Oh no, you must have forgotten the photo you posted in your playpen of the "GBR-3" with the nose still basically cut off. it says it was posted today. With all the photos you have posted today, why not post a photo of it all assembled, and ready to fly, paint or no paint? You always have some excuse for not flying a model. Ready for flight means "READY FOR FLIGHT." That means put fuel in it, (or battery) hook up the lines and FLY IT. Getting a "set up" whatever that is, should not be an issue, plenty of stuff out there, or maybe you have figured out that you can't fit what you need in the fuselage, and that you maybe should not have cut the nose off? Come on, get it really ready to fly and let's see it fly!! Why get this close to the finish line and then park the car?
As to the story, that is a lot to cover on an introductory flight. They usually spent an hour on the basic stuff like "These are the wings, that is the nose and that is the tail." type stuff. You know "That is the ground, and that is the sky. All aviation operations will take place within those boundaries." When Mary pulled the throttle back, she was probably just seeing if you would pee in your pants. What you should have done was put the power back up and said "I'm going back to the airport to get me another instructor." If she was really going to test you, she would have cut the switches. Again, an awful lot of advanced stuff for the first lesson, when you should be learning to trim the airplane, proper operating parameters for the engine, proper air speeds, coordinated turns, top rudder and bottom rudder control, just making the airplane go where you wanted it to go, especially in a Luscombe. And then there is the really important thing you need to learn first, and that is how to land and get your wallet out to pay for the lesson as fast as you can. That is where you can quote Bob Hoover and say "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Any landing where you can use the airplane again is a great landing!" After that you get into stall initiation and recovery, and spin recovery. Things that you need to know in an emergency. Then you can quote Bob Hoover again and tell her "Always fly the airplane as far into the crash as you can." Again, this is especially true in a Luscombe.
The only thing that the GeeBee-Z has in common with the GBR-3 is that they are both airplanes with wings and propellers. The resemblance stops there. The Granville brothers designed the GeeBee-Z. They designed better than you just using just chalk on a concrete floor. I don't know who claims responsibility for the other. Don't really care either.
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee