The beginning (winter-spring) of 2011 found me trying to teach myself how to fly an eRC-Micro-Stik at an Indoor Soccer Arena (hockey arena), there was snow outside. Many people have success with similar micro-sized airplanes in similar arenas like basketball courts however r I had some recurring difficulties; the small wheels kept getting caught in the AstroTurf-fake-grass, and the propeller kept getting caught in the net that keeps the hockey puck from hitting the spectators, and I always started out flying fast and hardly ever slowed down enough to fly in the small area, I was always doing a fast tight turn, I needed more room.

My very first plane, the JD-1

Thanks for reading
JD

So, after learning some basics on the club trainer I bought my own gear. The airplane was a HobbyKing Bixler, the radio was a FS-CT6B transmitter with a couple of receivers, charger, and a few batteries.

It only took me a day or so to get everything assembled and talking to each other (my first time). Drove out to the flying field, took it out of the trunk, a little assembly, walked to the launching area, throttle to maximum, gave it a strong throw at a slightly upward angle, and BOOM, the darned thing crashed in ten feet, hard enough to dent and bend the fuselage.

I learned about “Thrust-Lines” from that.
Whenever the motor/propeller is not lined up with the wings/tail/center-of-fuselage, then changing throttle/thrust will effect the pitch of the airplane, when you increase the throttle for a Cub or Cessna then you also pitch the nose up, when you increase the throttle on a Bixler with its top mounted pusher prop then you also pitch the nose down. This is what crashed my brand new airplane on day one. (I intend to write more about this in a later blog entry).

I learned that “Propellers-Bite”.
A couple days after the initial flight/crash, I had it repaired and back out at the field, this time I was going to be smarter, instead of throwing it, I would take-off from the grass field . Now all of the EasyStar derivatives like my Bixler are designed to be good at belly-landing (no landing gear, lands on their bellies) and are meant to be hand launched (thrown into...Continue Reading

2011 Early Summer, shortly after R/C Desk Pilot came out, I started flying that too, nice sim and a different collection of rc airplanes and I wish it had more sceneries/landscapes to fly in.

2011 Late Summer, found me learning to fly a club trainer with my nearest rc flying club. This was a high wing trainer of course with tricycle landing gear and was made of balsa and had a nitro/glow engine. I bought a gallon of nitro fuel to use with the clubs infrastructure and I not only got some flying lessons but also learned about all of the gadgets needed to support an airplane and learned about wiping-down/cleaning-off the airplane at the end of the day.

Another thing that I was learning is that, with a fixed-wing plane, is that you need to always be moving forward, I could not pause to let a flock of birds go by.

Just when I thought that I was getting the hang of it, disaster struck and somehow even with a buddy-box, I crashed this club trainer through a tree and into a corn field. The best word to describe it when we found it was “shredded”. Something that I noticed was that even after losing its wing in the tree was that the fuselage with a heavy engine on the front tried to keep flying forward like a spear. This is when I decided to go in the direction of lighter electric foamies.

I am counting this as my second plane, even if I did not invent it, I flew it. JD-2

Thanks for reading
JD

In February 2010 I joined RC-Groups.

Sometime in Spring 2010 I started flying RC Simulators. I used FMS and ClearView and bought a Dynam-6channel-USB-Transmitter, this combination worked very well on a nice laptop. This is when I started to learn about orientation and trying to not over-control the airplanes.

Favorite RC-Simulator Airplanes:

• FMS default B4, a version of the Pilatus B-4 Glider scaled down to a four meter wing span with a magic invisible propulsion system for take-offs and cruising around, having a long wing-span made it a very gentle plane to practice with.
• HZ-SuperCub a four channel version by Gunnerson, this is my favorite because I can keep it flying the longest
• EasyGliderE from Multiplex the actual producer of the EasyGliderE.
• HawkSky-BL from Gunnerson, an EasyStar derivative, looks like the HK-Bixler that I would get later.

By March of 2010 I was editing .par files, and modified a Funtana (flys like a Su-26m and looks like a Hangar-9 Funtana) to be more stable, with 25% control throws it goes from being a tiger to being a pussycat, much more controllable.

Thanks for reading
JD

Hello everyone,

This is the start of my first blog. I have been looking for a friendly forum to post some of my writing and I have decided that RC-Groups is the best home for the kind of things that I want to write about. Some of my writing will be simple observations of interesting ideas or events, and some will be informed opinions distilled from extensive research, some will be notes about the various aircraft that I am flying, and once in a while I will write about larger scale flight simulation. At first I will be centrally re-posting abbreviated versions of some of my better replies that were written earlier.

Here we go
JD