Saturday, February 6, 2010

First Flights

The prototype wing flew for the first time today. I tried a sidearm vertical toss launch at 3/4 throttle which seemed to work well.





Quite a handful- even with the dialed-down power system it has total vertical performance. But, I didn't really have good control. The first flight (not captured on video) was very short and ended in a soft crash into nice cushy snow- no damage. The controls were much too sensitive- I dialed back both elevator and aileron to 30% travel.

The second flight was longer and slightly more successful.However, at the end it still got away from me, and I had a harder nose-first landing in the snow. This did a little more damage- tore the motor mount off and damaged one of the winglets. Both are easy fixes and the gorilla glue is drying right now.

Both flights were too short to see if the trim needed to be adjusted. It couldn't have been too far off! Also, I'm glad I chose red for the bottom, but a brighter topside color might work better. It'll take some getting used to picking up orientation with the different aircraft shape.

Lessons learned:
  1. Increase aileron travel slightly
  2. keep elevator travel at 30%
  3. dial in more expo
  4. Try flying with the 1050mAh battery next time, both flights today were done with the much heavier 2200 mAh battery
  5. The center of gravity might be slightly too far back- for both flights it was right at the neutral point. I might move both battery locations forward 1/2 if possible.

5 comments:

  1. Congrats on the first flight, Andy! I'm pretty impressed. I'm going to watch the video now....

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  2. Holy crap, just watched the video. Looks a little twitchy....but fast! I can't believe how agile it is. Once you get a feel for flying it, it could be quite a cool flyer. It looked fast in the video though. Good luck getting it back together.

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  3. Ccch ch check it out, embedded video in the blog...

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  4. It looks like too much travel on the control surfaces. I'll have to check out the rest of the videos...

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  5. Adding weight off the tip of the nose to bring the CG forward helped a lot. Make sure you get your CG right for the super Stryker!

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