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 | I am building my first r/c project, a Logo 10, so… I have not had and opportunity to do anything dumb with it, yet. Our moderator says this forum is open to anything that flies or runs down the road on two wheels so here goes. The really dumb part is at the end. |
| In about 1982 I decided that I wanted to build a Rutan Long Eze. I had built a Bowers Flybaby out of wood in the 70’s and I thought the fiberglass project would be a challenge. Besides I wanted to be able to travel on long cross country trips, at a reasonable speed, with my wife and the Long Eze met that criteria. Now comes “True Confession time” . We attended an air show at Arlington, Washington a year or so after I started flying the airplane. One of the acts was a Long EZE doing low level aerobatics. I was impressed and thought “Heck, that looks easy, I can do that”. So… when we got back home to Idaho and forgetting all the I had ever been told about “when you try to teach yourself aerobatics you have a fool for and instructor”, I set out to duplicate the maneuvers that I had observed at Arlington. The only thing I did right was to climb to 5000’ AGL. A few loops came off ok even though they did demonstrate very pointedly that you should always clean out the junk from your airplane before doing aerobatics. |
 Front seat, Coeur d'Alene (Home) | Next I decided that a roll would be neat. When the airplane was inverted it suddenly developed an overpowering urge to head for earth. We were going down like a lawn dart, nose down and slightly inverted. I believe this is referred to as a Split-S. As you can see from the photo the aircraft is very similar to a lawn dart aerodynamically. I glanced at the airspeed just as it was passing 260 MPH, and knew that something must be done even if it was wrong. So… I hauled back on the stick, pulled about 5 g’s (est.) and leveled out at less than 1000’ AGL. Thank goodness for Bert Rutan’s strong design. |
| The next year when I was at the Air Show in Arlington again and had a chance to speak to the Long EZE aerobatic pilot and confessed to him the error of my ways. Then it was revealed to me that you must pull the nose way up before doing a roll in a Long EZE. At least with a R/C helicopter I will be a little ways away from the crash site if I screw up.
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