Our First Mid-Air!
Gil and I are, er, mature age, and Gil is at competent solo stage, while I (Adrian) am more experienced. In 40 years of RC, I have never been involved in a mid-air collision. But we had a beauty recently! It was too easy, he was flying his Radian glider North under power, I was flying a ASW28 foamie South, again, under power, but at the same flight level. I confess that I was mis-led by the relative glider sizes. I thought I was further out than Gil. Nope, I wasn't! There was a sudden loud "bang" and parts fell to earth. Then I twigged that a glider was still flying, indeed, flying quite well, and was answering my controls as normal. It wasn't losing much height, but I figured I had better show some courtesy & sympathy to the growing crowd of parts collectors on the field.
We gathered all that we could, and it appeared we had all that we needed to re-assemble the Radian so I undertook to re-create Gil's pride & joy as I did not need any time to fix mine!
The parts glued together well with a PVA glue. There was only little crushing to the foam which made the repair job much easier. The battery was bent though, and the input filter capacitors on the ESC were badly crushed. But they were easily replaced with caps from an ESC which had let the smoke out, but were ok for this purpose. The joins were strengthened with .5mm ply. A slot was cut, glue inserted, then the ply smeared with glue then pushed into the slits. The cabin area breaks also had 1mm ply strips glued across the joins. There was very little extra weight penalty, and the whole airframe seems to be quite rigid. It flew well, only needing slight elevator trim as we had to replace the Ezi connector.
It appeared that my glider had struck Gil's wing, there is a prop blade indentation on one of his wings, and a slight bruising. I have a slight bruising under my cabin and 3 hairline cracks. Two near the motor, and one in the cabin side.
How Gil Saw It
I have been solo for about 10 weeks and under Adrian's excellent tutorage have become reasonably confident with a Super Cub which I can hand launch from a bare paddock at home, I also have an Eflight foamy Apprentice on 2.4GHz. at 1.5mt wingspan and the Radian glider which is powered like Adrian's.I had been up high just stooging around looking for some lift, and also avoiding the circus (gassers) down at ground level when preparing to land, I decided to do a couple of circuits in front of me down at about 150ft to watch it fly by, seeing that most of the time it is up a bit out of harms way. I knew that Adrian had just launched and that he had taken off in the northerly direction and did not consider his whereabouts again.I think that there were at least one other gas plane up in the immediate background to my vision and that may have contributed to not being aware of Adrian approaching. I certainly did not see anything until the impact. It was stunning to say the least.Wreckage all falls at different rates. I didn't know who I had hit as the two planes seemed to be both stopped in midair for what seemed like several seconds. Then I could pick out the blue tips of my wings falling on their own .Adrian's plane just moved on at a leisurely pace unconcerned. There are a lot more planes in the sky over that particular area on most Sundays so am not sure if we could have done much different .
Thanks to all the guys who searched the ground and retrieved all of the parts, and thanks to Adrian, for the superb rebuild job.
Needless to say, we will both try and ensure that we maintain daylight between models in future. It happens so fast, but if I see a potentially hazardous situation in future, a dab of UP or DOWN will save the rebuilding!
