Ruination
A big ole airplane decided to chew up my poor combat wing.
When a lightweight Wild Wing collides with a large Ugly Stick, the result is, well, UGLY.
This morning I was flying combat with Mike Bowns, Mike Nadler, Frank D and Dave North, all armed with Wild Wings or close relatives weighing 6 ounces, give or take.
We fly on the left side of the Great Meadow, low and close to the flight line, out of the way of other pilots. They can easily avoid us by flying to the right, or over our furball, or farther out.
But sometimes they stray into our airspace.
Twice today, a large red plane, probably 16 times the weight of our little wings, flew through our combat zone.
It’s always startling when it happens, but we so rarely hit each other, seems like intruders should be at least as safe.
The third time, the plane took a big fatal bit out of my orange combat wing.
I know that accidents happen, but I was miffed.
The other pilot is an experienced flyer, a very capable guy.
I think he was tricked by the downfield perspective. He thought that he flew into our airspace only once, but we saw him three times, close-up.
Dave thinks I can reconstruct the plane from the pieces we found on the field.
I’m not so sure, but I’ll try.
Epilog [Dec. 1, 2008] Steve Tillman, who piloted the big red plane, was deeply apologetic about the incident.
When he found out that Wild Wing kits are out of production and scarce, he did an over-the-top Nice Thing: via RC Groups he found a seller who had four kits and he bought them.
He donated one and sold me the other three. What a grand gesture!
Meanwhile, I’ve been repairing and reconstructing the chewed orange wing.
Today it flew once again, swirling in combat as if never left.
Tags: Baylands, Combat, Crashes, Wings.
It sucks that your plane got wrecked. It’s easy for accidents to happen at a public park. There are no rules. It’s the wild wild west. Unfortunately the close in nature of the wild wing combat has your plane flying directly over the flight line. We all do our best to avoid collisions… well, at least those of us not flying combat… Sometimes that means staying out of the way of traffic. I hope your repairs at quick, easy and successful.
Some suggestions to help mitigate……
Paint all of our wings dayglow orange?
Switch our preferred motor to the Little Screamers Park Jet?
Scale up the Wild Wing plans by 2x ?
Start doing combat with Zagis instead?
Move our combat sessions to 2 PM?
Move our combat sessions to RealFlight G4.5?
Move our combat sessions to Sun Microsystems parking lot?
Any others???
Take the hit. Hit back. War is hell.
Meanwhile, rumor has it Pete is making good progress on repairing the plane and it is expected to fight again. I understand the key bit of advice was “put the big piece back in first.”
I think this is the first time an interloper has led to any serious damage, but this kind of incident has a long history. Probably the most memorable (stop me if you’ve heard this before) was some years back when we had an 8-or-so furball of MiniSpeedWings and PCWs going and Oblivia DeHavilland Mehrdad floated an ENORMOUS glider right through the furball (he swears he didn’t see it until he was in it. Can that boy concentrate? Does anyone doubt it?) slow, steady and stately. It never so much as twitched. Completely surrounded and harried at high speed, but nothing hit it.
I thought I’d never stop laughing and, with an occasional month or so off, that’s pretty much turned out to be true.