As Kanesh had deemed me and Isaac competent enough to fly the plane after going through a simulator test, it was now time to go out to the field for actual flights! Together with the delivery drone group, we met up with Kanesh at the Old Holland Road flying field on a lovely sunday morning

From left: Justin, Kanesh, Isaac and Kae

I was really nervous and my hands were trembling when the plane was launched by my groupmate. Although I had prior experience flying quadcopters as a hobby in my polytechnic days, fixed wing aircraft was a different ball game altogether. My reaction had to be many times faster as the aircraft has to be constantly in forward flight in order to stay airborne – unlike quadcopters which can hover. What’s more, flying circles meant that there are times when the plane’s nose will be facing me directly: meaning that the alieron inputs are essentially inverted!

Crashing in real life also meant a lot more downtime fixing the aircraft than crashing in the simulator.

Sure enough, the first few flights almost ended up in disaster as I was not used to controlling the airplane and nearly flew into one of my groupmates. I struggled to control the plane as it was pitching up and down wildly.

Something that exacerbated my bad flying was that I did not quite know how to trim the aircraft while in flight, because doing so would require me to take my thumbs off the control stick and move the trim switches, which was something I was not confident of doing. Alas, the plane few nonetheless and I was quite happy that I managed to learn some flying.

This session lasted quite a short while as the weather took a turn for the worse and it started to rain for the rest of the day, and this concludes the maiden flight of our group’s Skysurfer.