Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Beat Goes On

I've been busy the last few days and neglected my Blog. No big deal, not many people read it anyway. And why should they? How interesting is "Making Circular Formers on a Drill Press?"

This is not a cop out but I don't write my blog for others.... I write it for myself. If I write something down in a logical sort of manner than it helps crystalize the process I'm involved in, in my mind. It also helps me remember things, the details of which I don't want to forget.

At the present time I have four camera planes I'm working on. The first is the Anaconda which crashed big time and required me to build a completely new fuselage. I really like the way it turned out even though I liked the way the original looked too. That was the strongest attribute the model had... a sinister drone like look. Then I got to fly it thirteen times, eleven being uneventful and two where it crashed.

I don't want to forget those crashes and why they happened. Going back even before I bought the Anaconda from Dustin, it had suffered a crash on it's maiden flight. The reason for the first mishap was a center of gravity issue. A model airplane must have the weigh distributed properly for it to fly. Its like a titer-totter. Too tail heavy and the model crashes and too nose heavy is almost, but not quite as bad.

The designers of the Anaconda saw it as a First Person View (FPV) model. This means that instead of flying it from the edge of the runway the pilot flies the model from an onboard camera. An FPV set up can have a panoramic camera, a flight camera, and On Board Screen Display (OSD). OSD enables the pilot to see, in addition to the camera view, an instrument panel similar to what is on a real airplane. All this extra equipment adds additional weight, but who in their right mind would put all that equipment in a foamy model that they hadn't test flown. Therein lies the rub. If you don't have all that extra weight in the front end the plane will be tail heavy and crash. There have been some spectacular U-tube videos of Anaconda's crashing on take off because without the extra weight the model is not airworthy.

I feel sorry for RMRC. They built this cool looking model that is fundamentally not airworthy. This is not to say that it won't fly.... of course it will, but it requires putting more weigh in the nose than the styrofoam should be expected to lift. So I don't like this aspect of the Anaconda's design.

Now a manufacturer can have a cool looking model that will still fly even though what needs to be done to make it trim out goes outside the box of what the design materials should be expected to deal with. What makes matters worse is that when in the manufacturing process the foam was not strengthened sufficiently to insure a reasonable designs life. There were two crashes while I owned the model which bear noting not to mention some close calls.

Crash One: The motor ripped off in flight for no apparent reason. This goes back to expecting the foam, supported by only a thin plastic backing plate to be able to get the job done... talk about a spectacular shower of foam.

Crash Two: A clip on the servo linkage arm came loose from the horn on the control surface of the V-tail. This caused the model to plummet into the earth from an altitude of 200 feet.

Close Call 1: The foam piece on the underside of the wing came loose in flight setting the carbon fiber spar askew.

Close Call 2: A take-off had to be aborted when the when the electrical jack on the carbon fiber boom malfunctioned.

Close Call 3: The styrofoam hinge on a rear control surface had a manufacturing defect and separated halfway up the tail.

The upside of all this that in fixing all the glitches there were some great "lessons learned" that I have applied to the scratch building of my other camera planes.... and the beat goes on.