Maiden of the Impala

Last Saturday I headed up to the Bwlch bright and early. There was a good south westerly blowing but there was a lot of the wet stuff mixed in and the clag was rolling in up the valley and up and over the ridge of the slope, so there was no chance of me flying. So I thought I might as well stop off and fly on Meio on my drive home.

Phil had told me that the Impala needed a minimum of 15 mph to fly but prefers 20 mph, and I wasn't sure if I was going to get 15 mph on Meio. I needn't have worried as it was blowing an estimated 25 - 30 mph up there.

Mark was there and he launched the Impala for me. It went off straight as a die but I had to hold in quite a lot of down stick to stop it from shooting upwards until I cleared the ridge line, then adjusted the elevator trim to suit.

In that wind she was struggling a bit to penetrate the wind as it does have quite a large frontal area but as I turned to fly along the slope, she went fine.

I tried it on high and low rates, snap flap on and off and she performed well with all of those. She did prove to be a bit nose heavy, which is easily sorted, and I felt it would definitely benefit from a rudder. That maybe something I retrofit at a later date.

On landing, it needs to land close to the top of the slope to keep the air flowing over the wings. If you land a little too far back, it'll tip stall badly.

Unfortunately there isn't any video footage of it flying, hopefully that may happen this week. But now it's flown I'm adding some colour to the bare correx, so it should look a lot nicer soon.

Here's a picture to put you on, until next time, happy flying.

Steve