Yup, The crash was the result of excessive angle of attack induced by the pilot who pulled too much elevator. Only excessive elevator input can cause a plane to stall. Aispeed is only related to lift, not stalls. Ignorant pilots focus on airspeed. Lastly a plane can stall at any air speed but only one elevator position and one AOA.
a simple C of G check before surely was done?? Surely would hope so. Maybe not though... Also before a maiden .. if in doubt have the model a touch nose heavy. Tail heavy is the death of any aircraft.
The pilot wasn't paying attention to the angle of attack and let it get too slow. Also, you must resist the temptation to use the ailerons when the plane is about to stall because the down-going aileron can cause that tip to stall. You must keep the ailerons centered, lower the nose, and use the rudder.
CG is absolutely critical with models and fullsize, a C-130 loadmaster once told me he had to use a pocket calculator to make sure it was in the right place. PS- with models the correct CG position on typical non-swept wings is between about one-quarter and one-third back from the leading edge.
@@tungstenkid2271 Not a bad post . C130 with tanks & Skids calculator for sure. My 185, If it fits n the door we are going. Not all planes are critical. Good call on CG with most wings
The type of aircraft and the quality of the build would indicate at least moderate experience, you would not build and fly a model this advanced as a first aircraft. I agree with one of the other commenters, critically tail heavy. Tail should have risen way sooner, the poor pilot had little of no show of getting her on the ground any less damaged. There is video on RU-vid of a full size commercial passenger aircraft (twin prop, low wing, with 14 passengers) having the same problem, the plane did the same thing but all souls were lost. Very sad model crash but he gets to fly again. Commiserations from a fellow R/C pilot from NZ
I'm not the pilot or owner, just the video guy but I can tell you for sure that the pilot probably has hundreds of hours flying scale planes and jets. Yes, the cg was off but he didn't find that out until he got "low, too slow, and no place to go".
Sorry for this loss. Don't know why I got it two years later. That's heartbreaking to see ones long shop hours destroyed so quickly. Beautiful plane. It looked good on roll out but the pilot made errors. Big planes that are close to scale in operations, need scale space and techniques. I'm sure it's redundant in the comments for me to say the roll out looked good and takeoff looked okay. But then the pilot went into modest powered sport plane mode and try to fly that relying more on the prop power than the wings lift. Steep climb, rapid turn and flaps were still down during final stall. Recipe for disaster. I mentally pretend I'm in the cockpit. But you can't have people standing next to you talking to you when you do that.
The problem with full-scale R/C planes is that they fly exactly like the real plane. This B18 beauty seemed to be a little underpowered and tail heavy. Hopefully she was fully rebuilt !
You can't out-pilot a seriously aft CG without a ton of power. The kind of power to weight that a 3D plane needs to hover. This was a classic tail heavy ending. Very good work by the pilot at minimizing the damage by getting her level before impact. Could've been much worse.
Too true! I was the video guy that day and may have heard one of the engines sag. I've flown lots of twins and that usually doesn't end well as was the case here.
Wait and balance. Wait until you fly it to see if you need to balance it, is too often the approach. Adding the needed weight just seems to be a show stopper for some people.
Ouch. I had a similar experience.... I spent the better part of 5 years building a scale Extra. On its maiden flight, it flew like it was on a rail, very precise. Then it's receiver went bad (this was back in the day of crystals and FM frequencies). Heart breaking when it cratered. But, it learns you some patience.
I'm reminded of a Mythbusters episode where thye bought an RC helicopter to test out a theory. They bought it at a high end RC store. While they were checking out they asked if it came with a guarantee. The salesperson said, "we can provide a guarantee for RC helicopters. We guarantee that you're going to crash it."
I don't know why we need the slow replay, it was "flying" too slow to start with accentuated by hauling back on the stick when taking off thereby trying to defy gravity and then dragging the tail around in the turn.
Yep, I crashed a great flying stunt plane that way. The wind was blowing about 20 mph and on a downwind pass the plane went by going so fast it scared me so I throttled way back. Then the inside wing stalled on the hard turn trying to get back upwind.
Apart from climbing out too steeply, the plane appears to be flying OK until the steep left turn and accelerated stall. I had to pull steep turns until the plane stalled as part of my flight test 40 years ago, but we did them at higher altitude!
