We’ve all had planes that fly great right out of the box or off the table and quickly become favorite planes but more often than not there is room for improvement. Luck can only get you so far. I’ve had planes over the years that never seemed to fly right and didn’t perform up to my expectations; most of the time it was simply because I never went through all the steps to really dial the glider in. Sometimes, have several favorites means a potentially great ship never gets it’s due, well, at least until it is sold and the next owner takes the time to make sure the plane is really set up right, kind of like quarterbacks for the Green Bay Packers.
RCA’s Performance Tuning for Gliders makes the process of setting up your glider painless and runs through the steps to getting any rc sailplane’s performance the best it can be.
Paul starts with a box-stock, RTF 2-meter glider, identifies some performance deficiencies, and sets about to fix it.
Using several fairly standard techniques Paul get the stock bird to fly much better than it flew in its out of the box configuration.
While this video does cover many tips and techniques that more advanced pilots may know about, and at first seems to be target more for beginning pilots, what I like is the step-by-step fashion that Paul takes the viewer through to make sure that all the steps get done and in the order that makes most sense; a benefit for pilots of all skill levels.
The relationship between various elements of glider performance is also explained. In general I think this DVD has something of value for almost any builder and should be in any serious rc sailplane pilot’s collection.
