New Airplanes at the Field
by: Eric Lyon
New airplanes are always great to see and admire. I am a scale RC guy, but I like any airplane that flies well. I particulary like Golden Age Air Racers and WW2 Warbirds. Darrell, our club president got a Hanger 9 Piper Pawnee this summer. Sadly, Darrell passed away a few days after our Charity Fun-Fly this fall. We got to see it fly for the first time on a Sunday with our pilot Doug Gwaltney at the stick. Doug, I believe could fly a brick if it had enough motor. He is a great pilot. Darrell was a good pilot too. The Pawnee is powered by an OS .65 and seems to have good power with it. It has great presence in the air as it a good size airplane and pretty close in scale.
I have a new airplane as well. It is a Maxford Gee Bee E model. Actually, I have had it for some time and have modified it a little to be more scale and since it is a large electric model, had to carefully pick the right motor and ESC as well as a UBEC. I didn't want to risk a BEC built into an ESC because if the ESC gets overheated it could cause temperarily loss of radio signal. On my smaller models, I generally like to use a higher rated ESC so it will not overheat and risk a brown out. I have crashed an airplane that way and it was no fun. I opted to use a Firepower 40 sport motor with a 15 x 8 prop and use a big 5000mah 4cell lipo battery. My plane balanced perfect with no added weight. If you can pull it off like this it is great. However it is much more important to get your CG spot on regardless.