E-Starter

Dave finally finished his E-Starter!

This little Cessna-like foam trainer has been sitting around forever while he built other planes, in order to train for his trainer.

There's actually some logic to this: the E-Starter is a fairly nice looking plane, and it's also a fairly heavy foam plane with a 350C engine, which means that if it crashes, things will break and have to be glued back together (making the plane heavier and less straight). Dave saw me go through this with the Formosa, a similarly sized and powered foam plane, and was determined not to follow the same process with his E-Starter.

It flies very well! Much better than the various undercambered-foam planes he's been flying so far, like the Slow Stick and the Blue Maxi Stick. Loops, rolls, sharp turns, spins that are easy to enter and easy to recover from, and responsive handling. It doesn't fly well inverted (not surprising in a trainer) but it does just about everything else.

Of course, he's crashed it several times, due to radio issues. In particular, the GWS design seemed to encourage putting the speed control very close to the receiver; it turned out this made the motor cut out unpredictably.

More Planes
Shallow Sky Home