Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

HEADS UP!

HEADS UP!

I fly RC model airplanes and got into this phase of the hobby late in life. In my 20s I flew control line. At the time I couldn’t afford RC.

The more I get into it the more it becomes self-evident that being successful requires some knowledge and the skill to apply it. For example:

1. The airplane must be straight with no warp in the wings. A bent airframe is an accident going somewhere to crash.

2. The control surfaces, like the rudder, elevator, ailerons and flaps must be set to neutral and the center of gravity carefully checked. Even so the airplane will still have to be trimmed in flight.

3. The controls of an RC airplane are in the Transmitter. There are two sticks. The one the left operates the throttle and the rudder. The one on the right controls the elevator and the ailerons .

4. To take off you use the left joystick. This allows you to taxi, stay aligned with the runway and put the pedal to the medal. Once the airplane is racing straight down the runway you shift your thinking to the right stick and pull back on the elevator. This gets you into the air and for a beginner you steer with the alerions.

5. Once in the air you climb to altitude (High up) and trim the aircraft. By trim I mean that it will have a tendency to climb or dive and when the control is in the neutral position you need to be flying level. To adjust the elevator trim there is a little button tab next to the stick. This allows for incremental clicks, up and down, to get it flying level. Trimming in flight is like making a rounding motion on your stomach while with the other hand patting the top of your head. However the main focus needs to be on the stick to keep the flying machine in a circling patter and behaving itself. This might sound simple however, things move fast and it is easy to forget what hand is doing what. If the airspeed drops off and you go into a spin you are liable to wind up with a handful of wire and splinters.

6. One last thing to keep in mind is that the alerions work opposite to one another in tandem. This means that when one goes up the other goes down. Now you can look at the elevator moving and tell what is going to happen. The same can be said for the rudder. However, watching the ailerons move in tandem is not self-evident. The rule is that when the right aileron goes up that wing drops and the airplane banks right. It took me a couple of bad experiences to figure this out.

I was getting on in my years, as I mentioned earlier, in learning to do this and every time I taxi onto the runway somebody invariably cries out… “BOB IS TAKING OFF, HEADS UP!” I wish they’d stop saying that.