Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

More Form than Substance

My wife Linda must love me because she went with me Sunday to the EAA. The EAA, don't ask me what it stands for... I looked in the guide of events and they don't even define their own acronym. Anyway it is this huge annual aviation event held in Oshkosh WI and aviators from all over the world converge for the show. It lasts a week. There are hundreds of airplanes, vendors and everything and anything that has to do with flight.

It is held in the hottest time of the year for some reason, and to see everything would take easily two or three days. Walking up and down the old cement taxiways is hard on the feet but it is quite a show. Linda does not find it an enjoyable way to spend the day, following her husband around who wanders in an absolute state of wide eyed wonder. I promised we would stop at the antique mall on the way home.

She bought me a T-Shirt that says, "Drones need Pilots Too." I'm wearing it as I write this blog.

On Saturday my Anaconda Drone took off, climbed to 100 ft and suddenly the engine ripped off its mounts sending a shower of styrofoam flying in all directions. I never did see where the engine went, so intent was I in getting the model to return and make a dead stick landing on the runway. I'm not a great fan of using foam without a liberal substructure of light plywood, and hard wood dowels. I repaired the damage and went out to the field today. Don said he would trim it since I had made some major structural changes and don't you know, it climbed to about 100 feet and something went haywire in the V-Tail control surfaces. It plummeted to the ground. The fuselage nose dived into the sod bog which surrounds our flying field. I've been outside sectioning the remains of the fuse to take the lines off, so I can build a new one. The motor, wing/boom assembly and V-tail were undamaged.

The Anaconda is an EPO Foam model airplane that has the look of a drone. It is fun to fly when it behaves, however, it has been a pain in the ass ever since I bought it from a friend who crashed it on his maiden flight. I really liked the model, however, to get it to fly required adding too much weight for the foam to accommodate. It was a fun model to fly but not very flight friendly. Of the fourteen flights it took during its service life, three experienced serious mishaps.