Fail-safe settings for control surfaces

[Dave Reaville]

Hi Rick

Thanks for your comments as I believe we are in agreement.

Although the airframe may be damaged, odds are the hardware will not have been beaten up too bad. Remember this is a slow spin, not the competition spin we pattern types are used to. In the end, the loss of an airframe is insignificant when compared to the possibility of injury or even death of a fellow flyer, spectator, or passer-by.  

In my case, the TX antenna connection failed when my plane was at a high altitude and entered into the slow spin.  I watched with complete helplessness but the fail-safe settings worked exactly as programmed and it impacted into the RC field (slightly left of the center of the box about 90 yards out).  

Safe building & flying,

Dave


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Rick wrote:

It would be interesting to see statistics on how often a plane comes out of failsafe and the pilot regains control before meeting with Mother Earth. It's never happened for me, but admittedly, I don't use the feature often. Had two sport airplanes go into lockout when I did use it, and I watched both spin in.
I agree a spin recovery isn't the easiest thing to execute down low when you're in a panic, but I'd venture to say it would buy you more time than being in a vertical dive while in lockout would--IF the receiver recovers signal in time. I think it just comes down to dumb luck really, in what attitude/altitude the plane is in when the lockout occurs. The question is what are the odds that your plane would only go into lockout in level flight vs. the middle of a snap, roll, inverted dive, etc. Assuming worst case scenario, i.e., no signal recovery, the spin at least puts the plane back on the field so you can find it, and hopefully the spin would serve to somewhat lessen the descent speed at impact. Maybe a flat spin would be better in that regard.

My luck with such things dictates that it doesn't really matter what I plan for--the plane's going in, and hard.

Rick

-------Original Message-------

From: discussion at nsrca.org
Date: Monday, May 16, 2005 08:05:42 PM
To: discussion at nsrca.org
Subject: Re: Fail-safe settings for control surfaces
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