MattJen
Elite Veteran
Location: uk
| I have just spent almost 3 days attending a master class on large scale flying on one of these giants of the sky.
No photo or video can prepare you for the size of this beast, even in comparison to the XLV which I owned previously was dwarfed by the scale of this fuse built by Peter Robertson.
I have bought it and wanted to be sure and spend a few days understanding scale flying. The machine uses the PHT3 jetcat turbine, so I had no worries on flame out issues or reliability.
On Weds we met up at a private field on the Dartmoor moorlands, not far from Plymouth, perfect flying weather no wind, we started unpacking and getting this machine ready for flight.
The blades are huge as is everything about this machine.
It holds 5 litres of jet fuel, yep, 5 litres, which using a hand pump system took around 8 – 12 mins to fill up, I gassed it up and then prepared for the inevitable first flight.
Coming from an F3C background I felt flying slow and precise would not be a problem with this machine, as its head speed is around 950rpm, how wrong I was!
The turbine which had not run since August 07 fired up on the button, a real tribute to the reliability and engineering of the jetcat system.
Within 15 seconds the machine was now up to idle, it was so real, having own 2 PHT3’s it sounded different being in cased in a such a large fuse. Up to mid stick and we were in a hover, the first thing I noticed was the delay between an input on the TX and something happening on the machine, it took some time to get used to it, and was disconcerting at first, this I later found is normal operation of a scale model this size and is the new skill I now had to master.
On the smaller scale/funkie fuse,pod and boom setup, having flown an Airwolf gasser I could keep the disk quite level and do a slow controlled turn using a little aileron and rudder, and using elevator to control the exit speed out of the turn.
On a machine of this size to expect a tail servo to turn that amount of mass is unrealistic, and this where true scale flying comes into play, to turn a machine of this size needed aileron nose down and rudder, but I found it hard to keep and get that balance right in order to not allow the machine to balloon up,this was purely my in experience flying this size of scale machine, which is why it run away from me on a few occasions, the main mast on this vario setup is tilted 5 or more degrees forward not level as on most scale machines, hence it is really easy to suddenly find yourself with a machine that is running away from you, with Peter on my shoulder shouting get that nose down! Feed in aileron and rudder I did manage to bring the model back to me and into a safe hover, it was very nerve racking, and as you can imagine the old hands were shaking quite a bit, anyway after the first tank, around 15mins we landed, calmed the nerves down and refuelled, on this next flight, I was trying to master turning the aircraft whilst keeping the nose down and using rudder, I have to say this was going against the grain of how I learnt to fly, as it always seemed I was flying to the edge and catching the machine, if I overshot the flying area it was full aileron, nose down, rudder, once turn levelling out, but it was down to timing being perfectly executed so the machine as it turned the aileron was in effect acting as brake to slow the machine down, this I would say was the biggest learning curve, and is the key to successful flying of this machine. ALONG WITH LOADS OF CONFIDENCE.
I left Plymouth 2 days later having gained a good insight to the scale flying skill, having managed left hand circuits and right hand circuits along with a nose in hover coming into land, I felt with a lot more stick time I would become a lot more comfortable with this beast. It is a lot harder than it looks, despite coming from a precision flying background.
I will be practicing on my Hotcat those scale turns into wind and once mastering them every time I will be back on the Jet-ranger.
It was a great learning experience, and I thank Peter for sharing his knowledge and time….
 
"A woman went to a plastic surgeon and asked him to make her like Bo Derek. He gave her a labot |
(my UK terminology)
