The third time (and second unit) were indeed the charm! Yesterday the flybarless T-Rex 600e took to the air without incident and flew beautifully! With James Kovach (sparx) at the controls, she lifted off and was summarily wrung out to make sure everything was working as designed. The previous two crashes had me a bit frazzled, admittedly and I wanted someone more experienced to take the helm on the latest attempt, just in case I was doing something wrong. The flight proved to be an uneventful one, which is a good thing. All evidence from the two previous, unsuccessful flights point to my original SK360 being faulty. I’m still waiting to hear back from Art at Skookum Robotics to verify this, as he is checking out my original controller. I can’t really fault Skookum for this, since it’s an electronic device. Anyone in the industry will tell you that there will always be the faulty device that slips though. It’s my luck that I seem to attract them quite a bit. Besides, Art has bent over backwards to ensure that I was not only back in the air quickly, but safely as well. Back on topic…

The heli performed very well and reacted just as it should have. James got approximately 3 minutes on the first and we did a second flight after some tweaks, which improved the handling characteristics. Unfortunately, on the second flight, we got less than 2 minutes before the pack gave up on us. I know the pack had been charged, because I charged it that morning. Looks like one of my two 6s 5000 mAh Air Thunder packs has given up the ghost. Since I can’t afford to buy another pack at 300 bucks right now, and the Zippys at 85 bucks are all out of stock (as is usual) I’m stuck with 7-minute flights an hour apart on this heli. That said, after I got home and ate some dinner, I recharged the good pack twice more and got two more flights in before dark, though due to space limitations they were just hovering and slow circuits on the street out in front of the house.

The full-on review of the Skookum SK360 and Mikado flybarless conversion kit are still in the works, but I will say that like pretty much everyone else, I’m now hooked on flybarless, and I’m scheming to come up with ways to convert all of my other helicopters over to the new technology! With my current settings, the helicopter does exactly what I tell it to do and nothing else. It holds attitude beautifully and I’ve got a learning curve ahead of me to re-train myself to stop automatically correcting for misbehaviors that are no longer present! As I mentioned, the full review is forthcoming, but as a teaser, here are a couple of pics of the head setup on the helicopter as she sits:

Mikado's T-Rex 600 flybarless head conversion kit installed

Clean and simple