A cautionary tale

[Greyhead46]

As this is the time of year when many of us will be setting up our new models ready for this year’s flying season I thought it worth recounting my experience from last year.

 

Towards the end of last season I was out with my foamie electric glider which I have been flying for a couple of years now using my trusty JR 3810 with FrSky 2.4 rf module, when for no apparent reason it nosed down and ploughed into the ground. Luckily the coincidence of not too much altitude, boggy ground and full up elevate alleviated the worst.

 

Having retrieved the model amid talk of “strange things” happening to models at the Redmarshall field and my own musing over the new electric fence the club have installed to keep the horses on their own side of the fence I returned home to stick the nose back in place.

 

Repairs complete my thoughts turned to what had really happened and my first idea was a dodgy elevator servo but something was bugging me about the model as I’d extracted it from the mud and when I removed the transmitter from its case the penny dropped!

 

Being smart, when I first set up the model, to save having to program dual-rates, exponential and CAR, I changed the name of an existing, no longer used memory bank and checked everything wobbled in the right direction. I just had to reverse the aileron channel, neutralise the trims and was ready to go in no time; simple!

 

What I had failed to remember was that the previous model had been a slope soarer and to help if lift went marginal I had programmed the “landing” switch for a few degrees down flaperon with a smidgen of down elevator to lift the tail.

 

All things being equal operating the switch shouldn’t have been a disaster, but I had reversed the aileron channel so they both deflected up killing all lift from the wing at the same time as applying down elevator. Not so smart after all!

 

When I’d retrieved the model both ailerons were deflected up, at the time I thought they must have been deflected by the force of the arrival but being top hinged with control horns out the bottom surfaces if at all they would have been deflected down and that was what had been bugging me.

 

What exactly happened is pure conjecture but I assume I must have removed my hand from the right stick, to scratch my nose or adjust my hat, who knows? On the return journey my hand inadvertently hit the “landing” switch, which is situated just above the right hand stick, and the rest as they say, is history.

[Don Fry]

I’ve been (nearly) caught out that way. I started making a written record of every switch use for every model, but it fell by the way side. 

[GrumpyGnome]

To help avoid this, I try and have a standard switch layout, and set up templates for models of various types using these templates..... not foolproof, but helps.