This past Friday evening I took my wife to the park to show her how my cub looks to fly at night. There was a pretty stiff breeze, but not anything worse than what I’ve flown in before, so we went out into the field and I took off. I did a few low passes, eliciting several Ohhhhhs and Ahhhhhs from my wife, then I took it to the far side of the field and turned it back towards us. The wind was stiff enough that it appeared to just hover there over the edge of the field, maybe 50′ off the ground. Then, suddenly, it nosed over and went into a perfectly vertical dive straight down, ignoring all my control inputs on my transmitter.
A cub makes a pretty sickening crunch when it augers in. 🙁
I don’t have a definitive answer about what caused the crash, and likely never will. All the control linkages survived the crash and still work just fine, and the radio transmitter has good batteries in it, and the receiver and other electronics on the plane still work fine. At this point all I can think of is radio interference – which occasionally happens for a second or 2, but not for long enough to bring a plane down like this.
Here are some pictures of the carnage:
Saturday night I spent a few hours deciding if it would fly again. Turns out, with enough epoxy it looks like it will:
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