Steven's Tutor

This is Steven's Great Planes Tutor. It has a speed 300 electric motor running on 7 NiCad, 270mAh cells. It is covered in colored Reynolds Plastic Wrap. I glued the wrap to the wood with 3M Photo Mount thinned with lighter fluid. It flies for about 6 minutes at full throttle at 7mph. Weight is 10 ounces.

The instructions say that this can be built in a day by an experienced builder. Yeah right! This was as difficult to build as any stick type plane. The instruction also say that it flies fine as a 3 channel (no ailerons). We didn't find that to be true. It is very unresponsive to rudder. We added ailerons. It's unresponsive to them as well. But, when flown coordinated (using ailerons and rudder together) it is acceptable.

Landings have almost no speed. This plane can only be flown in extremely low winds (less than 5mph for sure).

Fatal Flaw

We found that this plane has a fatal flaw. On three different occasions we put the plane into a spin and could not recover. The first two times we weren't sure what happened. The third time it happened Steven was flying it high. He could not recover it, so he handed me the radio. I could not recover it either. After the crash we did a radio range check where it lay. No problems with the radio. Our conclusion is that the plane can get aerodynamically 'stuck' in a spin. Because of this, we decided not to rebuild a 3^rd time.

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