R/C aerobatics; when you forget a wing bolt.

Yesterday in the first round of competition one pilot forgot to either install or tighten a wing bolt (they are removable, slide onto a large aluminum tube & are then retained to the fuselage by a bolt). Take off & the first part of the routine went well but suddenly he knew it wasn't responding correctly & I had noticed that too so kept the camera on it. As he tried to get a handle on why it wasn't doing what it should I kept watching & taking shots until I saw the trouble & then I fired until the buffer filled. The plane was a long way from us, almost a 1/2 mile so these are heavy crops but more importantly I think I was the only person who could see what happened. I was looking through the viewfinder of my 7D with all 400 mm of magnification my 100-400 could deliver. Fortunately the plane survived rather well & will fly again. (the wings were barely hurt at all but the wing tube was very bent. This is a BIG plane with a 129 inch wingspan but I don't know it's weight.

That's a great sequence. Way to be awake & on top of things!

Thanks Frank. At first I thought he had clipped a tree because just after he went past them he cut the throttle and started doing strange things relative to his assigned routine. They are allowed to stop & then restart the routine by letting the judges know they need time to re gather their thoughts after a major screw up / lack of hearing the last instruction / bad cross wind / etc; but this seemed different so I just kept it in the viewfinder & ignored the other plane doing it's routine. It was the only mishap of a 2 day competition.