Wanted: an understanding wife, 2 large garbage bags, & maybe a winning lottery ticket (R/C)

These are from the weekends aerobatics fun fly. One of our top pilots started his routine a bit early (before burning off much fuel & smoke oil) & what was planned as a flat spin became an inverted flat spin & that led to trouble because he didn't have enough altitude to recover. The extra weight & loss of air speed from the spin caused a stall. Shot with a 7D2 & 28-300 L IS (and it seems to have a very deep buffer which was needed for this because I've left a few frames of the sequence out).
Fortunately the turbine & majority of electronics survived & will fly again.

ouch, that must hurt. Hope he'll be back in the skies soon.

Michiel>=-

Great capture of the sequence, seeing it breaking into pieces must have been mortifying for the owner, but a great opportunity for a cool capture.

Oopsie

Duct tape and Elmer's will fix that right up.

The first couple frames were really scary, then I recalled it was R/C... I wondered why you were more concerned with the electronics than the pilot! Nice shots, colorful plane.

Hope you have more in the hanger to fly!

I grew up with RC Aircraft, I even remember the first Digital Proportional radio systems arriving in the late 60's. In all my years around them I have only ever seen one crash where the model seemed to explode into bits like that. Usually they just seem to smack into the ground and stay there, although usually in lots of bits. It's really good that you caught that.

Alan

CanonCameraFan wrote in post #17584445
. I wondered why you were more concerned with the electronics than the pilot! Nice shots, colorful plane.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying but if you watch the video you will find the pilot (a friend) shrugged it off & expected things to be far worse than they ended up being. Although he has a day job he can be considered a pro in the R/C world & brought 13 planes to fly at the event but all the others were prop planes. The jet cost roughly $15,000 Cdn to build & about 75% of of that cost survived the crash. Years ago a crash like that ended with an explosion or fire & there was no salvage. Advances in fuel tanks (Kevlar construction) prevented that this time which was good because he still had roughly 1 gal of fuel in the tanks. This photo is what a crash used to look like

Ouch, always sad when you realise it's going down and you can't recover it. At least all the equipment wasn't a write off though and those are some great captures.

We were able to use the photos to confirm that it stalled rather than had a parts failure or wrong input to the transmitter. He applied up elevator & aileron control for it to bank to the right (to level the wings) but it rolled opposite what the controls were asking it to do. I think that by going in and cartwheeling a lot of energy was absorbed as it destroyed the carbon fiber fuselage. The Turbine wasn't damaged which was a big relief.

I've got photos of a real one doing that at Reno in 2007.... Scary...

Mark H