Location: Bellomy Field
Plane: (Brand New) Parkzone Radian
Conditions: 3-4 mph winds with 8 mph gusts.
Notes:
Flying for the first time was nerve wracking, and I had absolutely no control! I hand launched the plane with way too much throttle like a fighter jet from a battleship, and way overcompensating on the controls, I was doing some serious acrobatic flips, hoopla's, and what have yous just trying to keep the thing from piledriving into the ground with erratic throttling. The wind was no help either, and trying to slow things down I crash landed by catching the wing tip on the ground, everything was fine that time.
Pulling myself together I went for another try. Thought I would use much less throttle, and be gentle with the controls, the Radian is a very responsive plane! This time using very little throttle on the launch, I was able to have much better control of the plane, and I was able to even cut the throttle completely and fly into the wind, this is where I realized that the Radian can fly with absolutely no throttle whatsoever. When flying into the wind the controls extremely responsive, and with only a slight jog of the controls the plane flips completely around and zooms away! I felt much more under control this time, though I still had issues decoding in my brain what controls to enact in order to get it to do what I wanted when the plane is in different orientations, i.e. I always turned the wrong way when flying towards myself or at weird angles. Landing this time I was able to throttle off and glide towards myself which was into the wind, come close to the ground, and again turned the wrong way since I was flying towards myself and caught a wingtip resulting in a gracious crash.
There were a few more flights similar to the last one, and one of them had a picture perfect landing. During the last flight the wind really picked up, and I couldn't control the plane. I would try to fly into the wind, but with a small jog of the controls it would flip completely around real fast and pick up serious speed. The elevators also had high sensitivity when flying into the wind, and a few times I found myself flying near vertical. I decided to try and bring the plane in for a landing, and while coming in low with the wind I was having a heck of a time keeping control, and as mentioned earlier, my slow brain works backwards sometimes, and I did a 10 foot piledrive crash during the approach, resulting in the image above.
The break is clean, so I will probably go to the hobby store to get some balsa wood spars for reinforcement.
So now, I will pick myself up, dust my sleeves off, glue this thing back together, and fly again another (not so windy) day.
