Nitroplanes.com PBY:
I maidened this PBY off the lake near my house the other afternoon. I have to say that for a cheap hunk of chinese foam with $2 servos it's pretty impressive. My aviation history expert buddy says the markings are historically valid, and by my eye, the scale outlines are really good -- sometimes there are obvious flaws in the cheap foamies, but nothing that stands out to me (other than maybe the pilot is relatively too big inside the cockpit) with this PBY.
Wing span is almost 58" so it's pretty big for a cheap foamy, comes with twin electic motors and speed controllers already installed. The servos are also already installed. The total assembly time couldn't have been more than an hour.
It has a light wing loading and can fly really slow (scale) like speed. Here's what blew me away -- on one take off I advanced the throttle really slowly -- one click and wait, one more click and wait, etc. and just let it build up speed scooting along the snow. Before I new it it was airborne at maybe 1/3 throttle and slowly climbing by me at eye level, spinning those twin 3-bladed props. That had to be one of the coolest RC take offs I've ever seen -- just because it flew past me so slow and looked so scale. (And I'm talking about the model, not piloting here)
The one thing that I wish they'd done with this model is to make the wing floats retractable -- that's not a big deal I guess, but it would have been one extra nice touch to an otherwise pretty nice airplane.
As far as flying goes -- it's a big boat in the air and flies pretty much like you'd expect it to. With the big wing and scale tail, you need a lot of rudder in the turns to counter the adverse yaw -- you almost have to lead with rudder in the turns. You also see this in turbulence where the aircraft can get yawed and rolled around pretty significantly. For me I tried to go light on the correction and let it fly through the bumps, but there were a couple snaky moments on short final when the airplane got pretty discombobulated between roll and yaw in the winds. But in lighter winds (or no winds) it's amazingly smooth and scale like. I didn't push the aerobatics too much, but it easily rolls and loops. With the twin props free-wheeling at idle there is a ton of drag and you can drop altitude really quick if your approach is too high -- but add a few notches of throttle and you can fly a really nice flat/gentle powered decent right down to the water for a very scale looking landing. Those flat powered descents look really cool -- with the big fuselage hanging off the wing and the whole airplane flying/descending at just the right pitch angle -- it just looked so right.
So it's not going to blow your socks off with sport aerobatic flight performance, but if you are interested in something that looks and flies really scale and can handle snow in the winter and water/grass in the summer--and is dirt cheap--this isn't a bad choice.
Lots of detailed pictures here:
http://www.nitroplanes.com/60a-d8943-catalina-arf.html
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