My First Giant Scale Airplane By James Goss      I have been building and flying small-scale model planes for many years and still get excited when it's time to go to the flying field. Just ask my wife Mary, she will tell you that when it's time for me to go to the flying field, it's indeed time for me to go to the flying field.  I am like a three-year-old going to McDonalds to play on the playground, can't wait to get there and cry  when it's time to leave. I guess it is true what they say, big boys have big toys. Well I certainly love my toys and now I want some bigger toys to play with.      For the last few years I have been looking at the giant scale guys and wondering what it would be like to fly one of those beast.  So about two years back I decided to take the plunge and buy a giant scale kit to build.  Now I didn't start at the entry level or even in the middle size of giant scale, I went directly to the top. If I was going to build a large airplane it was going to be sure enough a large airplane because this might be the one and only giant scale I ever build.  I finely decided on an Extra 300 S kit from Lanier.       When the kit arrived by ups I was shocked at how big the two boxes were. It looked more like a washer and dryer combination than it did the model planes I was accustomed to receiving by ups. This was my first lesson on how to build giant-scale planes: it really takes a lot of room to build really big planes. As my wife said, WOW! When I opened the boxes it was easy to see why the kit needed such large boxes. One box was needed just for the foam wing cores. These are gigantic wings which some day will measure 102.5 inches across. All the other foam parts and all the wood was packed very neatly in the other box. My next lesson on how to build a giant-scale plane: buy plenty of all the glue families  and then go and buy three times that much. I thought I would never get enough glue for this project.      Next came the blueprints. This is a full size set of prints so you need another workstation just to open the plans on. The drafting of these prints are about the same as any other model except they are huge.  With a kit of this type the manufacturer assumes you know all the basics of kit building and does not elaborate on fine details. Lesson number three: I had to actually read the prints. Nothing on the prints actually measured to be correct so when you placed a component over the prints to see if it would fit the prints were too large or too small. The type of paper used and being so large in size would account for a lot of shrinking or expanding. This paper is not blueprint quality stock to help keep the price of the kit down.      I built the fuse first, then the tail, and then the wings. All this took about a year to build. I wasn't in a hurry because I new when I finished building this kit it would be time to fly the monster and I wasn't sure I was ready for that experience. Plus during that year of construction on the big guy I also built ten or twelve other kits.      It was now the summer of 2000 and I joined the Anniston RC club. Up until now I had always flown at the Munford field, home of the Talladega RC club. Buddy Birdsall and myself joined at the same time, I think it was in June. Buddy had been flying with some of the Anniston RC fellows and told me what a nice bunch of guys they were, so we decided to join the club. About this time I met Cecil LedBetter. I had already been hearing a lot about Cecil from Buddy as to how good his building and flying skills were. As you all know by now, Cecil is one on the finest fellows you will ever meet in the RC hobby.  Having a chance to talk with Cecil about giant scale planes really took some of the mystery out of it for me. When Cecil let me fly some of his large planes it really got me inspired to complete my extra 300. They fly so straight and smooth I was now really looking forward to flying my own.      It is now November 2000 and my giant scale is complete. Its test flight was on Nov. 4, 2000 at the Munford field.  What a day to test a new small-scale plane, much less a giant-scale such as this one.  Cecil and I, along with five or six other brave guys, arrived at the field around noon.  The sky was very cloudy and hazy with off and on rain all day.  Wind was calm but visibility was very limited. Now if this was a small model I would not hesitate to test fly it in the rain, but this was a plane that I have been working on for some time and had a major investment in. About 2:00 pm I decided to go ahead and fly it so I started checking everything out. I had only finished it that morning and had not even assembled it in my shop due to lack of time. Do you ever remember a time when you rushed to finish your plane and later find out that you forgot something? Something very important: Well this was one of those times. When I activated the ailerons they both went up or they both went down. I ask Cecil if he had ever seen anybody that stupid before. Cecil didn't answer but I know he was thinking yes, just the day before when we were cranking the 5.8 Brison engine and I forgot to remove the three exhaust covers from the muffler.      I had designed the ailerons so they would need an inverting wye but instead I installed a regular wye. Having a computer radio I made some programming adjustments to combine the flaps and ailerons on ch 1 and 6. I didn't have an aileron extension so I fed the aileron connectors direct to the receiver. And again I was ready to fly. We cranked the engine by hand. The prop is a 26 x 10 wood prop that gives you plenty of contact surface. The Brison starts easy by hand.  Rain was now coming down pretty hard but I decided this would be the last chance today. I made a couple of rolls down the field and on the third pass I brought up the engine rpm's. The plane tracked straight down the field and had a beautiful take off.  It didn't take long to figure out that the engine was too rich. On the high end it would skip and sputter so I throttled back to mid range and made a couple of circuits but stayed near to the field. I was going to make a practice run for landing, but Cecil suggested bringing it down   incase the engine quit. So on the down leg I brought it around and lined up with center field about 300 feet from the west end of the field's threshold. Throttled back and it started settling in. By the time it reached mid field it was on the ground with a very gentile set down. Boy what a relief! At 29 lbs. 5.5 oz. it does not float, it comes on down to earth. Lesson number four: It doesn't matter how long you have been flying rc, when you leave the ground with a 30 lb. giant-scale, you will be nervous.      I really did enjoy building this project and plan on building more giant-scales in the future. As Danny said in the last newsletter, it is easy to get hooked on gas engines.

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