The first crash I really remember is from a long way back, 2000ish, before I ever imagined I could afford RC. I'd had an Estes plane, free flight electric but had beaten it up pretty badly over time. Then I saw the mother of all planes to my adolescent eyes. It was another Estes plane, the Sky Rangers Flight Trainer. It used the exact same high-wing fuselage and feathers as my old freeflight, but came with a 1ch 72mhz radio. You'd charge it up, turn it on, toss it, and hopefully could do something with the on-off style rudder control the radio gave you before running into something. I loved it. I took it out to the middle school sports fields and got in maybe two flights. I forget the details, but I remember somehow the plane started to stall, I banked it hard to lower the nose but to no avail. So this thing comes screaming down, full throttle from about 30 feet straight into the dirt. It crushed the motor clear under the wings and split the tail-boom off aft of the wing's trailing edge. I don't know what was more shattered, the plane or my hopes of ever flying again. I wrote a letter to Estes customer service explaining everything about the crash in detail and explaining that I did everything the manual said to stop it, and requested that maybe they could send me a new fuselage so I could patch it back up. A week or two later a box comes in the mail, a new trainer fuselage with all the electronics installed and a spare prop to boot. I used parts from the crashed trainer to repair the tail feathers and motor on the electric FF plane. I still have both of them buried somewhere on the shelves in my workshop.
