed drops off to zero and you basically fall out of the sky.
2. Turning slowly - as the aircraft goes into the crosswind part of the turn it begins to accelerate and once its turned away from the wind, so it has plenty of airspeed, hence no stall.
3. Turn tight and apply heaps of power - as per 2 airspeed increases and as such no stall.


If it stalled going into the wing, then I imagine when going with the wind you've taken some of the power off due the speed being too fast, so it was flying with the wind and had minimal airspeed, so once you turned into the wind you would have dropped more airspeed going into the turn hence stall. Well thats what I think, without having seen exactly what happened there is no way of knowing.

My first aircraft flight about 20 plus year ago lasted about 20 seconds and there wasn't all that much to repair since the aircraft was in too many pieces lol My son on the other hand as the first model which is the Kinetics which is worn out from flying so much. Its learning curve and sometimes I think bigger planes aren't always better when working on your flying skills.
 

KKArioKA

Epoxi Flyer
Paul got it right !!

i just remembered i had a post explaining how to coordinate a turn with the wind so ill quote myself on a better topic - the other one i was explaining to a guy with 12" plane 3 channels, sorry :p !

You need to LEARN how to fly with the wind as your ALLY and dont fight the wind !!

if your problem is turning into the wind, do it quickly and with power while you turn, gentle turn you aileron to the oposite direction of the turn AFTER the turn is initiated and coordinate with the rudder :D

sounds like alot of work, but with practice you can get there !!

View attachment 4905

remember flying is like riding a boat, if you have no traction/motor pulling, you will feel alot more the tide of the waves, at the moment you add throttle/power you start ripping the waves and move in a more predicted path, cutting in a straight line.
 

Fishbonez

Active member
Good advice all. Iam currently waiting for this plane to come in at the US Warehouse and we will go for it again
 

bmsweb

Site Moderator
Paul got it right !!

Thank man. It was interesting seeing Thomas fly his new EDF and I noticed the small size of the model and the fact that it was an EDF, he had more probs with the wind. I was on his case all the way through the flight telling him more power, less power, turning too tight etc . . I'm surprised his didn't crash it with me in his ear the whole time.

I guess its like when you first fly, you don't realize you need up elevator in a turn, but once you know this all is fine. The same with flying on a windy day, once you know what to expect and what will happen its not such a big deal.