A Good Day to Fly

Aug 10, 2007 4 Replies

I took my "Vulcan" powered glider (newly repatched) and my Hobbyzone Scout (tail freshly 'splinted') up to Saratoga Battlefield National Park this evening. I had two amazing flights with the Vulcan, and no crashes, no failed launches, no damage to the plane. Both flights were about 5 minutes long. On the first one there was enough of a breeze aloft for me to let the plane glide unpowered for up to 15 seconds at a time. On the second flight there was less breeze, but I was still able to do 5 second mini-glides. My first landing was absolutely textbook: I brought it in for a smooth landing on the short grass just 10' from me. On the second flight I had to bank away from the first landing attempt, then the battery pack started to run out, but I managed a gentle, controlled landing into some tall grass about 30' from me. Some of it was captured on video, and I'll see if it's worth posting on YouTube.



The Scout just wanted to bank nose-first into the ground. This with the tail at the same angle that previously produced an acceptable climb angle that was cancelled out by a persistant right bank that I couldn't stop. This plane is going to be powereing a foam glider, I think. It's already been discontinued, and replaced by a 3 channel, 8.4 volt version called the "Phantom", but the new plane looks like it uses exactly the same fragile tail boom and a very similar, too-fussy tail assembly.


On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:45:11 GMT, "mjc13" wrote in :

You may be able to trim the plane by bending the flight surfaces.

To stop the right bank, you want "right aileron" to go down and "left aileron" to go up.

You may not have ailerons on the plane, but those are the inputs needed to stop the banking.

The idea is to get more lift on the right wing and less on the left.

You may be able to cut trim tabs into the back edges of the wing or make trim tabs out of foam taped to the trailing edge.

Watch out for your CG if you add stuff to the wings. You may need to add weight to the nose to keep the plane in a good balance.

You may also be able to bias the tail feathers to compensate for the bank. You want to get "left rudder" into the mix. If your plane is a V-tail, I think that means that the left "ruddervator" needs to be down a smidge when the controls are at neutral.

If you're planning to take the innards out of the plane and use them on a different setup, you can afford to be more daring in your trim experiments. Learn something from the plane before you trash it.

Marty

wrote in :

I had already bent the trim tabs to full opposite bank, and I do know which way to move the stick. ;-) It just wasn't working. That's moot, though, because the current problem is the plane wants to dive. I changed the trim tabs to compensate for that, and played with the rear flaps to add lift when it started to dive - no luck. The last thing it needs now is weight in the nose...

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:20:55 GMT, "mjc13" wrote in :

Strangely enough, in some situations, that can be a sign of being tail-heavy.

If you added some weight behind the CG and didn't add equal weight to the nose, then it could be a factor.

Or it's possible that the repaired tail boom is not straight.

Keep honking away on the trims. As it is, it sounds as though the plane is not flyable. You can't make it much worse than it is by experimenting to see what works and what doesn't.

Marty

wrote in :

The trim tabs seem to have so little effect, and the tail seems so touchy, that I don't think I'm going to keep wasting time on it. I may get another Scout fuselage, because I have all kinds of spare parts and spare battery packs, but this one is going to go into a glider, I think. I appreciate your response, though.

I just got another Vulcan, through Ebay.

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