Crashing my Hangar 9 Beast 100CC - May 27th, 2017

Описание: It was a very long voyage to get to this date.

I've been long fascinated by biplanes. Of course I wanted to fly biplanes when I began flying RC back in the late nineties. When I re-entered the RC hobby a few years ago, I purchased and wore-out a number of UMX Beast biplanes and then I finally achieved a great deal of success with my E-flite Beast 60e. After a couple of years of flying my Beast 60e, I finally started to "lust" for the Hangar 9 Beast model. By the time my "lust" evolved into a more mature "passion" for the big model, the Hangar 9 model had become discontinued.

With some searches on the RC classifieds, I finally found a seller willing to ship an "unboxed" Hangar 9 Beast kit from Brooklyn, New York to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Once I confirmed the shipment of the kit,I began my search for a DA120 motor. That search resulted in finding a recent posting by Mike McConville for his Hangar 9 Beast model fully assembled, lacking only a few components before being "ready-to-fly". That purchase resulted in a one day, 16 hour, round trip to Champaign, Illinois to pick up this model.

Even after spending many hours of preparations on this air-frame, there was still much to be learned and little details to be resolved before this aircraft was to become "mine". The intent was to maiden this craft at the TCRC field, but the field was closed when we arrived and we took to the alternate and less desirable location of the Scott County Fair Grounds. Not good to learn both a new flying site and a new aircraft in a single sitting, as I would soon find out.

During my maiden flight with this aircraft, I ran the fuel tank too low and killed my motor during a descent. Unfortunately, the aircraft's heading at the time was toward the fence-line and power-line end of the parking lot which meant I needed to negotiate a quick 180* before setting down. I kept the nose down to maintain airspeed but I quickly found both a down-draft from the tree-line and tail wind which rendered my elevator useless and instead of a final flare, the "nose-heavy" biplane instead dropped it's nose in the final seconds of flight.

LuAnn did a great job of documenting our event of which I studied the aircraft's behavior and compared the final events to my control inputs, mechanical setup and that morning's flight behavior.

I have since replaced the fuselage and cowl but am flying the same motor, prop, spinner, servos, receiver, wings and landing gear (including wheel pants) as you see here. I have downsized the smoke oil tank, moved my CG rearward, set the carburetor to run richer, installed smoke fan-spray nozzles, and dialed down my flight timer. Additionally, I'll be avoiding the Scott County Fair Grounds as a flying site for this plane as the large open space quickly becomes "small" for this aircraft.

Checkout my better success at the TCRC Flying Field.

   • Glenn's Hangar 9 Beast 100 goes to the Jor...  

As LuAnn immediately reflected at the crash site, history has proved that these early crashes (such as on my Beast 60e model) generally result in years of following success and we are now looking forward to many years of successful flights after this aircraft's rebuild.

Thank you for sharing another of our exciting adventures and learning experiences. Stay tuned for many more Hangar 9 Beast adventures!

Glenn

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Update...

After one of my July 1st, 2017 flights at the TCRC field, I found my Dubro ball-link throttle linkage to have failed during one of my flights, causing a loss of engine power and a forced "dead-stick" landing. Fortunately, this previous event helped me avoid a repeat finale. A review and reflection of that linkage failure as well as observed fuel consumption rates, has lead me to theorize that THIS dead-stick was caused by a failed linkage and not by an empty tank caused by an improperly set timer. The near-empty fuel tank that I recovered probably had more to due to from the impact and subsequent siphoning out through the fuel vent. I would not have suspected a loose throttle linkage as the impact could have cased that from the firewall separation upon impact.

Since the linkage failure, I have added a 4-40 washer to my throttle linkage hardware as an added level of safety as relying on a nylon coupling in close proximity to a hot muffler is a very poor design choice.

Glenn

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