I know I am not alone when I mention that there is nothing like the looks of a giant-scale airplane, complete with all of the bells and whistles. From panel lines to rivets, sliding canopies, flaps, retracts, and lights, the list can go on and on!
However, with all of these added features and functions comes an increase in the aircraft’s operational complexity. If you fly a giant warbird, or are thinking about getting started in the world of giant-scale with some advanced features, you’ want to start thinking about minimizing the amount of transmitter switches you used during flight to control various functions. Also, you need to examine the effects of increased wing-loading setups as well as trimming for various flight characteristics you may encounter. This is especially important when you start flying in scale competitions.
When I get started with large, relatively heavy scale airplanes, like Mark Frankel’s T-34 Mentor show above, we started a flight training schedule so I could learn its finer points when we flew the plan in Team Scale at Top Gun.
To lighten the workload, we used the Flight Mode switch to combine various flight conditions and functions. This way only one switch is needed to adjust the model during various…
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