The Good

After 1½ month of flying the plane, I was feeling a little more confident and I trusted enough myself for doing loops.  So at the end of the 2013 season, I went flying with a friend with my Super Cub LP. I wasn’t expecting any disaster…

It was a little cloudy & windy but I went flying anyway because I was too much confident that nothing could happen since I had 6-7 flights of experience!

The Bad

I had a good overall flight but I had an small accident with some trees at the right side of the flying area. After investigating the plane, I realized that nothing was broken so I went for another flight. I made all the required checkups and verified that all control surfaces were working as expected before taking off. That’s what I tough…

The Ugly

After a minute of flying, the elevator stopped responding and violently crashed the plane on the ground. Nothing more to say here. Just a painfully hard crash on the ground…

Here is the video of the crash:

The explanation

During my encounter with the trees, one of the servo got loose in its socket and the glue (silicon) that was holding the servo to the fuselage was not holding anything anymore! During the flight, the servo pushed itself out of its socket instead of pushing on the elevator rod resulting in a hard crash.

The damage

As I said earlier in The Hobby Zone Super Cub LP RTF. A good beginner’s RC plane, the plane can be repaired easily. As long as your electronics are still working, it is hard to damage the plane beyond repair.

Here the description of the damage:

• The wings broke in half near the middle.
• The nose broke into pieces.
• The firewall got smashed.
• The engine and motor gears went through the firewall and almost reached the inside of the fuselage.
• The fuselage bent near the second window.

Here is some pictures of the wreckage:

Super Cub LP Crash (wings)

Super Cub LP Crash (nose smashed)

Super Cub LP Crash (engine smashed)

Final note

This adventure stopped me from flying during the 2013 season. I wasn’t mad that it happened. This event made me realize that repairing your model is also part of the hobby. In a future post, I will show you how I repaired everything to get the Super Cub LP back into the air.