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Friday, February 14, 2014

RC POWERS F18 V3 HIGH ALPHA MARATHON

Hi everyone -

About a month ago, I was doing a lot of work trying to improve my high alpha skills with my workhorse F18 V3 that I had used to test all my motors with.  I tested 8 motors in total with this plane, but now with testing over, I have returned to my favorite parkjet motor for this size plane, the Focal Price 2700 Kv motor with a 6x3 EMP prop.

We had been having a lot of very still days with nice cool, dense air and the day before I shot this video I tried to fly for a full five minutes non stop in high alpha and missed it by five seconds!  So that was kind of bugging me, so I set myself up to try and fly high alpha for the entire life of my lipo battery which is normally about 7 minutes 15 seconds.  It is not always the greatest quality high alpha in the world, but I think it turned out pretty well and it was fun trying to keep it like that for such a long time.


I measured my angle of attack and it is about 40 degrees for the most part (this is a rough measurement as I froze the frame and measured it on the screen).  Once I tried to get about 10 degrees higher than that in angle of attack and the wing rock started to become pretty severe.  This plane does high alpha so well if the CofG is per the plans.  My other F18 has the CofG about an inch behind plans and does not high alpha as well.  It does other maneuvering and aerobatics better than this one, but not high alpha.

Anyway, it was fun to try out this marathon and satisfying to fly the entire battery at high alpha!

Cheers,

Scott

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