Re: Thinking of starting R/C - electric sailplane

All true but if you have an instructor, IMHO, your learning curve will be MUCH better. Just getting whatever plane you decide on trimmed right on the first flight will be of great help. People do learn on their own but having a fellow standing there with a buddy box helped ME VERY much. mk

IME the best thing is to fly a sim for a while.

After half a dozen simulated crashes, you will probably be ready for the real thing.

Getting the model trimmed is where help may be needed..but try

It is always nice to have an experienced flying buddy. It is the formality of the club instructing that is the turn-off for me. It is a bad impression for the fun of modeling.

And the guy is talking about a virtual free-flight. If he was talking 3 or 4 channel power, I wouldn't have given him that advice. It might not be use a club instructor, but I wouldn't suggest that he wing it (pun just happened).

With some of the models suggested as "beginner models," they look like they are just trying to sell more models. Some of those models won't last long and can be a handful even for an experienced pilot.

In Houston, I was considered a good test pilot. Even those who could win major contests in aerobatics were sending other people's new models to me to test fly.

The reason was that they knew what I brought to the flying field. There was no telling the many strange configurations I would show up with. They figured that if I could work the kinks out of those things, I could do good with just about anything.

My last four-channel had some very bad flight habits and I wrestled with that thing maybe three flights on each of four different Sundays. Everyone enjoyed seeing me get it out of the car. They knew eventually I was going to give them a hellacious crash. Drool ran off their chins.

I figured out (finally) what the problem was, fixed it immediately, and it flew perfectly after that. Within three weekends I was bored with it and they were bored watching it. I liked it better when it was all over the sky and me trying to figure it out and when a big crash was just one surprise away. I stopped flying it and I might put it on eBay.

Ken

I have used simulators at NASA to save money and time. I have never done anything with one on a personal computer, but I can see how that could help a fellow.

That is funny. Your sentence construction is that after a half-dozen simulated crashes, you will be ready for a real crash. That might be true. Funny though.

Ken

Well Ken, I think that it probably reads better that way..

"If you haven't crashed an RC plane, you weren't trying hard enough"

All the full size pilots who have tried models that I know have a real problem with unlearning stuff that is relevant to being in the cockpit and not relevant to being on the ground 100 meters away..

The classic being my pal who managed to get his distance all screwed up, and fly down an avenue of trees, get the model OUT of the side, only to find a post in a post-and-rail fence and hit it mid span exactly. "I thought I was well this side of them"

He did buy me a new wing.:-)

I know of two astronauts, that one would expect to have no trouble, had to have the transmitter taken from him three times on the same flight. They quit.

Armstrong was pretty good, but he was an AMA member once and I believe competed at one of the NATs. He had the right feel for it.

The only real pilots I have known who could have a two-minute ground school and then fly perfectly well were chopper pilots. They were comfortable immediately and became good in a hurry.

I had been flying a 12-foot sailplane of my design back from way up wind on the field we routinely flew. There was one tree on the field. We all knew where it was. This was a week before the NATs and we four were doing some serious, timed spot landing practise.

On the way back, I thought I might be a little on the other side of the tree and since I had plenty of altitude, I made a right and then a left to pass way, way on the other side during my downwind leg.. I flew straight into it. I had gone out of my way to hit it. It I had done nothing, I would have been 50 feet on this side of it.

Lots of lessons are there but I never seemed to learn them.

Ken