This weekend I finally had time enough and good enough weather to break out my HobbyZone Super Cub LP model airplane. I bought this guy last fall along with a flight simulator to use to learn to fly over the winter. This was the first weekend I wasn’t too busy and had good enough weather to try it out. I can tell you this is one durable little plane thank god!
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After assembling, binding, reading the instructions (though not all of them apparently) and watching the instructional video a few times I took the plane out for a flight. First flight I let the thing go and it lurched hard to the right. I tried to correct by pulling up and trying to get it straightened out, but instead I lost lift and nosed it into the ground. I lost a few pieces off the tip of the wing at this point too.
I gave it another shot and got it into the air a bit longer, but was still suffering from severe control issues. Ultimately I crash landed again. At this point I realized that the tail was not in a neutral position which was causing the severe pull to the right. In retrospect, the chipped left wing was now also pulling it left, so things were in quite a crazy state at this point. I tried to straighten the tail using the fine tuning on the transmitter. Then gave it a third ill fated flight where I didn’t throttle up enough for some reason and nosed it into the ground.
Flight four was a success as I got it airborne and flew it for 7 minutes. I even executed a loop. Kind of lost a little control a few times, but it was at this point I realized that the plane had a pull to the left. The same left wing that had a chip out of it. I’m going to find out from the hobby shop this week if the chip was enough to cause the pull to the left, or if I still had a tail alignment issue, or if I had the wing on off center. After flying for a while I tried to land and managed a controlled crash landing.
With not much damage I made flight five. Did a loop and some circles before the throttle seemed to sputter a bit. I knew I was probably close to being out of batteries so I decided to try and land the plane. It was headed my direction and I briefly thought I could just catch the plane out of the air. I thought better and dodged out of the way in time to perform my second “crash” landing.
All in all the plane still appears functional, and I did have a successful 7 minute flight, so I’d call it a success.