Ack. Sorry to see that happen! Those flying boat things are not at all easy to fly well, they respond very aggressively to control inputs and they're fast.

It happens to everyone sooner or later, though:



This was at the local flying club at the weekend. The pilot is quite good, and thought he was long past his "new airplane every session" approach to learning. Then, on a perfect approach to a touch and go, four feet up, he hit the wrong joystick. Down elevator rather than more throttle. Instant lawn dart.

Funniest crash I've every seen, it looked so deliberate. Luckily aside from a broken prop, some sheared off nylon screws, and a divot out of the runway (which we made him put back ), there was no damage, and it was flying again in ten minutes.

My shiny piper cub from a previous post had a first flight of all of 5 seconds. That ended in a field in bits. One wingtip needed to be completely rebuilt, the left wing needed to be re-covered, and I had to tig weld the undercarriage back together again. The fault? I forgot to run the antenna wire out of the fuselage, so the radio range was about 100 feet

The second flight nearly ended in grief as well, on Saturday. I made a remarkably fast takeoff (I was rather conservative in motor choice as it turns out, it's got about 200% as much power as it really requires), then spent the next five minutes going in large left hand circles while sweating a lot as a friend tried to trim out the tx controls for me. I couldn't afford to take my eyes off the thing. We eventually got it flying more or less straight, and after about 15 minutes flight where I was almost under control, I managed to pull off a perfect landing.

It was at that point we found that the left aileron servo had broken loose from it's mounting point in the wing, which meant I'd been flying a known somewhat difficult model on one aileron with the other acting as an airbrake! I was, paradoxically, rather glad to see the fault. I had been beginning to feel that I really didn't know how to fly at all, but it turned out to not be entirely my own incompetence

pca