Bryan just had his maiden voyage!  Take a look!  (and sorry for the poor photo quality, but all I had was my Iphone.) 

Da plane! Da plane!!

Its in the air!

Hot Damn, still going up!

Flying upside-down. He's a regular aviator! And you can almost make out the blue flames I drew on the wings.

The examination committee, watching intently.

And the most amazing part?  He didn’t break it when he crash landed! 

Other cool stuff– I have been trying to build R/C planes from scratch.  There are lots of forums and videos on how to build them.  The first one I tried to build was the R/C Powers Extra 300.  They have a lot of really good info on there and so I thought I’d give it a try.  I learned a lot from making that plane, but it was not flight worthy at all.  I didn’t brace it enough with carbon tube and it just fell apart when I first tried to fly it.

The next one I tried to build was the Sumo 3D.  There’s an rcgroups.com forum thread about it, and it looked really fun.  I built it, and appllied a lot of what I had learned with the Extra 300 but it still didn’t fly very well.  I think the propeller was on the motor backwards cause there just wasn’t enough thrust to keep it in the air it seemed.  I think I also learned a bit about hand launching and giving the plane a bit more speed.

Since then I have purchased the AXN Floater Jet / Cloud Sky.  So far this thing has been a real adventure!  The first day I took it out to the soccer field near our house to fly it- there were 15+ mph winds.  I brought it down quickly after take off realizing that things weren’t going smoothly.  The landing was fine into some tall grass…

Last night we took it out again– much calmer wind conditions and everything seemed like it was going well at first.  About a minute into the flight or so the plan got down wind from me and I was having a lot of trouble turning it around to come back towards me.  It was up pretty high too, so I cut the motor and was going to try and land it slowly.  I landed it…. but it was in the middle of a giant, unkempt cow pasture.  Michelle, Lucky, Rylee and myself looked for the plane for about 15 minutes… we were wearing shorts in grass up to my waist.  We quickly decided we needed to go and get jeans on… So after a quick change, and about 30 more minutes of hiking through brush and trees looking for the plane, we found it!  It was still in one piece too! 

Anyways- that was our adventure last night.  Life is good… chigger bites are bad.  Michelle and I are both doing well.

Then end.

<dirty Revo>

I’ve been reading the Helifreak.com forums a lot lately and been wanting to learn to fly R/C helis for a while now.  So… yesterday I made an offer on a helicopter and the seller and I were able to come up with a pretty good deal.    My new heli should be in the mail Friday.  I’m very excited.  I got a my brand new Spektrum DX7 transmitter a couple of days back and my copy of Phoenix R/C Simulator arrived yesterday.  I crashed thousands of dollars worth of helicopters and airplanes last night. 

In other news- Michelle and I signed on our new home yesterday!  I’m super excited about moving in closer to my new work.  It’s going to be much nicer driving 20-30 minutes to work instead of 50-60 minutes every day.  We officially get the place on the 21st, but Michelle has like three tests that week so most likely we won’t be moving in until the following weekend.  Anyone feel like lifting boxes?! 

Our new home!!  My new heli!!  Check it out: