christchurch and district model flying club

Does one Swallow make a Summer?

As I fly at Beaulieu, I try to keep my Airforce so that I can fly in the conditions which prevail there. It is sometimes calm but usually windy. The problem is that it may well be calm here in Barton but when I get there it is blowing a small gale. This happened yesterday. It was so calm that I took the Hype 3D which is difficult to fly in wind but lovely in calm or near calm. Sadly the wind blew, not very fast, but fast enough to make it difficult to land the machine. If I take the Swallow when it is calm it tends to float so I have a job getting it down on the runway.

What is a Swallow? It is a pattern ship. You can see from the photo that is looks good. I like it because it does look good. It also flies well in a dignified sort of way and can handle the wind with no trouble. It can do most aerobatics of which I am capable, but it does take up a lot of sky. It has a wingspan of 66 inches, length 63 inches. For your information the airfoil is Naca 0012T. I have not a clue what that means. I have flown it with both a 90 four stroke and a 90 two stroke. It does well on both but the 2 stroke gives it a good deal more get up and go. With this engine, which is an OS, it will go very fast.

It goes together like most ARTF planes but they always seem to take longer than I think they should. The instructions were in English and what looks like Chinese or Japanese which I found particularly helpful. When I put the OS 90 two stroke on the front and started it up I thought that it would be a real beast. It is very powerful and I thought it would roar away and be hard to control but it was not. I have a few A.S.P engines. They are cheap and go well put they do not like to go slowly for any length of time. So with them I cannot taxi the planes out to the flightline but this one behaved very well.

After 33 flights there was a catastrophe, the tail plane came off in the air. I know what you are thinking, I had not stripped the covering when sticking the tail in. That was not so. Both pieces of the tail floated away and the Swallow did a graceful dive right into the runway and exploded (and no picture… - Ed). Some kind friends went to look for the bits of the tail and thereby hangs a tale. When we looked at the pieces we could see that the tail (which is not flat but elliptical) had two spars running through to keep the shape, and for strength. They were about 1/8 inch spars. But the top one had sheared of as though it had been cut with a knife. When I looked at the break through a .magnifying glass, it looked to me as though there was glue in the break. Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat I deduced that some poor little Chinaman did not have a long enough piece of wood to reach from one end of the tail to the other had butt jointed a piece in the middle. The experts on the court of enquiry at Bealieu thought the same. I phoned the retailer, who asked me to send the evidence, I sent him half of the glued wood. Strangely he could not see any glue on it (there was not much) We had several conversations about it. I said that I wanted another one but wanted a very large discount which he refused. He asked me to send him all the wood. Not being born yesterday I refused and said that I would ask the trading standards office for a lab who would test the joint and prove who was right. This caused something of an explosion. I was offered a large discount and had another one which is flying well.

After his initial refusal I think the retailer treated me well. I have put an aluminium strut from the base of the fuselage at the back to reach the end of the tail on each side as a strengthener. Someone else has had the same experience with a different plane.

So after that sad tale we are flying well again. As an end piece, relatives came to see us and out of politeness the man asked to see the planes. I picked up the Hype 3D which has a square body, held by diagonal spars along each side, It is very light. When I picked it up I realised that one of the joints was loose. I idly tapped the side and found that almost all of the joints were adrift. When I cut the covering to have a look I saw that there was very little glue on any of them. Could have been another bad crash. I will have to have a word with that Chinaman.

Brian Wiseman

(What are those mugs on the fence - Ed)

Back to Home page

[Home] [Chairman's Chatter] [Editorial] [Diary of a Flier] [Swallows and Summer] [Harry Spotters] [St Louis]