@@pauleyplay If you bank an aircraft to 45+ degrees you will get an accelerated stall. I have a pilots licence and did lots of them while learning, including for the flight test.
@@pauleyplay Depends on your speed and you ought to know that if you fly aircraft. If you bank it to 90 degrees, then good luck to you! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XN0LVBff_5g.html
Looks like it was underpowered, or the engines weren't producing full power. Then a stall in the turn. First flights can be tricky, CG, trim, breaking in engines.
If the plans showed the wrong CG point and the builder doesn't catch it you'll have this. Or maybe the builder failed to check properly. This model probably could have been landed successfully by someone with more experience- the reason all these commenters know it's tail heavy is that they've done this to themselves or seen it very close at hand. Scale models that use tail surfaces proportioned faithfully to the full scale are often only marginally stable, compounding this issue and making the CG range very narrow.
Tail heavy maiden flights seem to be the norm while nose heavy is more manageable. It seems like more people would purposely err toward nose heavy and do a couple of high speed hops first when there is so much at stake.
These things can happen on a first flight. My Dad and I built a Sopwith Camel in the late 1970's, and our take off was just like this one but the battery pack became dislodged and headed toward the tail and our crash was similar to this one. My Dad loved building and repairing these things as much as he enjoyed flying them, so he took the usable pieces, added new pieces, did a better job of securing the battery pack, and we flew that Camel for five years.
Yea my Dad was like yours. I think he probably enjoyed the building and repairing a bit more than flying. Always hard to take something you put so much care in building and risk it in flight. But that's what they were for, so that's what he did. By the end his favorite plane to fly was a Piper Cub, lol.
Oh man, what a heart breaker to see such a beautiful model destroyed, and on the first flight too. Aggressive climb (tail heavy?) seems to have put it on the verge of a stall (note wobbly flight) but it seemed to recover before the left wing dips. Perhaps it didn't recover. Sad.
The plane was balanced according to what was given and the pilot flying has saved more planes than you can imagine. Yup it was sad. Thanks for stopping by.
With more than 50 years as a commercial pilot with some model flying experience, this is a typical too slow and too low stall and spin in. But why? The aircraft seemed to be underpowered or the engines were not making full power, tail heavy, high nose steep turn into a down wind, out of trim, out of rigging to name a few. Probably some of a couple or more of the mentioned problems. Such a loss for a beautiful built aircraft. Does anyone know for sure the reason for the crash?
Probably tail heavy, yes but should have been able to get it down. Needed to fly straight and level first though to gain airspeed and trim up. Then a slow gentle turn. The high angle of attack, combined with low airspeed and a high bank angle were all recipes for a tip stall.
Both wrong. The crash was the result of excessive angle of attack induced by the pilot who pulled too much elevator. Only excessive elevator input can cause a plane to stall. Aispeed is only related to lift, not stalls. Ignorant pilots focus on airspeed. Lastly a plane can stall at any air speed but only one elevator position and one AOA. Simple really.
@@chipcity3016 We're not wrong! Whilst you gave a correct and lucid detailed definition,my reply was a simple exposition of your description,which most model pilots would struggle to fully understand,given their seemingly general lack of knowledge of simple aerodynamics. I speak as a full size pilot of many thousands of hours and 60 years of model flying,including twins.
So sad. Always check the CG and it looked a bit underpowered. If you set the cg about 1/3 of the wing at the root,that will usually work for 1st flight.
From a pilot’s perspective it looked like a classic engine failure in a twin engine airplane. I would hypothesize that he lost power on the left engine which caused the yaw and roll to the left. Classic turning into the bad engine raises stall speed and can’t be countered with aileron. Should have pulled back the good engine, leveled the wings and tried to raise the pitch.
Both engines were working, which is why it was likely able to stay airborne for a bit to begin with. If I had to guess, it looks like the CG was too far aft. Its hard to tell from the video, but it looks like he was trying to get the nose down with the elevator once it took off, but there might have not been enough authority to do it and it eventually stalled. Hindsight being what it is given it was the maiden flight a few ground runs first to get a feel for the controls and if its balanced or not before the gear leaves the ground would have been my first instinct with a new RC model. Really sucks as I'm sure many hours went into building it, and I've had the same thing happen from not checking that all the controls move the way they should. Although in my case it was a store-bought kit and not something custom like this.
