Mark's Miss America Mustang

Customised Hangar 9 Kit

Miss America Autumn flight 2009

Scale flying is one end of a spectrum, the other end of which is stunt flying. The reason for owning a 'warbird is to try to make it look and fly like the real thing rather than bop about prop hanging and knife edging.( not that she will do these!) Miss America always gets comments about how good she looks in the air. This video and the still shot coming across the evening sun shows the exhaust muffler in all its glory. Time for a rebuild and get rid of that ugly thing!

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The trick is to fly as smooth and progressively as possible. The flight pattern must be thought through to avoid angular turns - you never see sudden manoeuvres at an air display. 
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Lacking the momentum of the full size huge scale loops are only possible with raw engine power but the aged SC lacks this so you need to get speed up in a dive first. Barrel rolls similarly need to be slow and this requires use of the rudder if the plane is not to dive on the way out of the roll.
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Take-offs require holding her level on the stick so that she doesnt fly straight off the ground -a bugbear of every other video on youtube. Similarly landings need to float down and hold the tail up for a while on the ground. This is tricky as with too much throttle she will stub the prop or worse - on this poor surface- catch a rut and smash her nose into the ground. This wears away at the engine rocker cover!

These videos show very few of these skills but I am getting there!

Detail of clamshells up and down in 'park'

The clamshells do a lot for this kit. The standard Hangar 9 wheel holes look grim when the wheels are up but worse when down. They also give quite a bit of turbulence on landing - just when you need stability. The clam shells give a smooth laminar flow over the wheel bays and look fab in the air as they sequence up and down either side of the wheel action. On take off you have to pass back overhead for all your mates to get the full action. The sequence is quite slow -very scale and the U/C has a sliding servo mount that will allow one wheel up before the other.

On the full size, the hydraulically operated clamshells drop when the engine stops and you can get this 'static' pose by switching the servo power off half-stroke.

The flaps may seem excessive particularly if you know how much of a floater the H9 kit is. However, with the extra 2 servos and battery the flaps do a great job of settling her down with the nose level. The sight of her rolling down the runway with flaps fully down is very impressive, as the tail slowly drops to the deck she behaves like a much larger scale model.

The exhaust stacks look particularly good here in clean steel. They are now nicely black and crusty!

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Standard Hangar 9 Aircraft wheel wells

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As a cheap starter to retracts this kit is ok but most unscale in that the mustang's wheel wells are completely sealed with no gaps. The standard retracts are flimsy and wobbly but I hear the latest kit is much improved.

 

 

With a little surgery you can do as I have done and massively improve the appearance of the wheel wells by using clamshells. These are separate doors hinged to open and close before and after the main U/C legs move up and down. There is sufficient room to get a second servo in to do this and the result is worth the hassle.