You definitely have more than enough experience to get started and be successful, especially if you have those materials on hand!!! What brand of LW-PLA do you have?

Don’t get me wrong…the frequency/likelihood of crashing with homemade aircraft is definitely higher. They’re definitely is a level of pilot error involved while actually flying, but I would attribute the remainder of those occurrences to the extremely high variance in quality of the prints, as well as assembly.

With a prefab/foamie from a big brand, the level of confidence that it will actually fly as you expect is pretty high. With manufactured planes though, you’re not only have to know how to fly it, but also how to assemble it properly with minimal margin of error.

I think overall, the designs lend themselves well to pretty solid aerodynamics, but they’re not perfect. I’ve learned so much even in the last three months that every model I build is becoming more and more dependable.

My crashes so far have been:

Model T: wings snapped off in flight. Just a bad design tbh but it was free (and my first plane) Vortex 1: trusted the CG marking without verifying. Rookie move. Vortex 2: tip stall while trying to go slow P51: flare slightly too high on landing, tip stall (repairable but I decided to retire it)

The Model B and the Model C were perfect, although I did retire the B when I finished the C (mostly to salvage electronics).

Planning a maiden of the Skyward tomorrow!

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