Speed Air

The model was beautifully finished out of the box and appeared to be made entirely of Basswood or similar; no balsa to be seen.

The two halves of the wing were joined with epoxy in the normal way, with a strong wooden dihedral brace used to set the angle and reinforce the join. Clamps and weights were used to hold the joint while the epoxy set for 24 hours. (A small wooden pin to assure proper wing-alignment would have been a good idea.)

After the joint was completely dry, the covering was cut away from the servo bay, a mounting plate added and the aileron servo mounted in the normal way.

The instructions (written in Engrish) said to attach the stab and fin with CA. Bad plan. The CA "bleached" the green covering white, and ran onto the white covering turning it green. I switched to epoxy which did the job fine.

Fitting the gear did not go smoothly. The rudder and nosewheel horns were on opposite sides of the fuse, which meant that left rudder gave right nosewheel steering. This required a clumsy hack to get the rudder/steering to work at all. Also, I found the pushrods supplied for throttle and nosewheel were very flimsy, and not properly supported inside the fuse. The two little blocks of wood supplied to be glued in place after assembly were not acceptable. After fitting these the fuel tank would never come out again. What were you to do if the clunk kinked forward?

After balancing perfectly, at least as per the instructions, the aircraft seemed tail-heavy. It was quick to fall back onto it's tail, with the nosegear off the ground. But when hung from the balance point, it was perfectly level!

This aeroplane was in trouble before it left the ground. A better pilot might have saved it; a smarter pilot might have aborted the takeoff.

It didn't want to take off. After nearly 50 yards of run at high speed, I had to yank it into the air. It adopted a very shallow climb-out and back-stick made it very wishy-washy, so I had to let it climb slowly. And when I throttled back, it pointed the nose down, so I had to keep the revs up (and the speed high). By the time I started the first turn, it was maybe 50 feet up and a long way off.

The turn itself was a nightmare. The slightest turn and she started to slide down again. To get it round the corner I had to turn so slowly that it was a long, long way out by the time it was going downwind again, and still very low.

Downwind, it was even less happy about keeping it's nose up, and I just couldn't get it to turn for an emergency aproach. As it was vanishing out of sight downwind, I desperately hauled it around, but it went down and was lost in the ground-clutter.

We found it the next day. Smashed to pieces, of course. It had completed the turn and was on it's way back to the strip, but had gone in hard and fast. Accurate measurements on a 10,000:1 scale map gives us a distance of 850 meters from the strip to the crash-site.