Bravo, Keith. Over many years I've been asked to fly up and coming fliers airplanes to evaluate them. Very often, I found it advisable to not fly other than the most basic maneuvers with them due to their poor state of trim. I strongly advise Terry to ask a truly accomplished flier (at the risk of offending...a flier who flies excellent patterns with his own airplane without acrobatic flailing of the handle and the arm to which it is attached to do so. Generally speaking such excessive pilot input is necessary solely to overcome shortcomings of the airplane's trim and/or powerplant set-up.) Based on Terry's recent comments about sensitivity I'd be willing to bet a good trimming session along with an informational conversation about what is being done and why would be a great first step.
I realize it isn't always easy to find someone like this in some areas and I've no magic fix for that. Terry should let us know where he lives and maybe he'll get some suggestions.
Keith's suggestion of the Skyray and the Brett Buck set-up is absolutely on the money as well.
I can only echo this sentiment - since Ted told me about it in the first place! So many people have such severe trim/setup issues that they have no chance of ever learning anything, other than how to respond to the rather random things that their airplane happens to do. You can *never* hope to have any feel for flying the stunts with the various airplanes/engines I see people try to fly. I fly them and can barely do any better than they do.
Plenty of people have different approaches and different standards as to what constitutes "good trim", a "good airplane" or otherwise. Many of these people have only the best intentions but either don't know any better (since they are in the same boat) or have some sort of axe to grind. That's why I get into so many arguments about it on-line - there are so many people with such sincere advice, most of it horrifically wrong, that they get angry when someone comes along and contradicts it.
Much of the issue *is not* which design you use. Some designs are very poor, to be sure, but the design is the *very last* issue they have - it's workmanship (particularly in the control system and alignment), trim, and engine runs/engine setup. The latter, in particular, can be utterly fatal, and there is so much bad advice about it that it's almost overwhelming.
My recommendations are well-known and have been covered exhaustively. The reason for my recommendation is that you need to know virtually nothing about engines to get it to run well *as long as you don't have anyone around to "help you" by messing it iup with "expert engine knowledge", and the airplane is simple enough to build, set up the control system and trim that you have a chance without expert help. And Ted notes an important additional point - "expert" might mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and many people who the beginner might consider an expert might not be- just more experienced in overcoming the same problems that the beginner has, too. The "wild flailing" at the handle is actually a pretty good indicator of how well someone else's airplane is trimmed that I hadn't considered before now. You see it even at the NATS, in some people around the fringe of qualifying. You see terrible trim everywhere at even the very highest levels, and there are a few people who I decline to mention that would be (or would have been in some cases) sure contenders if they had someone competent adjust the airplane and engine.
But most of the designs mentioned, aside from the Ringmaster, would be adequate *if everything was right about them*. But you need proper control system setup, proper trim, and at least an engine that is not hurting you (as opposed to fighting you, which MANY of them do). All have known issues - the Cardinal has far too much flap area (like most of the similar airplanes) and is hard to build and trim, the Twister is relatively difficult to build and trim to the degree necessary. They Flite Streak/20FP is a very capable system that is relatively easy to build and trim correctly and is by far the best choice in this case although the CG can be a hair trigger sort of thing. The Skyray 35 is essentially a Flite streak with an adequate tail volume coefficient. Ringmaster is a non-starter, any vintage engine is more-or-less a non-starter, 1/2As should be considered a non-starter for beginning stunt pilots after the initial carnage of learning to fly safely is over.
But expert help - with a genuine expert - is worth more than anything you can possibly do on the equipment side, and worth extensive effort and travel to employ. With everything right, even very modest airplanes can be brought from disaster to satisfactory.
An astonishing amount of information is available on-line compared to any time before, to the point that sorting out the trash from the treasure is sometimes difficult, so you have a chance by yourself, but there are so many things that a beginner wouldn't even know to ask about that real live help is very important.
Brett
p.s. the original topic of - wrist -elbow - shoulder is also a very interesting one, and should include fingers as well. Simple posture issues usually cause the sort of persistent shape errors that persist over years/decades you see all the time. For my money, most of the control comes from the fingers and wrist, and you have to use the elbow and shoulder you probably have some other issue, likely trim or power, at leas as of the year 2016. Used to, you more-or-less had to use your entire body to make the airplane work because everybody had engine issues, because all the engines were almost uniformly crap, just to different degrees, compared to today.
Topic: Stunting Basics - the WES element (Read 9905 times)