I recently made a trip to AZ to visit the family and dedicated almost every am to flying with my father and brother. We were flying out on the outskirts of town where a new residential development was being built. It was basically a huge field where they had graded it flat and paved the streets - and unfortunatly for me, installed light poles.

Well, the Ultimate Bipe I built the previous month met an early demise when 20 feet up, it thought a game of chicken with the light pole was a good idea (of course my thumbs had nothing to do with this event ) I could have swore I had an inch of room to sneak by, but alas - I hit the pole about as squarely as I could. Ping - the sound of the prop collet as it connected with the pole. It was a event that almost caused my brother to wreck the Ultimate he was flying because he was laughing so hard. He landed, the ridicule started - of course at my cost... Needless to say, the bipe was gone - but it's components were dying for a new home.

This is how the Yak-54 saga begins...

On a whim - I see this flat foamie kit at a local Phoenix hobby shop and it was calling me. I thought it would be cool to do a father /son project to build it and it was a great time. The kit is very well thought out and I give Jason and the gang at Insane Foamies credit - they did a superb job. The plane came with a CD that had a build video (did I say VIDEO) yep, it made building it a breeze!!! Watch 2 minutes, build for a while - repeat and complete.

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Having seen how slow and fun these can be - I was on a quest to find a good set of plans with a plane to build. I wanted to avoid the total profile build and wanted somewhat of a boxed fuse. I found the plans and started working on it with 3mm depron. Since this was the first depron build I've ever done, I wasn't quite sure how sturdy it would be - but man, I was surprised in the end.

Nothing overly difficult - cut all the pieces, grabbed a few pieces of flat CF stock for the leading edge and started at it with some foam safe CA. I needed some color and decided to go with some iron on stuff I had from some other builds instead of the airbrushing. Totally happy with the look and this thing has flown really well.

Maiden flight was incredible - it flies so slow and is so much fun!! Once the CG was back where it needed to be - I was in love. I've got a few videos I'll link to shortly and here are some build photos - the whole build is captured in photos HERE so check them out and feel free to ask any questions...

RTF Weight is 14.5 oz with 1320 3S Lipo

Here are specs on the build:

• Tabbed Depron Ultimate Bipe
• Ultracote Iron on Covering
• E-Flite Park 400-920Kv Outrunner
• APC 10x4.7SF Prop
• CC Thunderbird 18 ESC
• TP 1320 3S PL Lipos
• Deans Ultra plugs
• Hitec HS-55 Servos (4) with E-Flite 3D arms
• Hitec Electron 6 Rcvr
• Futaba 9C XMTR

Here is an early video:Tabbed Ultimate Video - 65MB