Big Electric Glider Assist

Well the weather this last weekend was excellent and altough I had not planned to fly, I decided to test the 2mtr red and yellow electric on sunday as the day dawned calm and clear.

It flies nicely the first flight lasting 20 minutes with about 4 minutes of motor run.

The power is somewhat dissapointing , largely due to the motor still only running at about 70 percent throttle , the reason being that on my radio A Futaba 9 zap, this stick in Gliding mode is for airbrakes/flaps and I have various cross mixes such as flight modes, trailing edge camber with delay on closing and flaperon mixing, deleting all these and the motor just would not run.

Funny thing though when its at full throttle and battling to climb I add trailing edge camber and it revs up some extra , when time allows I will set it up in airplane mode , but for our upcomming slope trip , I will battle on with carefull energy management.

So after these maiden flights I spent the afternoon setting up the Electric on the Ventus, now this is a whole new ball game, the power pod attached and some safety precautions taken(check the anchor).

Common sense with big propellors... give them plenty of respect, a good fishing friend of mine Jakes, while running a large power plane on his work bench ,swinging a big prop the aircraft lurched forward and he put out his hand instinctively to protect himself , net result the prop removed two of his fingers , on his left hand. I have no doubt this big electric could do some damage. Always take care, safety first.

The two packs of Nicads giving about 12 volts just did not cut it, so I hooked up two Li-po packs in series giving about 22 volts this seems to do the trick with plenty of power, at half the weight.

The Ventus is fitted with a 9 ch receiver and the programming was no problem as channel 8 is operated on a slider switch and this will operate the motor ,all other setups are normal for this glider. Nice thing about the Jeti Opto speed controller is that the receiver/servo's and motor operate on their own battery packs .Testing will take place soon on the slope to check climb rates and also that the thrust line of the power pod is ok , last time I flew a power pod on a glider was 1977 with a babybee on a two mtr Drifter glider ...my first rc plane, they say history repeats itself.

Regards Mike