Today the weather conditions were wonderful (60 degrees, sun, and mild breeze) for late fall so I took the opportunity to get in the maiden flight of the Li’L Wizard before the snows arrive. 7 FlyBoyz showed up for a great flying session.
Despite the fact that about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong with all the planes we brought to fly, we had a Blast!
As for the Wizard, before I was even 5 feet from the car, I managed to hit the tail of the Wizard on a fence post breaking off 3 of the 4 elevator hinges. A quick application of CA glue fixed that issue. The flying field turned out to be a combination of mud and swamp. I had hoped to use the packed dirt of a baseball infield as a takeoff area for the Wizard given that its’ small wheels cannot handle grass. The packed dirt turned out to be soggy mud. I had brought a length of cardboard along in case a grass takeoff was needed so we reverted to using the cardboard. Doing so was akin to attempting carrier deck takeoffs!
The Wizard is supposed to be able to fly on 52′ lines which is quite long for an .049 powered control line plane. Don’t believe everything you read! While it did fly on the 52′ lines, maintaining good line tension was a big issue. All future flights will be with 30′ lines!
The plane and engine proved to be great performers! The hardest part of all flights was keeping the plane on the cardboard long enough for it to become airborne. And the soggy, spongy grass proved to be a great cushion for several less than level training flights (i.e. crashes) held with my sons after the maiden flight. The plane took some hard hits and came thru unscathed other than some mud and wet grass on it!
I will be adding another post with some video of the entire flying session (including Corey’s first ever flight!) once Corey has had a chance to edit the several hours of video that was taken today. In the meantime, I have included below a video of the maiden flight of the Wizard. It took 5 or 6 attempts to get it up off the cardboard but we did prevail! FYI…this was my first control line flight since the mid/late 1990’s! Enjoy the video!
Here is the FlyBoyz crew that showed up to fly control line (and heli!) today. The 3 Dwyer’s are on the left, the 3 O’Neill’s are on the right. Not shown is FlyBoyz J. Lawler. who is behind the camera. The Li’L Wizard is the small blue & white plane in the midst of the Dwyer’s much larger vintage control line planes. More pix and video to come in a future post!
(Click on the photo to get a large image with higher resolution)
Maiden Flight of the Li’L Wizard!
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