91100 100 set
to the book
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2003
- Posts
- 694
Remote control airplanes ARE NOT like for-real airplanes.
My girlfriend got me an "entry-level" remote control airplane for Christmas this year. Cool gift, total surprise, and it's always been something I've been curious about, so I thought it was pretty thoughtful of her. Spent a few days trapped inside because it was either too windy, or rainy, or whatever, just fiddling with it. Moving the controls around, messing with the motor, discharging the batteries and recharging them. Finally got out today to fly it. Calm day, not raining. We find a decent sized park with trees around the edges. Not decent sized enough apparently. I thought I had a pretty good feel for it, nice and easy, lets not do anything dumb just yet. My girlfriend says "You better turn it, you're getting close to that tree". "No, honey, that tree is farther away than it ...". Crack. The left wing snags into a branch and throws the plane around, about 50 feet up. The tree spits it out, in level flight but upside down, motor still running. Nose is dropping, and I can't believe I had the presence of mind to actually push the nose back up for a decent, if upside down, landing. We look at each other, she sees her 200 bucks broken into a few pieces of styrofoam. I calmly walk over to it and find its fine, with a small dent in the wing (nothing a little packing tape can't fix) and some grass piled up around the top, not even the prop was damaged.
I should have taken that as a clue that the park was too small and we should have packed it up and gone looking for a bigger field. Nope, I was apparently too jazzed up to be that smart. So I fly it around some more. It went okay, until I fell victim to the "graveyard spiral". Another crash, fortunately, it was the same wing, and some more packing tape, but I can now see why the instruction manual includes a page with part numbers to replace things like the wings and tail.
Again, remote control airplanes ARE NOT like real airplanes. They are alot of fun though.
My girlfriend got me an "entry-level" remote control airplane for Christmas this year. Cool gift, total surprise, and it's always been something I've been curious about, so I thought it was pretty thoughtful of her. Spent a few days trapped inside because it was either too windy, or rainy, or whatever, just fiddling with it. Moving the controls around, messing with the motor, discharging the batteries and recharging them. Finally got out today to fly it. Calm day, not raining. We find a decent sized park with trees around the edges. Not decent sized enough apparently. I thought I had a pretty good feel for it, nice and easy, lets not do anything dumb just yet. My girlfriend says "You better turn it, you're getting close to that tree". "No, honey, that tree is farther away than it ...". Crack. The left wing snags into a branch and throws the plane around, about 50 feet up. The tree spits it out, in level flight but upside down, motor still running. Nose is dropping, and I can't believe I had the presence of mind to actually push the nose back up for a decent, if upside down, landing. We look at each other, she sees her 200 bucks broken into a few pieces of styrofoam. I calmly walk over to it and find its fine, with a small dent in the wing (nothing a little packing tape can't fix) and some grass piled up around the top, not even the prop was damaged.
I should have taken that as a clue that the park was too small and we should have packed it up and gone looking for a bigger field. Nope, I was apparently too jazzed up to be that smart. So I fly it around some more. It went okay, until I fell victim to the "graveyard spiral". Another crash, fortunately, it was the same wing, and some more packing tape, but I can now see why the instruction manual includes a page with part numbers to replace things like the wings and tail.
Again, remote control airplanes ARE NOT like real airplanes. They are alot of fun though.