New Air One Electric maiden

Well today was one of immense satisfaction! The New Air One  Electric was maidened. Surprisingly a large number of us ignored the rain forecast and and gathered at a local easterly slope, Harrop Edge between Leeds and Manchester.

The foamy brigade respectfully gave way to us to launch  the New Air One Electric with 1/2kg of ballast (AUW 3kg) in 20mph winds for the first flight flown by Jonathan Wells. Pretty much from the off it was put into F3F racing style turns with 3/4 circuit rolling circles, well he was nervous not being his plane! What was surprising was the energy retention in the glide and you'd be hard pressed to say the folded prop made much difference in slowing it down. It really is a slippery conversion. At 3kg it felt very bouyant and Jonathan said it could have taken a lot more. There is provision in the wing and joiner for a further 1kg! The CG was a little forward but it looked very quick and more importantly it didn't bleed the speed which was what I was looking for.

There was no real need for the power train, the objective was to trim the plane. That will be another day but a quick spurt of power caused the motor to cut out after a few seconds. The ESC set up still had the current limiter engaged as a precaution so I guess we'll try again with that off and disable the Ubec and run the radio gear with a small lipo. MKS servos can now use tiny individual Sbecs to regulate input voltage which will allow use of a 2s lipo. The power set up is a bit more than I had planned and bench tests showed 1.75kw at 128a. For F3B electric I was aiming for 1kw which we'll fine tune later but for now, it will be fun to see what  it's like at this power and that will be for the next time now we have a trimmed out airframe.

Updated classic by Brian James (AKA Yellow Blue). Bagged foam core wings using PU glue and glass fibre 1/64 laminating sheet with co ordinates provide by Dr James Hammond using the Schwing section.

So all in all big grins from me and yes I flew too today, 2nd flight with my new Vampire F3F. Even more so to catch up with local fliers and one in particular, Brian James- He maidened a 'new' plane too. Its says Ridge Racer on it and older readers will remember this slope nut classic, only Brian got foam cores CNC hotwired using the Schwing section and bagged his own set of wings. Now at this size and bigger fuse it brings the design bang up todate. Looks like a prototype for the type of slope model we should bring into our range...Hmm!