Almost stalled going into the wind, so was very slow then turned left down wind with very little airspeed and dropped the wing. And the rest is history as they say.
Damn! That’s a real shame! Way too steep on climb-out and washed off any airspeed leading to a classic wing drop. It’s hard to see all that effort wasted. It was a lovely model.
Tail heavy. His elevator was what appears to be all the way down as if he was trying to desperately get the nose down. Beautiful bird, definitely hard to watch the ensuing carnage.
That was a real shame to see, obviously underpowered, but why? Either the engines were too small, the props were too big or the tuning was way out. I assume from the detailing on it, the builder is fairly experienced, so I can only assume it was a mistake or oversight. As soon as the model left the ground the pilot was in trouble, his best option would have been to reduce power and fly straight ahead until it landed again, but at the time, he made a poor decision and it cost a nice model. My sympathy to him.
What do you think plain magnetic factors do a whole series of yes, break test?Countless other tests before they're stupid enough.Take off with the plane. However, in the military's defense, they're not stupid enough to put a pilot behind the off. And even then they don't. You know they keep the gear extended. They have chase planes now. Of course, I realize in modeling that's not possible but I certainly would have done some. High-speed taxi in test to see how the planes going to respond to its control.Not only familiarizing myself with the controls. You know, get up to the speed of take off but shut it down. Bring it back, do that several times until you feel comfortable enough. Take the plane off with a very shallow take off. Do not retract the gears and get your a** around the pattern and back on the ground. As quickly as possible. But it is always amazement and enjoyment when I get to see a video like this, when someone Rushed the process. Now you get to start over.I would say dumb a**, but you know, you were smart enough to build a model.You just did not take the appropriate flight testing is?Shall we say before maiden flight. At least that's what your youtube video says maiden flight of a beach eighteen. More like maiden.Fly to a dumb a** who didn't do anything and crashes.Brand new b j team model of course. Hey keep building and flying them like this.We need the youtube upload to keep everybody happy
Only RC videos I watch. Crash videos. I really like the crash videos where they have 1000's and 1000's of dollars invested in their planes and then crash them. 😅
Turn back to downwind leg and air speed went to zip! This maneuver costs life’s of full scale pilots every year! Sorry for your loss! It was a scale maneuver though! 😂
Accelerated stall. In a 60* bank the stall speed increases by 40%. Classic stall spin. "Maintain thy airspeed lest the ground shall rise and smite thee."
1. Failed to check COG. 2. Insufficient airspeed prior to take off. 3. Too steep climb out. 4. Failed to lift gear 5. Banked causing accelerated stall 6. Maiden flight - Failed to do short hop tests *Old men with too much money and too little knowledge of flight*
Too bad,lovely model. Classic stall on takeoff. Electric motors are better than gas,as the response time is instant. You can always add engine sounds with a speaker setup.
Unfortunately, the owner decided to move on from it. The engines were salvageable. Thanks for watching. Just curious, where did you find this video? I didn't embed anywhere so just wondering.
@@TestPilotPaul I watch RC videos periodically and I like airshow clips as well. I think that pairing with watching Matt Younkin put his old Beech 18 through an aerobatics routine probably did it. Check out an IRL Matt Younkin airshow video, not to be missed if you are a Beechcraft fan.
@@vg23air The plane was almost halfway around the circuit but the operator banked it over more than 45 deg which is a steep turn, causing what is known to professional pilots as an "accelerated stall". It can happen any time a plane is banked too much, regardless of whether it is departing, arriving or just fooling about!
RC fact! If you fly, You are going to crash! MM quarter back says tail heavy and not enough forward speed and maybe a control stick error for just for a second that enhanced the left wing roll to disaster. I still have a PICA 60 size Spitfire that I spent a lot of time on that flew only 3 times and then I Put it up because It was tail heavy.
@@Brian-hd4rf The pilot never let the nose down enough, long enough to accelerate before starting the uncoordinated turn. This is what kills pilots in manned aircraft. Classic and can happen to experience pilots
I ride my Schwinn push bike to my yacht club so I can partake after a sail. A jet aeroplane crashed into Port Philip Bay Melbourne around December last year. Interesting. 🇦🇺👍🍺🍺