Becsta loses a Glider!
A few weeks back, I witnessed a disgraceful piece of flying by a pilot in a full-sized aircraft – they decided to fly low and slow diagonally across the HSL field right into what I believed was the same patch of air that we were thermalling away in. Because I couldn’t ignore this aircraft, I had to take my eyes off my own, and within a few seconds, lost an awesome glider.
When I looked away from my plane at the slow moving aircraft directly overhead, my eyes reacquired one of the other gliders flying in the same manner as my fingers were working my transmitter. It just so happened that Fred had the same intentions as I did, and was flying slit-s turns to warn the pilot that there were model aircraft around him. When Fred decided his glider was clear, he straightened up and flew upwind towards a lake. I was flying his plane too, and my heart sank as I realised that I didn’t have control of it (believing it was mine, of course).
“Bec, you’re flying the wrong plane!”, Al screams…
Crunch!
It was all over in about five seconds.
My Icon slammed into a grove of trees about 300m from the field, near the high-tension power lines to the south. When I eventually found it, my heart sank. This Icon (a combination of my original Icon TD fuselage, and a pristine F3B wing bought off Carl 12 months ago) was an absolute mess. The plane found the one clear patch in the middle of the trees, and slammed vertically into the ground at max velocity, burying the nose about 10 inches or so into the ground.
The fuse was broken half way down the boom, the leading edge of the fin was slit, the wing seating was split at the join seam, and there’s cracks up in the nose.
The centre panel has multiple bite marks out of the leading edge, the spar fractured near one of the tip panel joiner boxes, the flaps were torn, and broken, and generally the panel’s quite delaminated and beyond repair.
The tip panels have some major sections of delaminations, and gouges out of the leading edges, both aileron surfaces were ejected from the panels, servos are loose (but were otherwise working and chattering away when I got to the plane), but otherwise could be repairable with some effort and TLC.
The only parts left completely untouched were the elevator halves.
I’m in a fix at the moment – do I throw the glider away, or do I attempt a repair, and use it solely on the slope? I don’t think that I can repair the spar sufficiently enough to winch-launch it, and the repairs would add significant weight to the glider overall.
The positive outcome of this incident will be the stimulus to buy some new gliders, and at this stage will likely be the NAN Models Xplorer. I flew Dave Pratley’s Xplorer up at Armidale in January, and loved it! That plane just didn’t want to come down! Ugh, decisions, decisions! Is this the impetus to defect from the Icon Camp?