Another Plane for this year's S.M.A.L.L. Fly-In

Copied from my Facebook Page.
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I got a beautiful and reasonably calm morning to test-fly the Dynaflite "Butterfly", built by Breezy Hill Flyer, Darryl Wilson.

We lost Darryl last January, and some of us have adopted his planes with the intent of keeping them flying.

Billy will be flying Darryl's other Butterfly and his Cub, and we will have them out and flying on the Breezy Hill Flyers Memorial Fun-Fly to Darryl on Saturday, May, 4th.

The Butterfly, and it's smaller sibling "Piece of Cake", were designed as powered sail and sport planes with fantastic glide ratios, meant for slow flying and thermal hunting.

The O.S. .25 that Darryl installed on it's nose pulls the Butterfly into the sky with "considerable authority" (like better than a 45º deck angle) at full power, and will probably be running around at about 1/8 power cruise most of the time it's in the air.

On the calmer days to come, this long-winged bird will be an absolute hoot, with some super low & slow flights around the field.

The two flights today went well, but the rising wind was starting to rock it around quite a bit, so I shut down to wait for better days.