George Markey 1

Hi Kiwi 1,Sorry I can't help you as I chickened out and did not, in the end, buy this lovely plane. My club's grass patch is just too short for comfortably greasing in fast, low drag planes like the Raven. However, I'm sure one of the other guys from this thread will oblige. Hopefully you have read David's review in the July issue of RCM&E and noted his comments on the CG ie this should be no further back than 135mm from the leading edge, not 145mm. as in the manual ! Best of luck with your plane . George.

Hellcat,I have been fancying this plane for some time now and have sympathy with your disappointment that the kit shortcomings were not included in the review. However, as you have described them, they would not put me off buying the kit. My particular worry is the high wing loading at 32onz. per square foot. My club has a rather small grass patch and trying to land a fast moving plane is something of a nightmare, where landing gear and prop. are frequent victims. So my question is; how does the plane fly, particularly with reference to the landing speed. Does it come in like a bat out of hell, or does full flap tame it to a reasonable, stable speed which does not require unlimited runway .Hope you find this very late post.Thanks, George.

The set-up I anticipate puting in my plane (when I get it ) Is a Turnigy C50-55, 400 KV. motor, a Turnigy Plush 80 amp ESC which comes with a switching bec of 3amp-5volts and a 6S 4000mah battery. I will prop. this to draw approx. 50amps. which will give a tad over 1Kw at full throttle, similar to Aerts set-up. I used this very successfully in a Seb Art Angel 50 for three years untill it decided to go free flight and find the hard spot for a one point landing amidst many acres of grass! Lee, your experiments with moving the CG back will be extremely interesting since everyone seems to be flying with a more forward CG than that specified by Seagull. I look forward to your feed-back. Love your magnets Aerts. This is a must for me as all my screws end up in a black hole in the grass!Many thanks for the positive feed back on the strength of the undercart chaps. This is very reassuring as I have had some really wearysome experiences with Tender Undercart Syndrome in ARTFs in the past.

O.K. I'm sold, The order is going in. Many thanks to you all.

Thanks for your input Lee, I think it boils down to accepting that this plane needs a positive approach when landing. In these situations I have found that setting up the ailerons to act as flaperons and reflexing them up on the landing approach helps. This does help to slow the plane down but mainly gives it a more nose down attitude which keeps the approach more positive. I usually set this at 30% of the aileron rated movement.Such an approach can ,of course, result in the odd heavy landing, which can be hard on the gear. Have you, Lee or David, experienced any signs of the under-carriage weakness which has been experienced in some A.R.T.F.S. David, what improvement would you be looking for by going to a .90 2/stroke. Would this also add more weight? ( I'm not really familiar with modern I/C engines . Since coming back to the hobby some ten years ago, i have been exclusive electric). Off now to watch the video again!  

Having read David's review of this plane in the July edition and watched the video, I really want to build one of these. However, further research has raised some nagging doubts which I would like to air on the forum and get some other enlightened opinions on these worries.Firstly, the flying weight as given in the Perkins web site is 6.4lbs (2.9Kgs) where as David's review model came out at 8.25 lbs. (3.7Kgs.). These weights result in wing loadings of 25 ozs/sq.ft. and 32 ozs./sq.ft., the former being nicely in the comfort zone for forgiving flight performance, the latter,for me anyway, being in the red zone for a plane of this size. Mitigating against this is the landing in the video which looks smooth and stable without being hair- raisingly fast. Secondly, there are two reviews on site which chronicle a series of disasters with this plane, resulting in a very low rateing. In both cases, however, the problems encountered seem to be related to a rearward CG, and in one case also to instaling a 4S electric system as recommended in the manual, resulting in a woefully underpowered plane. Both these problems are covered in David's review. Can we then assume that had both these unlucky people read David's review before flying their planes and taken corrective action, the result would have been very different? I look forward to your comments.