Happy ending and a lesson (monovision contacts)

[jackcutrone]

Yesterday - finally no wind and sunny, never mind the 28 degree temperature. Flew my UM P51 in semi maiden after added reinforcements. 7 batteries - 6 light crashes and one sort of a landing. It is a tough little bird.

Another flight. Pic 1 - that has some school buses and the white thing way up in a tree behind it is my plane.. Pic. 2 - that would be a tree and that would be my plane stuck up in the tree about forty feet up. Fortunately the plane was near the end of a branch and the tree was kind of tall an thin so not a lot of branches below it. The very thing that brought me out was no wind and so nothing was going to blow the plane out of the tree and the weather was promising increasing winds over the next few days from a direction that would push the plane further into the tree.

Aha - an idea. Went home and got my fishing rod. Tied a half ounce jig to the line and tried to wrap it around a nearby branch. Managed to do that after about 7 or 8 tries. Pulled back and released tension until after I got the branch swaying. The plane fell out, into a nose dive and landed about 8 feet up in a bush. Carefully knocked it out with the tip of my fishing rod though the line wrapped itself around the plane. Pic 3 - my fishing rod on the roof of the car with the plane dangling from the end. Pic 4 - that would be the idiot who got his plane stuck up in a tree.

Lesson - I am sure that the main cause of the tree eating my plane was my poor piloting skills - rather new, but I could have sworn the plane was a good distance from the tree when it actually was not. Thought about it and I think a large contributing factor was the fact that I have what are called monovision contacts. That means the contact in my right eye has my prescription for distance and the one in my left eye has my prescription for reading - much higher magnification. Though I was skeptical when I first got them the optometrist was right - your brain shuts down one of the signals so if you are looking at something distant, you are only seeing with the right eye and if at something close up only the left eye. Very handy not having to wear reading glasses. But with that setup, you lose depth perception because you are only looking at something distant thru one eye. Hence the lesson - if I fly, I need to put distance contacts in both eyes or wear my glasses. Again, probably mostly my piloting but I am sure that the contacts were a contributor - as I said, was sure that the plane was nowhere near the tree.

I am one LUCKY guy. I really didn't think I would be able to get the plane out of the tree with my fishing rod, but I did and it is not damaged at all.

[Delfin]

Happy you got your plane back. Even without glasses when flying distance can trick you. Whenever one of my birds fall it never falls whew I thought it crashed. You really got lucky with the fishing rod. I would have tried it the hard way with a chain saw and probably crashed the plane.


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