Jeff Reid wrote some interesting ideas about Launching ,and while it's hard to argue with his theory's , there are very practical reasons for disagreeing with his conclusions. One of the best pieces of advice my original instructor taught me was to learn to do things the correct way the first time , that way you do not have to retrain yourself to do it correctly a year or two from now. Bad habits can be very hard to break. Sure Jeff , you can pretty much just release a 2M Poly floater out of your hand when using a winch , if the line breaks as soon as you let it go , not much will happen as a floater will go from a total stall to flying in a couple of feet. But let's say you are different person , and you have just finished learning to launch, fly and land a 2M Floater for awhile. One day you show up at your usual flying site and one of your flying buddies has a "for sale" sign on his 3M TD plane . It's ready to fly and even comes with the Tx. You have always admired this plane and on a few occasions have even had even had the chance to fly it. Needless to say you agree to become it's new owner. After some instruction about the Tx the seller says why don't you take your new plane up for a flight. So he launches it for you ( he handles the winch and the plane , you work the sticks) . You have a nice 10 min flight and land smoothly and your friend the seller looks at his watch and says he has to be somewhere in 10 min so he has to leave now. The trouble is it's a beautiful day and you want more flights. The last launch was textbook so you figure , "heh I can do this " , and you proceed to do you normal launch routine ( wiggle the sticks , make sure your antenna is clear of the winch line, etc. ) . . . . . . . . So what's going to happen now ? Well I don't know , maybe you will be lucky that day and nothing bad happens. BUT what if just as you launch you get a nice puff of wind up your tail? Suddenly you get that "Kite Spiral" and before you can recover the ground has risen up and struck your nice new plane, breaking it into a bunch of ragged pieces. Or how about this , Just as the plane leaves your hand that winch line that all of you have been using for the last two months breaks. So here you are , 8 feet off the ground with flaps down, lots of up elevator, the nose pointed towards the sky , and NO Airspeed . If you are really quick you can get the flaps retracted , the nose pushed over , and you might just get control of the plane before it hits the ground. With a little bit of airspeed from a proper throw during the launch , that puff of wind up your tail might only be an momentary sag in the launch instead of a disaster. And once again that little bit of extra airspeed might give you the time , and in most cases it does, the time to recover from that broken winch line . So what's the "moral" of this silly little story ? If you learn to do things correctly the first time you learn to do it , you can save yourself a lot of grief at some point in time in the future , and look at the time you will save "unlearning incorrect techniques " . Learning to launch correctly is just like learning to fly, there are a bunch of things to remember and think about , and when you first start out it's hard to do. But at some point in time it becomes instinctive , and every time you launch a plane you have calculated a whole bunch of different variables so quickly that you usually don't even notice it. Jim Bonk RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
